Is it okay to leave a Windows laptop running with a black background image maximized for a long time?
from sopularity_fax@sopuli.xyz to nostupidquestions@lemmy.ca on 04 Nov 2025 00:51
https://sopuli.xyz/post/36191652
from sopularity_fax@sopuli.xyz to nostupidquestions@lemmy.ca on 04 Nov 2025 00:51
https://sopuli.xyz/post/36191652
Concerned about screen getting burnt in or something
#nostupidquestions
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Why not let it shut off the screen, which is enabled by default?
Any screen can experience burn in.
For LCD screens it doesn’t matter. They use the same amount of power whether the screen is black or white. There’s no way to damage the screen by displaying an image.
OLED displays are vulnerable to burn in. So a bright static image left on screen for a long time can result in a latent image that’s permanently burned into the screen. That’s because the OLEDs degrade faster when they’re brighter. But a black screen should have no effect.
Strictly speaking, all screens will experience decreasing LED brightness as a function of hours on and brightness level. Modern LCD displays use LEDs for backlighting, so they will get dimmer over time if you leave them on (regardless of what they’re displaying). But because the LEDs are all running at the same power level, they’ll all degrade at the same rate, so no images getting burned in — just the display as a whole slowly getting dimmer over time.
OLEDs have that happen because different parts of the display will dim at different rates, depending upon what’s shown on-screen, because each pixel is a different LED that can be run at a different brightness level.
There are some LCD displays that can have different levels of backlighting for different parts of the screen at one time (“local dimming”), and I guess that theoretically, that could result in burn-in of big rectangles on the screen, though I haven’t read about this actually happening or people measuring it.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backlight
displayhdr.org/lcd-dimming-in-hdr-displays-explai…
Black is better than anything else, off is best. See if there’s a key combo for your laptop to turn off the display
It depends on the type of screen. LCD or OLED? No. Just have the screen turn off after a minute or two through the power settings if you need the whole machine to continue running.