KM Are you still in contact with the Apple employee,

No sorry. Was a one off thing for rMBP PWM frequency.

KM I am also very curious about what was up with those eyestrain issues in some versions of iOS 7

Maybe this? http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/27/ios-7-motion-sickness-nausea

I actually own a Arduino 8-segment display with controller backlight (that has upgradable firmware) Maybe some time I'll experiment with the PWM frequency to find the max PWM frequency my camera can detect.

Some guy named RMania did a test of an unknown iPhone model running pre iOS 7 and detected no PWM with oscilloscope equipment. Maybe sometime I'll get a proper oscilloscope

https://youtu.be/RUnn9yuAJ_I
      3 months later

      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)

      5 days later

      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.

        • JTL replied to this.

          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 just had an idea why

            Maybe it's harder to set precise brightness percentage on a smartphone. Android, iOS, etc, with the sliders. But what is the resolution of the sliders. For example I recall reading that on MacBookPro the hardware has 1024 steps of brightness.

              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

                  KM

                  "This is so horrible:
                  I recently bought a BlackBerry Z10, it was perfectly usable, no eye strain at all for hours. Then I upgraded the OS to the latest version, and right after the initial boot I got burning eyes and very strong eye strain. I looked if I can downgrade the OS - no, it's not possible. It was possible for years, but not anymore with this latest version. This is just horrible. Such a luck at first, and now it's all gone."

                  Unfortunately, PWM is not the only source of eye strain. Some graphics driver (even in smartphones) can cause eye strain too, as you have found out. I also get eye strain from graphics driver too (in laptop and smartphone). So not only we have to watch out for PWM, but also for software/graphics driver that might cause eye strain. Did you manage to solve your problem? What phone are you using now?

                  • KM replied to this.

                      Slacor I do know that 100% and 0% sometimes still has PWM though

                      Any engineer that does that, should be sent to syberia and not be allowed to design nothing more complex than a simple cube.

                      • JTL replied to this.
                      • JTL likes this.

                          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.

                            Kray I could not solve the problem. I purchased two other Z10 at eBay and made sure to ask the sellers about the OS version before my bids. But both sellers silently decided to upgrade the OS anyway before shipping. I'm not trying it a 4th time, so I'm still using my old iPhone 4 @ iOS 6.0, which works for whatever reason.

                              laclean ahem $4000 ASUS gaming laptop I tried 😛
                              ahem Samsung Note4+

                              I don't have dithering problems though.

                                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 Hi Jason

                                  I've been trying to get in contact with you before. We have lot's of information to share with you. I have a Macbook Pro 2015 (flicker free laptop) for example 😃

                                  Link

                                    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.

                                        • JTL replied to this.

                                            jasonpicard That is certainly possible. Intel drivers are quite buggy.

                                            Try and build a desktop with nice AMD/nVidia graphics and external BenQ monitor?

                                              Hi Jason.

                                              With regards to display, why not connect the netbook/laptop to a "flicker free" display from benq or viewsonic ? i think they say they verified that in a german lab(TUV).

                                              As for a phone, maybe you can find something to your liking in www.notebookcheck.net .They are German ,so maybe there's more chance that they don't mis-advertise, altough in the end we don't have a lot of choice , nobody does pwm reviews) They also said that the xiaomi redmi 3 doesn't use pwm, we have some post in our forums.

                                                dev