‘Lifespan of OLED TVs shorter than Sony claims’

The luminous power of the OLEDs in Sony televisions appears to be decreasing faster than Sony’s own data shows. This is the conclusion of market research agency Displaysearch after a comparative study.

The researchers had Sony’s XEL-1 display images for a thousand hours while keeping track of how the luminous power of the different colors changes. writes heise. The blue color is the first to darken: after a blue screen for a thousand hours, only 88 percent of the original brightness was left. Red and green changed in brightness more slowly, but for those colors too, 93 and 92 percent were left after a thousand hours, respectively.

Since the color fastness of the individual colors decreases rapidly, the color white – which consists of a mix of blue, red and green – will not be uniformly white for long; 91 percent of the white was left after a thousand hours. The color mix can be adjusted so that the image continues to look good, but this will have to be constantly repeated, because the OLEDs lose their color fidelity at an uneven rate. In addition, the clarity of the image quickly decreases in quality in this way, according to the researchers.

Based on the research, it was then calculated how long an average OLED TV actually lasts. The color white has a lifespan of around five thousand hours. However, most images do not only consist of white, but of a lively color mix and on average the Sony OLED TV examined will therefore last for 17,000 hours, the researchers conclude. However, according to Sony’s data, an OLED TV can last considerably longer, namely 30,000 hours.