Preface:
During his capture card experiments, Seagull commented:
The other, and in my opinion, more important conclusion is that dithering frequency depends upon the colour being displayed. I think this is why people have problems when software updates or changes, steam and chrome for example. The software itself isn't dithering, but if the colours have been changed slightly that will affect how the GPU is dithering and might produce symptoms.
This must also apply to OS as well. If the output has gone through several layers of processing, will white even be white anymore?
Gurm wrote in a different thread:
Additionally, WINDOWS has multiple abstraction layers before the output makes its way the screen. Color Profiles, color correction, gamma... all applied at the driver level, the card hardware level, the windows API level, the screen composition level... then again at the input and output phases of the display unit.
This comment singles out Windows, but with MacOS and the M1 chip this may be an even bigger problem.
E-ink displays and M1 Macs:
Based on this Reddit review, and also our own user Elitus who took footage of his Macbook Air with M1 chip on his e-ink monitor, it would seem that M1 chip has a problem with e-ink. This makes sense as we think the M1 chip produces a noisy output. This is probably a function of the interaction between new versions of MacOS and the M1 chip itself. In any case, there are a lot of dithering artifacts on e-ink when used with M1 Mac.
However, this Reddit post blame the Dasung for the dithering. What is the truth here? Is the Dasung just transmitting dithering from the Mac, or is the Dasung dithering algorithm "broken"?
Here are some excerpts from a Dasung 253 review on Reddit:
I set a white background on the desktop, which is natural for e-ink. However, when I move the cursor around, I notice that it leaves a white shade/trail on the desktop. That is, the Dasung monitor interprets the white desktop as very light gray, and there are parts of the screen that are slightly lighter than the "white" desktop. So the white point does not seem to be set correctly on this monitor. I think this is also a genuine bug (or the dithering algorithm is poorly thought out / implemented).
I suspect his Dasung is not getting white from the Mac's output. The Dasung is interpreting what it is given, which is "not white". I think this ties into Seagull's hypothesis that OS may be causing strain by altering colours.
If all colours are not "standard" due to be altered by the OS, will that not trigger temporal dithering and other "tricks" to come into play by the GPU?
JTL commented previously:
Back during my tests of dithering with capture cards, "different" colors of backgrounds and text outside of a small color palette did contribute to an increase in dithering noise
I haven't presented any new ideas here. Everything has been thought out previously by users like the ones mentioned above.
I have been thinking about it since KM hypothesized that a good OnePlus 3 ROM was usable because they might have forgotten to install a colour profile / colour correction. It made a lot of sense to me then and seem even more important now.