Usable Smartphones?

The Russian website ixbt.com has reviews on phone's and other equipment and tests for PWM. They focus on more mainstream phones (Galaxy S series, HTC, Moto, etc.)

I also may be getting oscilloscope+photodiode soon (see other thread)

I posted this in another thread, but I thought of sharing it here too.

I have tried many different phones like Samsung, LG, Huawei, Lenovo and all of them give me eye strain. I have purchased phones, only to get eye strain, and had to sell it again.

So far, the only phones that I can use without eye strain are phones that uses the Super LCD3 display (i.e. HTC One M7, One Max, HTC One M8, M9 and M9+). These are the phones that I can use and look at the screen for hours (e.g. watching youtube or movies on my phone) without any eye strain whatsoever.

Other display technology like SuperAmoled (Samsung phones), IPS (LG, Huawei, Lenovo etc) all give me eye strain. My wife is using Samsung Note 5, and I cant look at her phone for more than 2 minutes. The PWM in Samsung phones are quite bad. Her previous Samsung phones (S4) also cause me eye strain. Some newer HTC phones are starting to use IPS like the HTC Desire Eye, HTC E9+ etc, these also cause me eye strain, so not all HTC phones are okay, only their flagship series (M8, M9, M9+).

Right now I am using HTC One M9+ Supreme Camera edition, which I had to import from Hong Kong. This is the "best" phone that I can use right now. "Best" as in a phone with the largest screen that I can use without causing me eye strain. It is 5.2 inch, which is slightly smaller than I would like, but at least the camera is much better than my old phone (HTC One Max).

I also tried LG V10 for a couple of weeks. Great phone, does not seem to have PWM (at least based on simple my video camera test), but I do get eye strain using it from time to time. It is not like immediate eye strain as soon as I look at it, which is typical for a PWM-related eye strain), but this is more like a discomfort on the eyes, you feel something that is causing discomfort on your eyes (not sure how to describe it exactly)....and after looking it the screen for some time, it gets painful. So I am going to sell my LG V10 soon.

laptopmedia.com/tag/pwm/ has some reviews on pwm free phones, the site has also other reviews including pwm , which can reached via google. But some times the site seem to lie about pwm.

But they do say moto-g and some huawei phones are pwm free.

There's also http://www.notebookcheck.net , which tests for pwm.

laclean "lie about PWM"

how?

Sometimes they only give you pwm for 0% and 100% brightness which is useless. Sometimes, like you found , they post the pwm test result/picture of another device.

So it does decrease their reliability somewhat , but i hope we can use their reliable looking test results, because without them , relatively little test data available. But it is just hope.

laclean I see your logic, I do know that 100% and 0% sometimes still has PWM though. A better setup would be 0%, 50%, 100% I suppose

I can also vouch for the "Super LCD" or "Super LCD 3" displays. Although I think that they, like all others, suffer from some temporal dithering due to the snapdragon chipset driving them, they are the least problematic of all displays.

At least with Android 5.x, my HTC One M8 is quite usable for long periods and no eyestrain. It took a slight adjustment period coming from the iPhone 4s (early model, yellow screen) but once adjusted I was fine with it. One strange issue is that the Windows version of this phone is less comfortable for me, by a large margin. I think that the Windows drivers for the snapdragon use some kind of dithering and/or harsher dimming (Windows only has 3 brightness gradients on a mobile device).

I tried Android Marshmallow, but experienced eyestrain. I'm not sure if it was the particular ROM used, since there is no official Marshmallow for the HTC One M8 on Verizon at this time. When the official ROM drops, I'll evaluate it then. In the meantime I'm using the official 5.02 with the latest patches, stripped down, and it's serving me well.

Intriguingly, the BEST Android phone in the last 4 years for me has been the HTC One X - which used the same Super LCD screen... and drove it with an nVidia chipset! I'm hopeful that more phones will be released using newer nVidia chipsets, since they don't use temporal dithering.

The One M9 is acceptable to me, as is the One Remix (M8 mini 2). However, the HTC phones with glossier screens (many of the desire series) don't work well at all for me.

I wonder if @Slacor would have problems with the large (5.7 inch) LG V10. IPS flicker free screen and I might see if I can get one unlocked and shipped to Canada.

I use a Samsung Galaxy S2. I have no issues with it. Although I keep it at full brightness and use a dimmer to turn the brightness down. I play games on it and watch movies and use the internet with no issues. I wanted to buy a phone that Laptopmedia had reviewed but now you guys have me worried their reviews can't be trusted. It was a Meizu M2 Note that according to them doesn't use PWM at all.

jasonpicard Also you made those "LED/LCD flicker can cause migraine" videos a few years back. Good times.

JTL Yeah I kind of stopped using the computer so much because I was having so much trouble. I still don't have a good setup for using computers. I find my phone isn't powerful enough to do a lot of Internet use. I have 3 netbooks that I can't use They are all LED but I hook one up to my plasma TV it's just not ideal. I am running a program right now called PWM adjuster. I am trying it out on my Acer Aspire One netbook. I set it to run my PWM at 7350 HZ. It seems better but I can tell it is still bothering me. It's possible even though it's telling me the PWM is being changed nothing is actually happening. The program is supposed to work with Intel graphics cards. This computer is a GMA 3150 graphics card.