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The evening news is on again, and the channel logo sits in the same corner it sat in last night. A few weeks into life with an OLED, most owners start wondering what that little badge is doing to the screen, and whether the OLED burn-in warranty would pay up if the answer turns out to be something permanent. LG, for one, advertises five years. Whether those five years mean what you hope is a different question.

What does an OLED burn-in warranty actually promise?

On LG's Canadian OLED warranty page, the promise is five years of protection for the panel on named premium lines, yet the page never mentions burn-in or image retention, so coverage cannot be assumed.

That page (as read in October 2026) says the panel is protected for five years. A footnote names the G5, G6 and W6 lines. So the five years is a promise about the panel, or more exactly the panel on a handful of named lines, not a birthright of every LG OLED. Check the model number on the box before the headline does your thinking for you.

• Year one: everything is covered, labour included.
• Years two to five: panel and parts only, with labour charges applying.
• All of it sits under applicable terms and conditions, which the headline does not quote.

The page is Canadian: terms differ by country, and LG's terms in the US, UK or India, along with other brands' terms, were not verified for this piece.

None of this makes burn-in imaginary. RTINGS, in a note last modified in August 2026, says burn-in resistance has not clearly improved under extreme static use, even though newer OLEDs are much brighter. HiFi Editorial, reporting RTINGS on 16 August 2026, describes a 10,000-hour test on a continuous news feed at maximum SDR (standard dynamic range) brightness, where a 2017 LG C7 and 2020 to 2023 models showed similar burn-in rates. I would hedge that second report, because it is secondhand and the rates are not shown.

The reading that survives both is practical: a bright, unmoving logo is the habit to manage, so brightness is the lever you hold. Our piece on why Filmmaker Mode can look too dark covers the settings, and TV glare and whether a matte screen is worth it weighs the glare that tempts people to push brightness back up.

Four numbers settle most of the worry, three from TechRadar's December 2025 report on RTINGS' long-term test of TVs bought in 2022, all run at maximum brightness (failure count as of November 2025). Every OLED there developed burn-in only in the single-static-logo torture test; under mixed usage it was not really an issue. The fourth is the warranty page's labour split.

Test hours are not household hours. They describe the harshest evening anyone could build, far outside a home with varied viewing. The ordinary risk is a screen parked on one channel for days, not a Friday night of films.

How does the five-year cover break down?

Year one is the generous year, with everything covered, while years two to five narrow to panel and parts, with labour charged, and nothing on the page states a burn-in rule either way. Now my own arithmetic, not a source's: five years at five hours of TV a day is about 9,125 hours, roughly half the hours the long test applied. Under mixed viewing most of the test's hours are far gentler, so a burnt panel inside the warranty is the unlikely case and an ordinary fault, where the labour clause bites, the likelier one.

Read down the middle column and the pattern is plain: the generous part is year one, and the vague part is the clause you care about.

Where does the five-year promise break?

It breaks at the fine print, not the calendar: coverage is subject to terms and conditions, and burn-in cover stays unconfirmed for every brand until you read the terms for your country and model.

Opinion: I read the silence as a warning, not an invitation. LG may well treat burn-in as a covered panel defect in practice, but nobody outside the company can tell that from the page, and I would not spend money on the hope.

Set-up is where owners decide their own risk, and it often shares an afternoon with the soundbar, a separate fight laid out in soundbar audio delay and which device should wait.

• Country: a Canadian page is not your contract.
• Brands: Samsung and Sony burn-in terms were not verified here.
• Plans: ask whether any extended warranty names image retention.

This week, find your TV's exact model number and read your own country's warranty page for it, searching the terms for burn-in and image retention. The decision: buy the OLED you want and keep static logos in check, but pay nothing extra for burn-in cover until someone puts it in writing.

A newsreader's lips close on a hard "p", and the sound lands a beat later. Or a beat earlier, which is worse. You open the menus and find two sliders, one on the TV and one on the soundbar, and a question nobody answers on the box: which device should wait? Soundbar audio delay is rarely a fault. It is two machines disagreeing about time, and the fix depends on which one is running ahead.

Why does soundbar audio delay happen at all?

Voices drift because the picture and the sound take different routes, and every box on the sound route, from the TV's audio output to the soundbar's decoder, adds its own processing time. The picture is not innocent either. Motion smoothing and upscaling hold the image back while the sound leaves early, so a quick bar under a heavily processed picture puts voices ahead of lips. A slow bar puts them behind. Same symptom, opposite fixes. Even picture modes move it: the Filmmaker Mode settings we looked at recently strip most of that processing, and sync shifts with them.

Direction matters more than size. ITU-R BT.1359, the broadcast recommendation from 1998 that is still in force, found viewers detect sound arriving 45 ms early but only notice late sound at 125 ms. A bar running slightly late can pass unnoticed for years; one running slightly early looks wrong from the first sentence. Thunder follows lightning, never the reverse. This is the most useful number in home AV, and almost nobody quotes it.

Four numbers settle most living-room cases. RTINGS, in a January 2024 study built on 500 latency measurements, found a soundbar's ARC or eARC link often syncs worse than plugging the source into the bar, and that one sound-effects setting added 30 ms. Its headphone test puts typical Bluetooth SBC latency at 150 to 250 ms (as of 2023). Voice modes are processing too, worth knowing if you lean on the dialogue enhancement modes on TVs and soundbars.

The Bluetooth figure rules options out. A standard SBC link is past the late limit before you open a menu, and a delay slider can only make the early signal wait; it cannot pull late sound forward. The tolerance ratio is our own division of the ITU thresholds.

Should you set the delay on the TV or the soundbar?

Set it on one device only, preferably the soundbar because it sits last before your ears and sees every input, and use the TV's AV sync setting only when the bar has no delay control of its own. Two stacked delays is the classic mistake. Broadcasters may already hand you a signal out of step, so the table starts with the slack you inherit; its headroom rows are our arithmetic from ITU-R BT.1359 and the EBU's R37.

Read the ARC row against the late-headroom row. That single measured hop, if it runs late, spends the whole home margin by itself. RTINGS found bars closer to perfect sync with the source in the soundbar's HDMI input, so a cable move can beat a settings hunt.

Does eARC fix lip sync, and where does it still break?

eARC can carry automatic lip-sync data, a feature HDMI first added in version 1.3, but it only works when both devices report their delays honestly, and plenty of chains still drift on particular apps and picture modes.

The real fix is newer. The HDMI Licensing Administrator released HDMI 2.2 in June 2025 with a Latency Indication Protocol, aimed at chains with a soundbar or receiver in the middle, so each device can report its delay. Both ends need it. Exact figures are still being studied, but early indicators suggest it reaches new TVs and bars long before the ones on your wall, so check for it on your next purchase rather than retiring a bar that works.

Picture modes are the other trap. Game mode strips video processing, which makes the picture faster and leaves the sound relatively late, so a delay tuned in Movie mode drifts when a console wakes the TV. The same goes for separate day and night presets, the sort people set up to fight glare in a bright living room: check sync in each one.

• Drift in one streaming app only: leave the global delay alone.
• Optical with Dolby: PCM output cuts decoding time but drops surround formats.
• Both sliders set: zero one of them before judging the other.

So, which device should wait? Whichever signal is ahead: one delay on the soundbar for early voices, less processing for late ones. This week, put on a newsreader, zero both sliders and watch lips close on a "p": delay early sound in small steps until it stops bothering you, and give late sound a different cable instead.

Saturday, early afternoon, sun pouring through the window behind the sofa. You put on a film you have waited weeks to see, switch the TV to Filmmaker Mode because every review said to, and the opening scene is a murky smear where a candlelit room should be. Is the panel faulty? It isn't. The phrase people type from the sofa is nearly always filmmaker mode too dark, and the answer starts with the room the mode was built for, which is not yours at two in the afternoon.

Why is Filmmaker Mode so dark?

Filmmaker Mode is dark because it copies the picture a colorist saw in a dim grading suite, so its brightness and gamma assume a room with almost no light, not a living room at midday.

A UHD Alliance white paper on ambient light compensation, published in October 2025, puts the grading suite's surroundings at 5 candelas per square meter, about the glow of a lamps-off evening, and says compensation should do nothing in a room that dim. Read that as permission: at night the stock mode is already right. The paper also says a fix should leave black level alone and lift only what sits above it, through gamma.

Reviewers hit the same wall. Writing for TechRadar in October 2025, one tester said many films in the mode look "so dark that I might as well have the screen turned off" on a bright day. So nothing needs repairing or returning. The standard advice to always watch in Filmmaker Mode assumed a darkened room, and it has aged badly in homes with big windows.

Four numbers frame the decision, from the mode's timeline, the partner list at FilmmakerMode.com (retrieved October 6, 2026) and the effort a manual fix takes.

The wait is this article's own arithmetic. Until a version could read the room, every set shipped tuned for darkness, so the manual route is the default answer, not a workaround. If sun lands on the screen itself, that is reflection, and whether a matte TV screen is worth the trade is the better read. Sound has the same problem, covered in what TV and soundbar voice modes can and cannot fix.

Should I use Filmmaker Mode during the day?

Yes, use Filmmaker Mode during the day, but move two settings first: raise the panel's light output and lighten gamma one step, then leave everything else the mode sets exactly where it is.

Panel light comes first: OLED Pixel Brightness on recent LG models, Backlight on most LCD TVs. Push it up until the darkest scene you care about reads from your seat. Gamma comes second, and one step lighter lifts faces while black stays black. The trap is the slider beside it: on several brands, LG among them, Brightness actually sets black level, and raising it greys every letterbox bar.

Which route suits you depends on one fact about your TV.

Filmmaker Mode too dark: fix it by hand or by sensor?

Fix it by hand if your TV was sold before late 2025, because only the newest sets carry the light-sensing version that adjusts Filmmaker Mode for room brightness on its own, and nothing about the manual route costs money.

TechRadar reported in October 2025 that Filmmaker Mode 1.1 adds ambient light compensation through the TV's light sensor while keeping color accurate, and that LG's C5 and G5 OLEDs already ship with it. For those owners, one toggle replaces both manual changes.

The manual route costs a little daily effort; the sensor route costs a newer TV. And if you watch almost only after dark, neither applies.

Is Dolby Vision IQ better than Filmmaker Mode in a bright room?

Not usually: Dolby Vision IQ does read room light, but it switches motion smoothing back on by default and can still look drab, so it trades one daytime problem for another.

TechRadar's January 2025 Dolby Vision coverage found the standard Dark and IQ modes apply motion smoothing out of the box. Switch to IQ for brightness and your film starts to look like a daytime soap, so check the motion menu after any mode change.

Some sets offer a better middle path. The same report says Dolby Vision Filmmaker Mode reached LG's 2024 OLED range and Philips' OLED809 in 2024, then TCL's 2025 range, so Dolby Vision titles keep the accurate picture and the same two changes apply inside it. A brighter panel also draws more power, worth knowing if time-of-day tariffs price your peak hours.

• A Vivid or IQ preset brings motion smoothing back.
• Raising black level turns shadows grey.
• Daytime settings left on at night over-brighten a correct picture.
• Sets without the mode need a Custom preset built the same way.

This week, pick the sunniest hour you really watch in, play a film you know, and change only panel light and gamma. Grey black bars mean you moved the wrong control.

Related: what an OLED burn-in warranty actually covers