Just to follow up on this. I'm now using the XPS 15 9560 absolutely fine. I'm still running the old Nvidia drivers (if it ain't broke..) and I have to have Ditherig.exe running otherwise I get the old problems - I had a situation recently where I had 2 days of severe migraines and couldn't work out why - it turns out ditherig had stopped running in the background. In some ways it was a good way to 'blind test' that this is effective for me. A few drivers I'm using:

Windows 10 Home 14393 (build 1607)
Intel 630 driver 22.20.16.4729 (05/07/17)
GTX 1050 driver 22.21.13.8165 (31/03/17)
ditherig.exe v1.7

I still have to be careful - about 5 hours is my maximum tolerance, but the same goes for any screens these days. Ever since using a Macbook for 1 year without realising that it was giving me the migraines my eyes and head have never been the same sadly.

I know we're all different with different sensitivities but I really hope this solution helps someone else.

    7 days later

    Do you have any other symptoms than migraine? E.g. bloodshot irritated eyes? I don't have migraines or anything else, I just get bloodshot strained eyes if there is PWM. I'm not sure about any driver versions or dithering. I have thus far encountered only one example which was conflicting. Huawei Mate 9 was measured by a couple of sites not to have PWM and I was not able to detect any flicker with my DSLR, but still that made my eyes water and I ended up with bloodshot eyes. Even though I used it at the lowest brightness and the night mode on. So that made me think there might be something else than PWM. But then my current Xperia XZ Premium is again OK, if I don't let it go to under 31%, where there is PWM.

    I haven't found any LED display that won't give me bloodshot eyes, and strain which comes from tension in the muscles surrounding the eye as well as temporalis muscle. I solved all of the other issues though and don't get headaches or pseudo-migraines anymore. LED light is just caustic to my eyes, and I'm willing to bet it's the same with some others here as well.

    • JTL replied to this.

      degen I wonder how well GB-LED and other LED technology would work? Do you know if it's just white/blue LED's you have a problem with?

          JTL I haven't tried any other LED technologies besides WLED except for the Galaxy S2, and that was a long time ago.

            Hello all
            I am new to this discussion and am a family md.
            I also have had eye strain with certain laptops.
            Dithering is a new concept for me and would be quite a discovery.
            I have installed the solution and will try for a few weeks

            QEMD, welcome! It will help to have an actual medical opinion in here. Please do a little background reading if you have time - we have a real, actual problem here but it has many triggers/forks/causes that can be broken down generally into a couple of categories:

            • Things that move when they should be standing still - Dithering/Flicker/FRC/PWM
            • Things our eyes can't handle seeing - Blue light, brightness, some PWM falls into this category

            Cheers!

            10 days later

            Hello Everyone

            I started having eye strain when I first bought my Samsung Galaxy S7 (changed my old Samsung Galaxy S3). When I had long periods of phone usage I had spotted headaches at the back of my head and severe eye strain with blurry vision afterwards. I thought that it was because of age (I’m 25 years old) and a lot of people in my family needs glasses. Long story short I had one cellphone-off weekend and all my problems disappeared. This had confirmed me that the fault is in new screen technologies.
            I recently bought a Dell XPS 13 9350 touch screen and after 5 minutes of usage I have terrible eye strain plus headaches. I read that reflective screens are terrible for eyes. Something about reflective light hitting directly the retina. After a lot of research, I bought a matte finish screen protector which also blocks UV light (pure marketing I guess). I’m going to make an update when I receive the protective film.
            P.D. I downloaded dithering.exe and I felt immediate relief. It’s too good to be true so my next update will cover some more of dithering. Also, I’m going to try and downgrade Intel HD Graphics 520 to the 2015 driver.

              a month later

              I'm signing in for this, too, I am also using ditherig.exe, and in my case (the screen is B156HAN01 v1.1) there is an easy way to detect when dithering is off, because banding appears. I have a Zbook 15 G3 and I have switched the display with one from Zbook 15, because of PWM. A am trying to attach 2 pictures to show the difference

              Theese are the pictures that show banding when dithering enabled (sign that it Works). Anybody else having the same situation?
              I am also interested in making this an option in the drivers, if somewone whants to gather more votes for an official request

              • JTL replied to this.

                Alyosha2001 I'm not sure what you're asking. If it's banding, it means dithering is turned off (as you know)

                    JTL I was curious if banding appears to anybody else who turns dithering off (if there are true 8 bit panels, in other words)

                      I asked because I wonder shouldn't this be a good indicator wheather it is on or off, as I don't think there are many true 8 bit displays, especially on laptops.
                      "I'm working on trying to find a solution - so far I'm not convinced it's the Intel drivers that are causing the problem here, I think the dithering may in fact be coming from the GTX 1050 (old laptop was GTX 960) and I feel that when I disable the 1050 in Device Manager the laptop becomes more usable. Only time will tell with this however as once my headaches and migraines have been triggered it takes a while for my head to go back to normal sadly." - it seems to me like si_edgey was not sure whether it was enabled or not

                      • JTL replied to this.
                        15 days later

                        Also an issue with ditherig (v.1.7 and 1.6, others I haven't tried) and Intel HD Graphics 530 , when the screen goes off, dithering functionality is set back to default, even if "Disable all dithering options" is still checked. With previous intel HD Graphics 4600, this issue was not present

                        i've never gotten ditherig to work. I always get 'failed to load dll".
                        are you guys doing anything special?

                        • JTL replied to this.

                          reaganry Did you try extracting it from the zip file?

                          Although I don't currently have Windows or a computer with Intel graphics handy I guess it should look like this in the directory you run it from.

                          https://i.imgur.com/6iSehWl.png

                            yeah, mine looks like that, i do notice the 2 folder choices are x86 and amd64, neither which applies to my 64 bit i3 setup

                            • JTL replied to this.

                              reaganry Can you screenshot the exact message? In theory it should list a missing file.

                              With regards to amd64 it DOES NOT matter if your CPU is Intel or AMD. 64-bit CPUs were first invented by AMD, hence the name. What matters if your Windows install is 32 or 64-bit.

                                  JTL it's a popup box that says "Failed to configure the registers" or "Failed to load a DLL" when i run the x86). people earlier in the thread were getting the same msg. It's titled "Dithering Settings for Intel Graphics"

                                    I had theese messages, too, some time ago. Are you running it on the laptop monitor, or on an external one?

                                      dev