this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2026
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They might mean down to 1hz like some smart phones do, to save battery.
Ah yeah, I should have read the rest of the article. I didn't know about that feature though, that's cool
Oh boy, always on oled displays are so in now.
Feel the burn-in
Probably not as bad as you might think:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbEgQrigiLc
but yeah not sure how much worse it would be if always on...
There's a lighter band at the top of the screen on my phone, corresponding to the darker header area in the RedReader app for Reddit. Just from using that app every day. Though that seems to be kinda reverse burn-in, in that the rest of the screen became darker since I use the light colorscheme.
On the desktop, the taskbar alone would definitely burn in with my usage patterns. And probably also the tabs and the status bar in the editor.
Might also depend on the model and if it does any sort of burn in protection processes such as pixel orbiting. My partner has been using a Samsung Odyssey G8 OLED for productivity about 4hrs a day for about the past 3 years and it doesn't have any noticeable burn in yet(lots of other really annoying software UI issues though, because Samsung... 😅)
That's slower than a car blinker. An impractical refresh rate for OLED; did you mean 1 fps?
Edit: turns out OLEDs, like LCDs, use TFT technology to stay on between refreshes so it's fine.
And yes, smartphones have refrained from redrawing unchanged display areas for years. You can enable "Show surface updates" in Android developer settings (flashing lights warning) to get an idea. Usually, the display gets divided into vertical areas: status bar, main app, keyboard, navbar, and each only updates if there is a change.
1 Hz is 1 fps. Hertz = cycles per second
I know what hertz is, I'm en electrotechnician. The display's refresh rate is measured in hertz, and has to be at least 40 Hz or you suffer from headaches and some from photosensitive epilepsy. (edit: only applies if the screen goes black between refreshes, which I just learned OLED, unlike CRTs, doesn't.) Ideally 100 Hz or more. But the image (frames per second) does not have to change that often. For example, movies are 24 fps but 35mm film projectors are 72 Hz: they flash each frame 3x before advancing (using a three-blade shutter) because 24 Hz is seizure-inducing but using a unique picture for each refresh (72 fps) is expensive. Similarly, your OLED TV is 144 Hz when gaming at 144 fps (if you can afford that), when watching a 60fps gaming video or 24fps movie: the screen controller works the same all the time but the picture it's fed changes more or less frequently.
If an OLED screen refreshed at 1 Hz, ~~you'd see a line going down the display~~ edit: I learned about TFT OLEDs which don't do that. So it never goes below 60 Hz. However, the phone can reduce animation fps when the CPU can't keep up or to save battery. 1 fps is extremely choppy though, I don't know where OP got that. I did once use a phone capped to that framerate (via adbcontrol pre-Lollipop where the screenshot is transmitted over USB) and it was awfully non-responsive.
That’s some pretty confidently incorrect posting. Most gaming displays these days have some flavor of adaptive sync available that adjusts the refresh rate to the content being displayed, and even before that there were film modes that set the refresh rate to the ~24 fps(or a multiple if it) that film content is at to avoid stuttering/tearing.
This is likely the bottom of the adaptive sync window and will only be used if the machine is idle
I edited it, I thought all OLEDs worked like this little one where the pixels turn off between refreshes (in fact, in this passive matrix, only 1 line is on at a time, even the high-speed camera has an overly long shutter). Turns out there are TFTs that keep them on. Thanks for teaching me this.
What you’re describing is AMOLED. Nobody calls them TFT OLEDs.
It's pretty silly to through around credentials.
Here's a video of an OLED TV updating in slow motion. The pixels are on in between updates so it really doesn't matter how fast it's updating it's not going to cause headaches or any of the problems that we used to associate with strobing style displays. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=54E3uUEryZM
Well, on some they aren't.
But yes, TIL that some OLEDs do in fact work continuously thanks to TFTs
That display is using BFI (black frame insertion) which is usually optional to reduce blur.
Oh, my misunderstanding was because didn't know active-matrix (TFT) OLED displays existed, where thin-film transistors (TFTs) keep the pixels on between updates. I know those little 128x64 SPI OLEDs that are passive and driven line-by-line, I don't have a big OLED screen.
No, I meant what I said. The article says "hz" and so do other phone manufacturers offering the same feature. It may be marketing wank or technically incorrect but that's what it's referred to as.
But, hz of a monitor is not like a car blinker or CRT televisions where it's off in between the updates. It is on in between the updates, it's just not the new image. In which case it doesn't matter how slow your performing the updates because the pixels are just on with a static picture in between the updates.
Yes, it is on OLED, unless they've added active storage like TFT LCDs. In which case, that's cool technology they've invented.