Burn-in anxiety hasn't gone away. Gamers still debate it on Reddit, still hedge their purchasing decisions around it. And yet, according to market analyst TrendForce, the OLED PC monitor market shipped 2.735 million units in 2025 , a 92% increase over 2024. The fear is real. The sales growth is realer.
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The numbers behind the near-doubling
To understand what 2.735 million units actually means, some context helps. The overall desktop PC market runs at roughly 50 million units per year when you strip out the laptop-heavy portion of the 250-300 million annual PC shipments. OLED monitors still represent a small slice of that, but the trajectory is hard to argue with.
The TrendForce report covered by Tom's Hardware points to a specific sweet spot driving much of the growth: 27-inch, 240 Hz QHD models. TrendForce noted that these panels "gained considerable popularity due to their excellent price-to-performance ratio, significantly increasing shipments." That tracks. The 27-inch QHD OLED has become the go-to recommendation for PC gamers who want the visual upgrade without paying flagship prices.
Pricing has been the unlock here. OLED monitors have only recently started dipping below $400, while high-refresh 1440p LCD panels can now be found for under $130. The gap is closing, and buyers are responding.
Who's winning the OLED monitor race
Asus came out on top in 2025 with 21.6% market share, followed by Samsung at 19.3% and MSI at 13.1%. Here's the thing though: none of those brands actually make the panels themselves. Samsung Display and LG Display supply the underlying OLED technology, with the consumer brands handling chassis design and image processing.
That distinction matters more than it might seem. Panel supply is the real bottleneck for the entire category, and both Samsung Display and LG Display are investing heavily in expanding OLED output. The brands competing at retail are largely competing on price, software features, and build quality around the same underlying tech.
What the burn-in conversation actually looks like now
The burn-in concern isn't baseless. Long-term testing from outlets like Monitors Unboxed has shown measurable burn-in on OLED gaming panels after thousands of hours of use, particularly with static UI elements. The question is whether it's a dealbreaker for most users, and the sales data suggests a growing number of buyers have decided it isn't.
Modern OLED monitors ship with pixel-refresher tools, screensavers, and brightness limiters specifically designed to slow the process. Whether those mitigations are enough for a monitor you plan to run for five or six years is still an open question, and a fair one.
Pixel refresh settings panel
Where the market goes from here
TrendForce expects the growth to continue in 2026, projecting a 51% year-over-year increase in OLED monitor shipments. If that forecast holds, the category would cross 4 million units annually, approaching 10% of desktop PC sales volume. That's still far from dominant, but it's no longer niche.
The full PC Gamer breakdown of the TrendForce data notes that broader PC sales are actually expected to dip in 2026 due to rising memory prices, which makes the OLED monitor growth projection even more notable. Buyers are choosing to spend more on display quality even as other hardware costs climb.
For gamers sitting on an older LCD panel, the price-to-performance argument for OLED is getting harder to dismiss with each product cycle. The 27-inch QHD 240 Hz segment is where the value is right now, and that's exactly where the market is growing fastest. Make sure to check out more:
