Samsung's S95B QD-OLED Had Substantial Burn-in In Just 3 Months!

When Samsung first introduced QD-OLED, we were completely blown away by the potential of these new OLED panels and the promises they brought along. Alongside being more accurate and producing potentially brighter visuals with superior color brightness, we also hoped for lower burn-in rates and maybe no visible image retention at all. However, those hopes just got ruined as a 55-inch S95B user just posted a YouTube video showing critical burn-in on his 3-month-old TV.

The video was posted on the YouTube channel "Juan De La Cruz" and the user was in fact using the TV as a PC monitor. The burn-in occurred at the bottom of the display where the Windows Taskbar lives. From the video, it seems like the right side of the taskbar area has a deeper burn-in while the left has some random spots. There is also some discoloration at the top right of the display where the Google Profile Picture lives in Chrome, at the side of the address bar.

YouTuber "Vincent Teoh" previously called out Samsung for boosting the brightness way too much and producing inaccurate colors in HDR (FILMMAKER Mode) in Firmware 1204. Samsung later released a firmware update (version: 1211) to fix this issue and it was confirmed that the TV was tracking the EOTF curve much better in HDR.

S95B Burn-in At The Bottom (Image adjusted slightly to make the burn-in more visible)

The above user, however, was indeed using Firmware 1211 and didn't update to any of the newer firmware versions. Interestingly enough, he wasn't using HDR at all which produces higher brightness levels. So, the burn-in happened while using the TV as a PC monitor, in SDR, which isn't surprising as this has already occurred with WOLED TVs in the past. But, with the White sub-pixel gone in QD-OLED technology, we didn't expect to see this issue on the S95B, at least not in several years.

This however puts a question mark over the long-term reliability of QD-OLED panels in general as Samsung's the one making these anyway. Is the first-gen inferiority finally catching up to QD-OLED and if that's true then we may get way more reports of burned in S95B units in the future. By extension, the Sony A95K OLED TV and the Dell AW3423DW Gaming Monitor may be facing these issues too as they're also using the first gen QD-OLED panels.