It’s official: OLED TVs last longer than LCDs

If you're looking for a TV that'll outlast its rivals, you should buy an OLED. In tests, OLED TVs have been shown to last significantly longer than their backlit rivals.

The Rtings website has been stress-testing 100 TVs from a range of brands and across multiple price points, and in the last three years it's run the TVs for around 18,000 hours. That's the equivalent of watching TV or gaming for four hours per day over 12 years.

After three years of punishment, 20 of the 100 TVs had failed completely and 24 more had partial failures. The most common failures were in the LED backlights.

What do these tests mean for your next TV?

Very few of us are going to run our TVs for 18,000 hours over a three year period – these are effectively TV torture tests that will cause TVs to fail much more quickly than if you were watching them at home.

That's because the daily runtime of each TV in Rtings' tests is far longer than in real-world use, so it's much more stressful on the components and generates much more heat. It's the televisual equivalent of driving cars around at 100mph for 16 hours a day every day until bits start falling off.

That said, we can still get some important insights here. The big enemy is heat, and LCD TV backlights generate much more of it than the self-emissive displays in an OLED where pixels stay off when they're not needed. 34% of the LCD models in the tests had at least one LED failing, and nearly 60% of LCDs with edge lighting or no local dimming had partial or complete failures.

Rtings also found that burn-in was more of an issue with edge-lit LED TVs than OLEDs, although FALD or mini-LED models lasted longer than other LED TVs. OLEDs suffered burn-in too, but not significantly so – if you watch a variety of content it shouldn't be an issue.

We already have multiple OLEDs in our guide to the best TVs thanks to their superb picture quality, colour reproduction and contrast. And it seems that there's another good reason to buy – they suffered fewer failures and lasted longer than their LED rivals.