6 months later

insta42014 was there an improvement on your MacBook Air M2? I got one delivered yesterday and the screen felt uncomfortable to me. When I was on the shop I had a first bad reaction to the screen and the one on a MacBook Pro 14 inch M2 looked much better, but I thought to get the Air at home and have a proper look. I also made yesterday a 240 fps video for both the Air and a MacBook Pro 15'' 2015 and both showed artefacts blinking but much more noticeable on the Air.

Also anyone that has been able to compare the screen on the MacBook Air M2 and the MacBook Pro 14'' M1/M2? I'm thinking on getting the latter but it has PWM

    Alfort I tried MBP 14 m2, its still bad unfort 🙁 well its better than MBP 16 m1, but still giving me brain fog which is not acceptable to use on a daily basis. There is a guy on youtube who is using some interesting device to measure PWM, here is a video for MBA m2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urB2xtr3h3c It doesn't look that bad as iphone or especially as samsung s23, so I assume we getting problems with eyes because of FRC, i think current macbooks are using 8bit + FRC display, but i might be wrong.

      3 months later

      madmozg this is abou as good as any display gets, it's very very low. Lower than the iPhone 11 which is frequently the 'go to' device for people suffering with PWM sensitivity (like me).

      It seems this Air might have been faulty to me, as many many other people have commented it has no PWM/temporal dithering and is fine to use.

      I can't believe that a device that costs that much isn't checked against flickering. What a shame.

      8 months later

      I‘ve the same on my MBA M2, by iPhone 240fps recording (slow-mo)!

      It's not caused by temporal dithering since i disabled dithering by using StillColor!

      So WTF is that ?

      Same as the video shows, which provided by the Owner of this thread on the top.

      Does the flicker only show up only for certain patterns? Is it certain colors, or is it all colors? Does it only affect darker shades? Is there a known website or image with the effect that I could test under slow-motion?

      The answers to those questions could help narrow down the source of the problem.

      Is that the backlight of the panel flickering?

      I can’t believe a screen flickering like that is allowed to be sold on the market. The level of modulation seems to be very high. Do we know what frequency it is?

      • JTL replied to this.

        TemporalDithering I can’t believe a screen flickering like that is allowed to be sold on the market.

        As I understand it, there aren't really any regulations for product safety in this department. And attempts at certification (i.e TUV) seemingly have glaring holes that make the certification not worth the paper they're printed on.

        The level of modulation seems to be very high. Do we know what frequency it is?

        I don't have the device at issue on hand, but at some point I might investigate how to measure flicker/modulation percentage and other aspects with waveform capture using an oscilloscope, but that's yet another project I potentially need to work on. I wouldn't exactly trust the Lupin and other portable flicker meters for accuracy.

        Maybe getting LG Gram laptop will surely at least make sure that panel is from LG. From notebook check it seams like their panels are of higher quality than the rest of Chinese factories. Regarding certification, I have come to conclusion its obsolete. Generally certification does not work, there needs to be actual QA stamp with flicker free test results in the similar fashion as colour grading is done. This will make sure every single unit is tested, rather then product line itself with one or two units actually tested.

        Note however, problem probably is not PWM anymore. I picked up my old PWM laptop and it is easier on the eyes than modern laptops. The problem is - there is a big stack of various signal modulation techniques including temporal dithering, and to be honest there is such a mess that nobody knows anymore what is causing these problems. Need to undo the onion slice by slice in order to get to the bottom of it. Or at least find GPU that is transparent in providing full control of firmware controls to the user. Intel, AMD, apple silicon, they all copy from each other, generally the same boat full of crapware.

        The Panel is always flickering no matter you open still color or not.

        Guess the panel is trash level.

          There's probably something wrong at the hardware level with your backlight. I took some 240Hz video of my MBA M2 15-inch this morning and could not reproduce this.

          Edit: I gave it another try and managed to reproduce the backlight flicker on my 15 inch MBA M2. The key is to raise the screen brightness to 100% before taking the video, which I hadn't done previously. It's more subtle on my machine than the other posted videos but definitely there. I guess this is an issue with all M2 Airs.

            7 days later

            Has anyone captured this same type of backlight flicker on camera with an M1 Air?

            I know they have PWM under 75% but I doubt that they have the same "strong flicker that can easily be captured on camera on dark gray backgrounds" like a really large amount of M2 and M3 Airs seem to have, since their panel is more of the classic edge-lit backlight style a la the Touch Bar Pros.

            However, if anyone has used an M1 Air and have captured the same effect, please let me know.

            The one thing I know is that the M2 LCD Touch Bar Pro is entirely immune to this issue, despite extremely fast PWM at lower brightness, nothing ever shows up on camera at all no matter if it's at low brightness or high.

            • Rikl replied to this.

              DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs

              For M1 Air, Notebookcheck says PWM exists under 50% brightness. Rtings says no PWM at all.

              Who knows how they test these things?

              For mine, I can't tell. Mine does have significant dithering, solved with Stillcolor.

              Still not as comfortable as screens from 10-15 years ago.

                Rikl To test on your M1 Air (because this is one way to cause flickering on the M2 Airs): set the "Stone" dark gray solid color wallpaper option in wallpaper settings.

                Then, turn brightness to max. Record the screen in 240fps slow motion on your phone camera. Let me know if flickering is visible in the slow motion recording or if it just looks normal playing back.

                • Rikl replied to this.
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