Phone Burn-in Test

Burn-in doesn’t look like damage. The status bar and nav buttons sit in the same spot for hours a day. On an OLED panel those pixels wear faster than the rest, and the faint ghost they leave never shows on a photo. Flood the screen with flat gray and it’s right there.

Run the test on your phone

Tap Full screen on the test above to fill the display edge to edge, then start on the gray fill. Do this in a dim room and hold the phone straight on. A flat 50 percent gray is the most revealing fill: worn pixels look darker or discolored against a flat mid-tone, in the exact shape of whatever normally sits there.

Look along the top for a band where the status bar lives, and across the bottom for the outline of the navigation buttons or the gesture bar. A rectangle in the lower half is usually the keyboard. If you see a shape, that area is burned in. It runs in Safari, Chrome, and Firefox on both iOS and Android with no download.

Burn-in vs temporary image retention

These two look identical at first, and the difference decides whether you can fix it.

Image retention is temporary. Leave a high-contrast image on screen, switch to a flat fill, and a ghost lingers for seconds or minutes before fading on its own. It’s harmless and clears every time.

Burn-in is permanent. The organic pixels that drove a bright static element for thousands of hours have aged and now emit less light than their neighbors. Nothing brings them back. The test below tells you which one you have: a ghost that fades while you watch is retention, and one that holds steady on every fill is a burn.

What each fill reveals

Start with gray. A flat 50 percent gray exposes the shape of any uneven wear because the eye catches a small brightness shift against a uniform mid-tone better than against black or white.

White reveals a color shift. As an OLED ages, the blue subpixels dim fastest, so a worn zone reads slightly warm or yellow against a clean white field. Step through red, green, and blue one at a time to see which channel is worn. The blue fill almost always shows the heaviest retention because blue emitters have the shortest lifespan.

Black is the baseline. A true burn rarely shows on black since the panel is already off there, but it is the right field to check for stuck pixels, which look different and have a different cause.

Try to clear temporary retention

If the ghost looks like retention, the Exercise button cycles every fill to drive each subpixel through its full range. That’s the same approach as the pixel-refresh cycle built into most OLED TVs. Go full screen, hit Exercise, and leave it running for ten minutes or longer. Temporary retention usually clears within the first few minutes.

A permanent burn won’t respond. If the shape is exactly as strong after ten minutes, stop. Running it longer doesn’t help, and there’s no software fix for real burn-in.

OLED phones vs LCD phones

Burn-in is an OLED and AMOLED problem. Each pixel makes its own light, so a pixel that works harder ages faster and falls behind the rest. iPhones from the X onward and most flagship Android phones use OLED panels and can show burn-in over years of heavy use.

LCD phones light every pixel from a single backlight, so they have no emitters to wear unevenly. An LCD can show brief image persistence that clears in seconds, but it doesn’t get the permanent burn that defines an OLED fault. If your phone has an LCD and you see a fixed ghost, look instead for a pressure mark or backlight problem.

Slow it down going forward

You can’t undo a burn, but you can keep it from spreading. Drop the screen brightness, set a shorter screen timeout, and switch to a fully hidden gesture bar so no static buttons sit at the bottom. A dark theme helps, since lit pixels are the ones that wear. Auto-brightness that runs the panel near maximum all day is the fastest way to burn a new phone.

This matters most when you buy used. A burned panel is a permanent fault that a quick photo never shows, so run this test before you pay. The full checklist is in our guide to testing a used phone.

Check the rest of your display

A clean burn-in result does not mean the panel is perfect. Run the phone dead pixel test to catch dead and stuck pixels, which the solid fills here can hide when they match the fill color. Then run the phone backlight bleed test for uniformity and edge glow on an LCD, or mura on an OLED.