Question Image retention/Burn in on IPS laptop screen

DwarvenKing

Distinguished
Oct 11, 2014
1
0
18,510
Hey everyone, I accidentally left my laptop (G14 2022) running YouTube since I fell asleep using it and it ran for maybe 2, 3 hours instead of going to sleep and when I woke up and turned it on I noticed this big smudge across the right side of the screen which, when I looked closer, contained elements of the browser that ran and a ghosted image of them. Is there any way at all to fix this? It's a 120Hz 14 inch IPS screen that I only recently purchased and I'd be devastated to learn that I've already caused permanent damage to it. I turned it off over night but I could do longer if it would do anything. I let it sit on a white screen over night and had tried numerous stuff yesterday from playing games like The Witcher 3 to some of those image retention fixing videos that change color (I'm a bit scared of those since it seems to me they try to burn the screen to make everything evenly burned and ruined). Any help would be appreciated I'm at my wit's end here.

 

CParsons

Estimable
Staff member
Dec 4, 2019
115
31
4,740
Image retention on IPS generally relaxes on it's own, the best thing you can do is make some adjustments to your usage at this point. Like use dark mode when possible, screen savers, turn off your device when not in use etc. There is no "do this and it'll be fixed" solution.
 

ginandbacon

Commendable
Apr 29, 2022
12
6
1,565
First are you sure it's a screen burn in and not image retention? Image retention is usually disable, but not always and tends to happen on LCD technologies like IPS while.OLED tends to suffer from burn in.

“burn-in” is used as a catch-all term for any kind of ghosted image on a screen. The most common form of such “burn-in,” though, is technically known as image retention. While that might seem like a case of pedantic semantics, it’s an important distinction to make. Screen burn-in refers to permanent degradation of a display which is almost impossible to fix; image retention is typically fixable.

Although most PC monitors are made to be less susceptible to burn-in, it can still happen. If you run into it there are a few things you can try.

Check your warranty unless you absolutely know it's expired. While OLED warranties can be pretty strict, IPS which is an LCD technology isn't. Depending on the age and warranty you could get a new laptop or s green although swapping out laptop screens iant fun, lots of ribbon cables, usually a webcam at the top etc...

Change brightness and contract as already suggested by.tje previous poster.

Turn off the display for at least a few hours, or as many as 48, ideally.

Set your screensaver to a pure white image and leave it running for a few hours. If that doesn't
help, switch between white and black every hour or so. This may not remove image retention entirely, but it should dampen how noticeable it is.

Search YouTube for "ips image retention fix", there are lots of videos but they essentially do the same thing, switch between various colors very quickly. They are typically about an hour long.

The one thing I can say for certainty is any of the steps above won't make it worse. Results will vary between displays and how bad the image retention is but at worst there is no improvement but at best it can almost eliminate the issue.
 
  • Like
Reactions: CParsons