The Android 14-based One UI 6.0 update has been released for several high-end and mid-range phones over the past few weeks. While this brings many new features and design changes to Samsung phones, it also appears to have removed an important feature that prevents devices with OLED screens from experiencing screen burn-in issues.
One UI 6.0 may lack screen burn-in protection for status bar elements
According to some users, One UI 6.0 does not have screen burn-in protection. This can cause long-term image retention issues on devices that use OLED screens. All modern phones with OLED panels have a built-in feature that slightly shifts the pixels of certain UI elements so that the same image does not appear over and over again in the same group of pixels. As you can see in the image below, the image on the left is from One UI 5, with the status bar and navigation bar elements slightly offset to avoid screen burn-in. In the screenshot on the right, from a phone running One UI 6, the navigation bar elements have changed, but the status bar elements have not.
What is screen burn-in on OLED screens?
For example, screen burn-in can occur if the status bar and navigation bar elements (battery icon, clock, home button, back button, and multitasking button) do not shift position on the OLED screen. For those of you who don’t know what screen burn-in is, it’s a drawback of almost all OLED panels where displaying the same image/UI element for an extended period of time degrades the organic materials within the pixels, causing a decrease in brightness. leading to a decline. This causes image retention, patching, and other issues.
Pixel shifting is a common prevention method to avoid screen burn-in on OLED screens, and Samsung has been using it since the launch of the Galaxy S3. However, this feature appears to be missing from phones running One UI 6.0. Specifically, the pixel shift in the status bar seems to be missing. this is. . .was revealed by Reddit user Dragon Slash (Via Android authentication), and since then more Reddit users have confirmed this to be the case. As a reminder, phones running One UI 5 still have screen burn-in protection.
We hope Samsung fixes this bug and releases an update to all phones running One UI 6.