@"Mrak0020" Thanks for your reply. I will try this later after i return from work. I agree with you, i feel like symptoms are a lot worse when using the phone when it is dark.

After reading the last posts in this thread, i believe we can agree the problem is more complex than reducing it to PWM issues and display type. As i said in my previous post, the Samsung A5 never gave me any problems even after hours of using it on the same day, while the Samsung A51 gave me the worst kind of headache i've experienced watching a screen. And it's strange that the Redmi Note 9S, being an IPS LCD with supossedly no PWM flicker, or at least flicker at higher frequency than most OLEDS, it's in a middle ground in terms of symptoms between the A5 and the A51, both AMOLEDs with bad PMW from what i've seen on some reviews. So Wtf 🤣

I will try using the Redmi for a few more days to see if my vision somehow adapts to this screen. If the symptoms don't lower i'll try to find another phone (Any recommendations?)

    DiegoRojo i believe we can agree the problem is more complex than reducing it to PWM issues and display type

    Oh you don't even imagine how far it is from display type and pwm and things like that. I am doing all the research in another language so there's little of it on this forum right now; but there's a community of people who face this smartphone problem and a lot of tests are already done. For me old Samsung Note 5 (super amoled with low pwm rate) is the last normal phone, and iPhone 11 and Xiaomi with ips bring me a lot of pain immediately.

    No recommendations right now, unfortunately. Only one: avoid pushing through pain, bad phone will just damage eyes more and more. If your redmi has something like "reduce contrast" in settings, try it, it is helpful on some devices. Contrast has something to do with this, but not per se, it just messes up some physical qualities of this light.

    Ledstrain generally is visited by people with other types of problems, so this smartphone problem is less covered here. But I have to say it is not exclusive on smartphones, it has something to do with the basic screen technologies and eye sensitivity to this specific kind of damage. So some people have the same problem with notebooks, monitors etc. It is definitely most present in new tech (starting from 2017), but could be found earlier sometimes.
    It is definitely not connected to any eye pathology, a lot of people I contacted have been to ophthalmologists. Me too, I had a complete checkup with a lot of tests and my eyes are absolutely healthy.
    Neither it is connected with BVD, discussed here; most probably this light makes eyes to immediately excessively converge reflectively. But that is only a top of an iceberg; somehow it makes little red blood vessels to appear or break immediately, leads to light sensitivity (hopefully by damaging only cornea and not a retina, but it is impossible to define) and so on. The longer it is used, the more damage a person feels, but muscle pain from excessive convergence will slowly go down.

        Hi!....first of all: sorry for my bad english, and sorry if the post is too long.

        I didn't know about pwm until some months ago....and now i found this forum (and this thread) i am glad i did. 😃

        Long story short, i am looking to replace my current phone (an motorola one fusion...the standard model...not the fusion plus) mainly because it weights like a stone... but i wanna go with caution.

        The thing is, i have confirmed that i am sensitive to pwm flickering, i was getting serious eyestrain with my older phone (galaxy s3 mini...with an amoled) but interestingly i get a even worse "burning" sensation and headaches with an zte a3 lite from an family member wich has an lcd (and yes...i tested it with my fusion ' s camera and it flickers) then there is my one fusion wich is maybe the most "eye friendly" phone i ever had...but still far from perfect (i cant find information about the display online)

        The problem is that although i am pwm sensitive i also have others problems with my eyes (i am very sensitive to lights in general... including sunlight, i also cant tolerate certain colors on screens on certain conditions) So even with my fusion sometimes i cant enjoy watching something, is like some colors are disgusting to my brain...idk.

        So i have these options in my city:

        • The realme 8 5g (is the same as narzo 30 5g...)

        • One plus nord n10 (i read contradictory things about pwm in this one)

        • And realme x50 5g -not pro- that is at the same price here for some strange reason..but it weights too much for my taste.

        So it seems like my only real option is the realme 8 5g.

        Can someone say me if the realme 8 5g display is really 100% flicker free? Now i know notebookcheck is not always correct...and then there is dithering and other new things i didn't know before...and still dont understand very well haha. So i want to be sure if it really is 100% free from any form of flickering.

        Now ...about the colors / photophobia problem: i am still not sure what i can tolerate more...low contrast or high contrast displays

        • I never liked how amoled panels looks

        • An family member had an vanilla moto g6 and i liked how it looked (it wasn't perfect though) interestingly i didn't get eyestrain and looks like it uses pwm at 2.300

        • now with my one fusion i like to use the "saturated" profile more but its still not perfect, at least i can use it for some hours without much problem..so in the end i am not entirely sure what is the "perfect combination" for my eyes/brain.

        Thanks in advance 👍

          Mrak0020 Thanks for your reply, in a way it's good to know there is more people on the same boat (and hopefully we will reach some permanent solution to all this 😁 )

          There are 2 curious things that catched my attention while reading your post.

          1-To this day, i never had any problems with PC monitors or TVs (with some software exceptions i will mention in case 2). I have 2 relatively new Smart TVs (one Samsung, the other one LG), and a LG monitor. For me, it's strange that neither one has given me any symptoms, considering that at least one of them is newer than the smartphones i mentioned; can someone explain if the display functioning is too different from that of cellphones? I see a lot of people complaining about having this same problem we have with smartphones, with this other screens. If someone is struggling to find an usable monitor/TV maybe i can recommended this models for you.

          2-I remembered two moments when I had similar issues (maybe they are totally unrelated to this but who knows?) when playing some computer games. There were 2 in particular that gave me headaches and eyestrain after some minutes playing them: World of Warcraft and Outer Worlds. I'm not sure about WoW, but the thing is in the game Outer Worlds there is a visual effect called "Chromatic Aberration" that for some people messes very bad with their eyesight. When I searched about this problem i had with the game and deactivated that option, i felt instant relief. I believe that WoW used the same effect, or at least what both games have in common is that colors look a lot more vivid/intense than in most other games.

              DiegoRojo Thank you for these details!
              Let me think...

              1. I have never had any problems as well but I personally never tested a new tech (TV) other than smartphones for too long, and symptoms need some time to start (from an hour up to two days) if my eyes are completely fine and there was zero bad screens in my hands for months.
                I suppose that smartphones are different than other screens, because no one needs to watch TV under a direct sunlight, so a TV definitely has worse readability than a phone. There are many complaints on TV and monitors on this forum. But on a huuuge Russian-speaking forum about phones and gadgets (not about eye pain), smartphone problem looks way more specific: many people have no complaints about other tech, only about smartphones.
                On another huge forum about hardware including monitors there are almost no complaints about smartphone-like symptoms, in a super long thread about monitors for sensitive eyes I found only couple of similar complaints.
                BTW, due to the fact that the majority of complaints are about smartphones, there's a big chance that a lot of pwm complaints are not about pwm. No one actually tests pwm influence on their own eyes. Amoled screens became widespread only 3-4 years ago. People just google, find out about pwm and change the phone. When I was looking for clues all through the internet, I saw many pwm complaints that were similar to my symptoms, but milder.

              2. That is interesting. That might indicate that you react not to one factor, but maybe to couple of factors (eyestrains from software are way more common on ledstrain than the smartphone problem). But it could also be a clue to the smartphone problem, and I am going to check that with all my curiosity! Thank you!
                Update: I googled the basics, how it looks, and outer world examples. My first impression is that this can be quite an unpleasant thing. Blurry colorful image edges might drive crazy any person with no vision problems. I do not think it is connected directly to smartphone problem: I checked pure red, green and blue images and all of them bring me pain. But it might play some multiplying role. There are some images on my screen that I see almost like in 3D. Some sort of chromatic aberration might theoretically lead to this illusion.
                What I find quite interesting though is that you mentioned vivid colors. Google says chromatic aberration is widespread in modern games. What if some combination of chromatic aberration and vivid colors lead to eyestrain? If the colors are vivid than the edges with aberration should be also more vivid, with brighter red/blue/green.
                I will keep this chromatic aberration thing in mind during the research.

                nikomanuel96 The thing is, i have confirmed that i am sensitive to pwm flickering, i was getting serious eyestrain with my older phone (galaxy s3 mini...with an amoled) but interestingly i get a even worse "burning" sensation and headaches with an zte a3 lite from an family member wich has an lcd (and yes...i tested it with my fusion ' s camera and it flickers) then there is my one fusion wich is maybe the most "eye friendly" phone i ever had...but still far from perfect (i cant find information about the display online)

                As you said and from my experience, IPS or OLED is not the issue we are facing. The problem comes from somewhere else. Something changed in modern smartphones but the problem can't be reduced to display type or PWM flickering. If that were the case my Samsung A5 should be terrible for the eyes but i never had any problem with it. I could even stare at the screen for hours and never had a headache or even feel my eyes tired.

                    Sunspark Hi, have you upgraded the A70 to Android 10? I maybe forced to do it due to security reasons and i wondered how the phone behaves. Up to now with Android 9 it is perfect, even the battery life is great.

                    Also, have you found any other phone like Samsung A70? It is possible we respond in a similar way to displays.

                    Thnx

                        Peter No, never did update it, never will. It's too stable.. battery life is good, I can use this for hours, etc. Don't want to risk being disappointed with some new problem. Rolling back is possible I think, but I'd rather just not deal with that hassle at all.

                        I'll get back to you on phones next time I go by the store.. I don't normally look at them, but the other week one or two seemed ok in passing. I can however say, the S7FE tablet I played with then seemed pretty good, good enough that I thought I should go take another look at it. LCD display, surprisingly smooth. Good colour too. Of course the store sold out of it already and took the display down, unless they just moved it elsewhere.

                            Sunspark Thanks. I will try to postpone it as long as possible but probably within 2022 I will be forced to upgrade to Android 10. It is company policy.

                            I will be on the search the next months until i find a phone with a similar experience to A70.

                            Relevant to the 7FE, my wife has TabA, it is pretty good on the eyes and it is not an SAmoled device. I will have a look myself to a store, although in general i have a bad reaction to S devices.

                                Peter As a general best practice, I recommend not converting personal devices to BYOD and having corporate policies placed on them. It is better to have a 2nd device, even a cheap pos. Depending on the job one does, it is not as hard as it might sound.. back in the day, everyone carried 2.. a corporate blackberry and a personal anything. Ontario, Canada also just passed a law that says bosses are not allowed to bother their employees after 5 PM.

                                At my last job, they tried to get me to convert my personal device to be a managed one, but I said no. What I would do instead, I would use citrix receiver on my phone which doesn't need permissions or privileges, all you need is the RSA keyfob. You log-in, and it's a Windows desktop environment and you can use the Windows desktop version of Outlook in that Citrix session. That might be an option for you.

                                Sure it's not as pretty as having mobile applications, but I loved how clean the separation was.

                                If you check out the S7FE, let me know what you think. I can't justify having a tablet (what would I use it for?) but it's good to know of options.

                                  Anyone tried the Xiaomi 11T Pro?

                                  Playing in store seemed really really easy on eyes.

                                  Of course that doesnt mean anything after one buy and use it for a while, but First impressions were really good.

                                  It seems it has a flicker free Mode at 60hz.

                                  https://www.dxomark.com/xiaomi-11t-pro-display-review/

                                  Edit: It has a true 10 bit display

                                    DiegoRojo I had such an experience. I had Samsung A3 2107 and it was perfect for my eyes. But modern amoled phones kill me 🙁 And not only amoled…

                                        Last(i mean the newest phone) that i can use is Honor9. 9 is ok, 10 - already terrible. But I don't know what is the difference…

                                        Quad43 go to setting - display - advanced you can change the refresh rate in there also I have screen calibration set to vivid and the brightness set to adaptive.

                                          dev