I have experienced two images burnt-in my laptop screen very suddenly. The images did not burn-in over a long period of time, as it would happen with an old tube monitor. Instead, a single frame seems to be burnt in.
At the first time it occured, the windows desktop was shown. In the burnt-in image one could clearly read the minutes of the clock in the taskbar. I assume that it happened exactly after I had opened the lid and the image moved from an external monitor to the laptop screen. This was just after I had switched in the BIOS from a "Hybrid" graphcis mode to the "Discrete" mode (details about my system below). Even though I was not sure if that related, I immediately switched it back to "Hybrid". After a couple of days the burnt-in image faded mostly away.
One and a half years later I decided to give the "Discrete" mode another chance when I was about to reinstall the system. And again, just after I booted from USB, the next image got burnt in (this time, the UI of the bootable recovery tool is clearly visible). The interesting part is now that this time the lid of the laptop was closed all the time. I just finished the recovery process using my external monitor, checked if the system was OK, shut it down and left it powered off on the desk over night. Only on the next day I saw the burnt-in image. That's really spooky, because now there is an image burnt into the screen that was never shown on that screen.
My explanation goes in the direction that for some reason the discrete graphic card still tries to drive the display, even though it is turned off, but only when the system is running in the "Discrete" mode. The image is then not really burnt into the LCD pixels or something, but rather stay in some kind of memory.
Could that be? Are there any other crude theories? Maybe even a good explanation? Or even a fix?
Technical details:
Lenovo P50 from late 2016
- Nvidia Quadro 2000M
- 4K Display
- Intel Xeon CPU E3-1505M v5
External monitor connected 1st time via display port, 2nd time via dock on USB-C port
Update 1:
Additional information: the areas of the screen where a "burnt-in" image is visible, are flickering (about 30 Hz?). I took a short video clip one and a half days after it appeared, so it already faded away a lot. But you can still see some text shining through. It is barely visible when the actual screen content is full white and less visible when it is full black. It can be best seen on a grayish background like my taskbar in the video. The camera finally managed to focus after 6 seconds: https://youtu.be/mxaZcyhBHvI
This is a screenshot, but it is hard to judge on a still image. Better have a look at the video.
