Steam Frame

Excited to see that it uses LCDs instead of OLED! One of the things holding me back from head-mounted displays is the short lifespan / burn-in issues of OLED. Also loving the replaceable batteries on the controller.

Personally I much prefer OLED, especially for VR, and haven’t had any burn in issues with OLED in any form for years.

OLED only burns in if the content is static for hours. If your head is that stable while using VR, I give you $5.

Even modern OLED experience burn-in (despite them announcing every year that "this time we solved the burn-in issue!"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whuHuM9h88M

VR is particularly bad for this because, on OLED, higher brightness = greater burn-in and VR headsets generally significantly over-drive their tiny displays.

Naturally the solution to all of this is MicroLED which will have the benefits of OLED without the downsides. But until then, the only device I'm using OLED for is my phone (and only because I no longer have a choice).

Do your VR games not have static HUDs / UIs? It has been a long time since I picked up a VR game since I no longer have the room.

OLED is always burning in as a feature of it. It’s just much less noticeable when it’s:

  * cooled aggressively 
  * constantly changing colors (more even wear)

But it is still always losing durability in a steady way.

I used colorcontrol to enter the service menu of my LG C2 and disable all anti-burn-in features. No auto dimming, no auto picture level, no anti-logo, etc. The only one I kept is pixel shift because it's only noticeable if you're looking at the edge of the screen when it moves, it's a tiny movement. I skip the "pixel cleaning" prompt every time it wants me to wait. When I'm gaming in HDR, I use filters to increase the exposure to get the maximum brightness range of the panel. Been using it like that for ~8hrs/day for over 2 years now. Zero detectable hint of burn-in.

I'm just not convinced it's really much of an issues now-a-days. We have an OLED in our main space and it's on nearly all day (I like keeping sound on while I work from home).

Zero sense of burn in.

> Even modern OLED experience burn-in (despite them announcing every year that "this time we solved the burn-in issue!"):

Yes, but it's not degrading as fast as OLED haters makes you think. I spent days playing the same games (so HUD is in the static place) on multiple OLED screens I owned for years. No noticeable burn-in and still looks better than my only IPS screen.

Not really, most HUDs are fixed to thigns like your hands, guns, etc. or don't exist at all.

Static objects in your view are VERY nauseating (at least in my experience).

I have seen different options of "HUDs" in VR games, not all are actually "heads up". Adding them to the proper context sometimes makes more sense than having them floating in mid air like in pancake view. Examples I have seen are 1) ammo count on the weapon directly, 2) score and score board to the side or projected onto the "floor", 3) attached to cockpit elements in space/flight sims and 4) somewhat affected by physics so they rubber band a bit with movements. I can't come up with an example of fully static HUD elements, but I am sure I have seen some.

And even if fully static contents were a problem, I guess the foveated streaming would introduce enough noise to counter burn-in.

If you want a different anecdote, I have a LG C1 that got burn in after a year of use, playing FFXIV. I can see a blue outline of where my minimap and hotbars are. HUD burn-in. The only thing I disabled was the dimming feature, because it's outright annoying to use, where every time i'd scroll it'd make the text on a page illegiblly dark. (Dark mode pages, white text becomes dark gray while scrolling then back to white when stopped... sometimes not!). I moved that TV to the living room and got a non oled samsung instead which is what I use now.