Extending a TV’s life is less of a worry than it used to be. As recently as the 2010s, there was a lot of hand-wringing about how to get a plasma or OLED TV to last long enough to be worth the money. While plasma is a dead format for a few reasons, a modern OLED can potentially match or exceed the longevity of an LCD — as long as it’s treated carefully.

That’s the rub with any TV technology, really. With the right habits and settings, a new TV can last over a decade. If you don’t take action, it might still last a while, but you could end up buying a replacement a few years earlier than planned.

How to push a TV’s lifespan as far as possible

Save money with a few simple tips

The first thing to focus on is brightness. You should never crank levels as high as they’ll go, unless perhaps it’s necessary for visibility in sunlight. Extra power consumption means extra heat, which is the factor that ultimately degrades the components in your display. With LCDs (including mini-LED TVs), your primary concern is failing backlights — without which some or all of an image won’t be visible. On OLEDs, high brightness accelerates the decay of the organic components. Even if you avoid burnt-in “ghost” images (image retention), your OLED may develop a tint and/or lower peak brightness sooner than normal.

That said, you should skip your TV’s power-saving options, including any auto-brightness settings that aren’t Dolby Vision IQ. The explanation is that these options tend to be overly conservative, sabotaging picture quality. The smarter move is to put on a favorite movie or TV show, then manually calibrate brightness until you can barely pick up all the shadow details in dark scenes. I find that 50 to 80% is the right ballpark, but you might actually want to go lower if you own a super-bright mini-LED that you watch under dim conditions.

Speaking of burn-in, you typically don’t have to change much else beyond brightness to help an OLED. Technologies like pixel shifting, logo brightness adjustment, and pixel refresh cycles will usually be on by default. In fact, you should avoid triggering manual pixel refreshes, unless perhaps it’s recommended by tech support. All pixel refreshes are meant to even out the effects of image retention — but this actually results in slightly shorter longevity, and manual refreshes are more thorough than most. Triggering them on a whim is counterproductive.

What you do need to consider with OLEDs is your viewing or gaming habits. Because the cause of image retention is leaving static objects onscreen for hours at a time, OLEDs are less than ideal for marathon gaming sessions. Interface elements like health bars and minimaps tend not to shift much. The worst thing you can do, however, is leave an OLED on a 24-hour news channel most of the day. While pixel shifting and logo brightness adjustment can help, graphics like tickers and channel branding are even less variable than game content.

One of the simplest strategies for any TV is something you should be doing anyway, for the sake of your power bill: turning it off when no one is watching. If you’re having trouble with consistency on that front, consider using sleep timer functions and/or smart home automations. If you can find a smart plug matching the wattage of your TV, you can set up a schedule, or at least remotely shut things off when you or someone else forgets to do it in person. Don’t try this with an OLED, mind you, since it needs the downtime to run automatic pixel refreshes.

A few lesser aids

Picture modes and more

While this might not help as much as the tips I’ve already mentioned, something you should also consider is switching picture modes. If you’re using a default like Dynamic or Vivid, that’s going to ramp up not just brightness, but other settings that work your display harder, such as contrast and motion smoothing. You’re better off switching to a more subdued setting like Filmmaker Mode, then tweaking as necessary to make things satisfying.

Finally, you might want to be judicious with HDR. By all means, you should make sure it’s active if you’ve paid for a Blu-ray disc or a premium streaming plan. The blinding highlights of HDR content are going to generate more wear, however, so if there’s a choice to stick to SDR for things like menus or news channels, you should exploit that.