I have had several components where the LED displays have faded over time. Naim gear seems to be especially prone to this and there are an abundance of aftermarket LED-screen replacement sets for all their units on eBay as a result.
Regarding the dCS (Bartók/Rossini/Vivaldi) screens:
What sort of service life have you seen from these before they fade unacceptably? (Asking this question, by the way, is a huge compliment, as most brands of digital electronics become obsolete or fail long before the screen dies).
Is screen fade an age thing or a usage thing or both? In other words if you turn the display off when using does this increase its useful service life?
I understand that the current dCS displays are OLED rather than LED. OLEDs are quite different to LEDs though lifespan seems comparable ot slightly better for LEDs. However most data on either concerns TV displays and I do not know if the kind of display used by d CS and its use ( e.g. brightness) is strictly comparable. I would point out, however, that my Panasonic OLED TV at around 8,000 hrs seems to have lost black density or contrast becoming too soft and dark grey. In my case that represents around 4.5 years’ use. May need replacing .
Two factors do seem important to dCS users though. The displays have controllable brightness which affects lifespan.The second is that its length of activity also affects longevity so those with it switched on 24/7 are reducing its length of life, perhaps unnecessarily.
So average lifespan of these displays seems hard to pinpoint. I can recall a small number of display failures reported here but whether due to ageing or to other natters is impossible to tell. whatever, like ordinary LED displays, they will fail at some point.
OLED displays are reported to have lifespans from anywhere between 10,000 and 100,000 hours (generally going up year-by-year as they get better at making them). I doubt dCS scrimped on the display and I would be surprised if they lasted most people less than a decade or two!
LG are said to have increased the life expectancy of their TV displays from 30,000 hours to 80,000 hours (I believe this is predicted with 20% reduction in brightness). That said, that’s not an absolute number, but will vary from unit to unit.
It certainly can’t hurt to keep the brightness down and the display off when not in use
Unless I misunderstood you, as OLED panels have no backlight, if you’re finding the blacks less black, this could suggest a fault with the TV (or source) other than the OLED unit itself. Either that, or as you suggest, the lit areas are simply becoming too dim.
I believe we got a five-year warranty with our Panasonic, might be worth checking whether you’re still covered
I tend to agree Erwan. I am no expert but according to my understanding (and to Jeremy’s point above) because they are emissive the blacks are the one thing that don’t change with time on an OLED display.
My original question was prompted by the marked difference in contrast between the displays on my 2014 Vivaldi Clock and my 2022 Bartók. These look very much like transmissive displays to me:
One definitive way to determine if a display cannot be OLED: vision angles.
If the contrast and colours of your display greatly vary with different vision angles, it just can’t be an OLED one…
(Note that the opposite isn’t true given the progresses of other screen technologies - having relatively stable colours and contrast with various vision angles doesn’t necessarily imply it’s an OLED)
Actually, bit of a red face here. On probing a bit further I realised that the display on the clock was set to maximum brightness whereas the Bartók was set to about 50%. When both are set to 50% they look like this. The “bleaching” effect on the Clock display is much reduced and they appear almost identical:
So, false alarm, but I would still be interested in an answer to my question about likely display lifetime having just had to replace the display on my father’s Naim Uniti which involved first disassembling the whole bloody thing (as you can see the daughterboard is complelely hidden between the display motherboard and the chassis. Transformer had to come out to get to the bolts holding the motherboard in place and transport mechanism had to come out to get to the bolts holding the fascia in place on the other side. ):
The displays that are used on the Vivaldi are TFT not OLED,
I’ve seen a handful of actual faulty displays come across the support desk (missing lines etc.) but I can’t see anything in a quick hunt though that would be related to displays “aging” and having age-related issues or failures like those other displays that you mention (I have a few of those I need to replace myself)…
I can warmly recommend the Chinese replacement screens. Reasonably priced (I even made a slightly cheeky offer which they accepted!) and it arrived a week-and-a-half later with no duty to pay. As long as you have a soldering station (don’t know if all require soldering, maybe my father’s was an exception, of course you would know!) and a bit of patience it is a really straightforward procedure.
That’s interesting as I am certain that I did not make the OLED claim up. For example the Hi-Fi News Vivaldi One review of Feb 2018 refers to to the “superb, pin-sharp OLED display”. I also seem to recall OLED being mentioned in the launch bumph for Vivaldi. Perhaps only Vivaldi One has that display?
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