IMAGE RETENTION AND THAT DEVIL HEAT
I've had a theory bouncing around in my head for the last month and I thought I'd share it with you guys.
From this thread we've established that incidents of image retention on LG displays are temporary. It occurs and then eventually fades away.
We've also established (well, not conclusively, but good enough for me at least) that heat makes the problem worse. In other words, incidents of image retention are not as pronounced when the display has an air conditioner's cool breeze blowing on it, but is noticeably worse when it's not being kept cool.
We've also noticed that the image retention issue seems to get worse over time. In some cases, rMBPs have no IR out of the box, but most LG displays (possibly all) seem to eventually exhibit image retention (this last one can't really be proven until people have owned them for longer).
My theory?
I think that an LG display's susceptibility to the image retention issue increases with exposure to heat and it never get's better. For instance, your rMBP may be fine for the first 3 weeks and then, after your first weekend spent gaming on it, you start noticing IR appearing after 10 minutes. It stays that way for a month and then, after taking your rMBP to Mexico on vacation and Facetiming your family every day from the beach, the IR now appears in 3 minutes and is very severe (i.e. you even notice it on picture backgrounds).
Why do I think this?
Well, my rMBP was intially fine, with no IR.
Then, one day, while my screen saver was on, but my machine had not yet gone to sleep, I closed the lid and put it in my laptop bag. I didn't think much of it though, because I'd made sure that it was configured to go to sleep when I closed the lid.
Anyway, that was around 9:00pm.
Then, around midnight as I was falling to sleep, I heard this sound of air rushing out of the floor vent (or at least that's what I thought it was), but it sounded weird, like it was being obstructed. It turns out that a Mac OSX update dialog had popped up while the screen saver was on and, since it wasn't acknowledged, the laptop didn't go to sleep when I closed the lid.
In other words, it had been baking in my laptop bag for 3 hours.
My rMBP was soooooo hot, you could barely touch it. The fans were screaming, but it wasn't able to cool properly because there was no cool air to draw into it.
Anyway, shortly after that I started noticing the IR and I started following this thread.
Also, we had a particularly warm summer, and my loft apartment isn't air conditioned.
Needless to say, for weeks on end it was about 5 to 10 degrees warmer in my computer area than a typical air conditioned office would be.
The result?
The IR got worse.
The time it took to exhibit IR dropped to less than a minute.
The time it took to recover from IR increased.
It never improved.
I ended up taking my rMBP into an authorized Apple dealer (NOT the Apple store) and had them plead with Apple, on my behalf, to let them replace my screen. Apple agreed to "make an exception" in my case and the dealer replaced it under warranty. I got a perfect Samsung.
So, I'm not sure if this is a design issue, a manufacturing issue, or a design-for-manufacturability issue (I suspect the latter), but it's not good, and I think that heat plays a part. If I'm correct, the fact that many of you seem to have perfect LG displays, may simply be because the weather is cooler now. Who knows what's going to happen when summer hits again, right around the time a lot of 1 year warranties run out.
I'm just saying. Think about it.
I hope I'm wrong though.
😟
