• Awareness
  • Petition on change.org - Please sign it and bump

caboy (temporal dithering, PWM flicker)

those are not the cause of strain for everyone. Personally I have zero problem with either of them. And I suspect many people latch onto those things as a cause because it seems to make sense that it would be a cause but in actuality have nothing to do with the underlying issue

    ensete maybe not, they are not the cause for everyone. But it may be for someone and we are asking options on software level so everyone can choose those settings to match his situation. It's not that hard, to add some accessibility settings!!!

    ensete Well i have a problem setting "color gamut" to "auto" on my LG TV because it enables dithering. I didnt know about dithering at the time i was buying it, and i didnt need glasses at the time, but i couldnt enable it. That was 4 years ago, i never understood it up til a few weeks ago. Again and again i tried certain settings, always a eye pain with this setting.

    My father has similar problems like me. He told me he changed all his lightbulbs to 2700K lightbulbs, that took away all his eyepain, he can now work 8-10hours again. I looked it up, it seems he took a completely flickerfree lightbulb (by accident!!!) that emits light 100% of the time. He didnt know that, perhaps that was his problem all along. Who knows? I ordered 3 of them just for testing purposes(12 € for 3).

    I have some HUE lightbulbs. They have like a 1000hz PWM. I like them a lot, i can reduce brightness a bit and its totaly ok, but reducing them to 15% makes me feel totaly uneasy. Diming the lightbulbs is ok for me only at 50-100%. I have no idea why this is a thing, but i had to look it up, i always thought they wouldnt use PWM… I now use the lamp of the room next door, because it is set to 100% brightness and that is totally ok with me.(Same thing with my laptop using PWM…)

    A lot of people have problem with these things and dont understand it, maybe more people than the other way around.

    The thing is, if it was a disablity then the industry would be forced to produce more variants of flickerfree lightbulbs or build TVs complety without FRC, etc. Prices would then go down for these products. It would help a lot.

      Can't understand who says this is not the way to solve things, as if there is a known way to improve the situation, or if we all had many supports in the society..

      All help must be humbly welcomed

      hayder1983 Just realized, my TV is not doing the eye sore, my HUE lightbulbs are. I can actually use my TV on 100% backlight brightness in HDR with no problem(contrast lowered… so peak brighntess doesnt kill me) but only with the HUE lightbulbs off. It seems higher frequency doesnt make it better for me but worse. The TV has 120hz PWM, but it is like near constant light(see picture below from the review of my TV on rtings.com). If you look at picure below, it is not flashes, so my seems to accept it. The bad thing about the TV is that on SDR(which is almost everything) the TV uses the 50% setting all the time, only at HDR it uses full backlight. So it uses heavy PWM at SDR. 🙁

      The thing is, that i know this stuff only "by accident", reading it 4 years after i bought the TV. I didnt know this when i bought the TV or the lightbulbs(my symptoms got lot lot worse this year). I have not yet seen how exactly HUE is regulating its lightstream.

      I am working as an engineer and i know that manufacterers do NOTHING except when there is a law to test sth or have a minimum requirement. Even then they try to do some shortcut to prevent doing it, but if there is a law then at least someone will test it and we know it.

      Alyosha2001 I can state with certainty we have more than 100 users on this forum. But that's not entirely important here.

      Attempting to persuade companies using the raw power of metrics by petition without further evidence and research will get you delayed solutions in the best scenario and actively sabotage progress at worse. I don't think we have the best scenario either. An example for the naysayers who say this is a "niche" problem that doesn't matter and absolutely no one else outside of here cares is the iPhone X (and successors) were released with OLED displays that have awful 240Hz PWM, and given all the discussion about it in other communities it certainly is getting a lot of attention for such a "niche" issue. Perhaps the most attention for an individual series of devices. Unfortunately given the supposed difficulties of "properly" implementing OLED displays in mobile devices don't think issues with newer iPhones have been entirely solved but positive awareness is the first step.

      To say companies don't care about "this issue" and giving up all hope of technical progress is also a disservice to the cause. I think expecting existing products to work for everyone is a impossible ask, however it's important to remember over the years there has been changes in display and graphics technology, some for the worse and others for the better. First comes to mind are the crude LED backlights that had horrible PWM (part of which started the infamous Apple "eyestrain thread"). That was attempted to be solved with alternate means of dimming technology by various companies around the midst of last decade (granted some implementations were better than others and I think differentiating between them is still an open research question), but at this point desktop monitors without awful PWM (and possibly alleged voltage fluctuations) do exist. So in the case of desktop monitors that's closer to being solved at this point.

      Second of all in the evidence based cause and effect chain is the problem of LED spectrum, also known as "blue light". While some people dismiss this as just another gimmick by companies attempting to give the appearance of doing something I think the truth is somewhere in between and related to why some had issues with LED versus CCFL backlights. First attempts were to work around this by altering the image sent out by the graphics card to have less "blue" biased colors. This obviously impacts the picture quality and some users were dissatisfied because "why should we have to ruin everything when this was much less of issue with older monitors?" Also not solving the underlying problem of diodes themselves being biased towards the "blue" side of the spectrum. Software such as Flux, Iris, et al attempted to do the same thing followed by monitor manufactures in hardware. This is where I suspect that cynicism of a gimmick comes from.

      Than what slowly happened is presumably because of enough awareness by professionals (such as photographers and video editors), manufacturers embarked on private research and development of LED backlighting technology have a much more balanced spectrum comparable to older "good" monitors, and there have been some anecdotal reports that certain newer backlights are better compared to the common WLED implementations.

      If you're wondering what I'm getting at by all this, the message is that without a clear evidence based "cause and effect" relationship the chances of success resolving any issues is close to zero. Having seen how issues are investigated at big tech companies if an issue is vague and cannot be easily reproduced that unless a relevant engineer is REALLY bored and has nothing else to do (yeah right) or experiences it themselves, the most they'd probably do read said issue report and go "Well that's too bad" and close the case. I'm not trying to give anyone faint praise here but for an actual example of this occurring but after some (quite possibly flawed) tests look at the inconclusive Intel/TUV "eye strain investigation". We all know where that ended up.

      I strongly suspect the elephant in the room is lack of hard, undisputed research. In combination with the lack of coherent standards and relative "rareness" of this issue we also can't expect the research to come from big tech companies either. So what to do? I think having third parties potentially commission independent research into certain aspects of this issue is possible, but at a minimum it requires known good "control" samples that a majority of people can use, the equipment to empirically measure what's "wrong" in comparison between such devices, potentially a testing environment where people with various known triggers can visit to evaluate devices, First two are especially not cheap (think 4-5 figures USD) and the latter is just hypothetical thinking, but I don't see it as impossible either.

      If there's any way to interest anyone at any companies towards solving our issues I would bet it involves having such empirical research in hand, and the "connections" to bypass the usual bureaucracy and related issues.

      Best regards

      JTL

        JTL here here, overall a very good point. I still signed! Because it’s a start and I don’t have any other hope. Up to 274 signatures! I’m all for trying anything and everything to solve.

        Another point i think its worth to share, is that “healthy” screens will make workers more productive, so we should have companies also fighting for this screens to be available.

        For example good eink screens could improve productivity a lot for workers who don't need color screens.

        Just imagine apple working to improve eink screens, how good they would be now.

        a month later

        JTL If there's one thing I've learned after 10 years with a chronic illness, it's that there's no money in cures. There is no money in effective cures for Crohn's disease. As a result, there are 15+ extremely expensive, immunosuppressing drugs I can take, and more researched and marketed every year. The disease was first described in 1932, but there is still very little research into the actual cause of Crohn's disease. This will never change. There is no money in cures. There is no money in improving people's lives, because happy people take care of themselves and don't buy all kinds of products and services trying to feel better. Complaining that taking action is a mistake because there is a lack of research is fine, but you will be saying the same thing in 10 years, and probably 20 years, unless we push for change. However, if we get enough press, if we initiate change of some sort, make it clear that there are more and more of us, the money will be found. If you prefer not to sign, please by all means do not sign. But I, and apparently many others with me, am going to try and raise awareness. Once we do so, the money to do the research will be a mere afterthought.

          lougro I had completely slipped on this thread. I would be handy if it were pinned to the top of the list. Signed now.

          Many thanks for your initiative. I totally agree with you. We need to start from somewhere. And yes, @eyestrainsolutions, I could definitely live with an e-ink screen but OS-induced dithering worries me.

          lougro I'm not here to argue if there is money in conducting research or not, more so laying out a plan on how one would get closer to conducting research for "this issue" assuming they could obtain the proper laboratory equipment rather than the usual "throwing of the darts" we're all used to.

          As for "no money in cures", I can't comment on Chron's disease specifically but for a counter example a certain US president got cancer within the past 10 years and was an early trial participant in immunotherapy drugs that ended up resolving his cancer. Also there is early research that certain drug targets are conductive in repairing damage caused by multiple sclerosis in clinical trials. So it's not black and white as that.

            JTL a certain US president got cancer within the past 10 years and was an early trial participant in immunotherapy drugs that ended up resolving his cancer

            So all we need to hope for is that a future or former US president has or gets our issues 😛

            It was meant in jest really and as a partial retort to other comments

            8 months later
            • [deleted]

            It seems we stopped on this one. The petition got 700+ as of today, that is surprisingly low in number. Let’s share it to more people.

            At the same time, can we reach the influencers and make them aware of this issue? Now I see more and more reviewers measuring PWM of devices, that is a good sign for movement like this to move forward.

            dev