YouTuber leaves OLED Switch on for 3,600 hours to test image burn-in

A new test has revealed some positive news for anyone who happened to upgrade to Nintendo’s larger and more vivid Switch — image-burn is a distant concern. After 3,600 hours of subjecting an OLED Switch to the the same image — one that was ripped from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild — Wulff Den, a YouTuber who specializes in gaming videos, concluded that the device is finally, surprisingly, showing faint signs of burn-in.

As reported by Ars Tecnica, the damage is minor — on a white screen, like the Switch’s main menu, there was a faint “blue ghosting,” that appeared following the six-month experiment. But as, Wulff Den himself points out, “It’s still a little subtle. It’s not anything that I would do an RMA request for.”

The experiment began as soon as the OLED Switch was released, when Wulff Den decided to find out whether users would have to worry about burn-in. The YouTuber left his OLED Switch on, displaying the same image and set to its full brightness, without any interruptions aside from the occasional check-in. After 1,800 hours, or three months, the project yielded negligible effects — white pixels were slightly dimmer but Wullf Den noted he most likely wouldn’t have noticed, if not for relentlessly monitoring the changes during his test.

OLED burn-in— At the core of this extreme experiment lies some valid concerns over burn-in, which can occasionally plague OLED screens. The problem can materialize when screens display the same visuals for extended periods of time, as certain screen pixels burnout. While rare, it makes sense that Switch users were worried, given that a gaming session plays into this sort of situation.

Wulff Den proves that if you aren’t undertaking the same instance for an uninterrupted, 3,600 hours your OLED Switch is safe. He even provides a fix (granted one that isn’t that realistic) for those that might encounter the issue after doing something similar to his test.

“There is a setting on the Switch where you can invert colors, so if I wanted to leave this on for another 3,600 hours it would burn-in the rest of the screen and even out all of the colors.”

It’s safe to say though, that the vast majority of users can ease their minds, given that the Switch has a built-in mechanism to turn the screen off when no button inputs have been detected for five minutes.