but I honestly cannot say that I've seen any long term testing done with this new exciting

technology. I wanted to change that so in December 2014 I received LG's 55“ EA980V

OLED TV for long term, marathon testing. Reason: OLED TVs are great if you test them for a

week or two, but what will happen after longer periods and with normal usage? People are

talking about blue component of the OLED material that cannot keep up its luminance and should

make picture look reddish or greenish over time. Also, what about image retention or

burn in – we know that it exists.

In order to see what is going on, I placed LG's OLED TV in my living room and used it

as any other TV that I've owned. I was watching all kinds of content, standard and high definition,

internet video, Blu-rays, played a little bit of games and used built-in apps like YouTube.

To avoid relying only on my eyes, I did a complete ISF calibration on 18th of January

this year and used calibrated Expert 1 preset since. OLED Light, which is basically same

as Backlight on LED LCD TVs was most of the time at half of its maximum value, but sometimes

I've increased it to 70%. Calibration was made for Rec.709 colorspace.

After around 750 working hours, on 2nd of October this year I've rechecked using SpectraCal's

CalMAN software how Expert 1 preset looks and here are the results:

As you can see from the graphs, there were no big changes in picture characteristics.

On White Balance chart we can see that blue stimulus is reduced, but overall DeltaE 2000

errors are below value of 3. DeltaE is a rough estimate of sum of errors in colors, with

value below 3 considered not visible to the average human eye.

Color gamut is the range of colors that a particular device can show. In this case we

see no significant change compared to the calibrated state, meaning that colors that

are mastered on Blu-ray discs will be precisely displayed on the TV screen. If we check DeltaE

errors for colors, we see them below threshold of 3, with the biggest errors in blue. Same

situation was measured in January, so again, no big differences in this regard as well.

I also checked color gamut coverage since now I use CalMan 5 Ultimate for business version

of the calibration software. LG's OLED TV can display 99% of Rec. 709 and 89% of DCI-P3

which is a standard used in digital theaters and which should come to our living rooms

with the advent of UHD Blu-ray.

Peak brightness when 18% of the screen is covered in white was 152.6 nits in January

and 146 nits in October. This is a 5% decrease which cannot be seen with bare eyes. Just

for comparison, I've tested one 39“ Panasonic LED LCD TV 2 years ago and after 9 months

its brightness fell around 15%. In short, OLED does not show any concerning behaviour

in this regard.

Black is still pure 0.00 nits and black level is set so that value of 16 is reference black.

I still haven't properly tested Panasonic's first OLED TV, but I would say that performance

is very similar, at least when compared to the OLED TV I am using.

Although I was using apps, listening to music with built-in media player, none of the static

parts of the interface left any traces on the screen. Yet, I've received feedback from

different stores and also saw with my own eyes burned in LG's logos and lower thirds

of the news channels, so image retention and burn in are possible. Still, for typical usage

without constantly using OLED TV as a PC monitor there should be no worries.

So what is the conclusion of this analysis? After 10 months, LG's OLED TV did show small

changes in picture characteristics, but they are still below treshold that would be visible

to the human eye. Previously conducted marathon tests like this one did show even bigger differences,

so for the time being, OLED technology seems to be on the safe side.

Testing continues and I will report again in January 2016, precisely 1 year after the

initial calibration. Stay tuned...