I currently own a Mate 10 Pro with an OLED display, which has negatively affected my eyes. I experience consistent eye strain and headaches whenever I use it. I've heard that the Poco X4 GT is currently considered the most eye-friendly smartphone. Is there a better option available?
What is the best eye-friendly smartphone
Unfortunately, there is no single good device. Everyone's preferences and experiences are different. If you scroll through the big smartphone thread you'll see lots of people saying they've finally found a good smartphone, and later posts from people who've bought the same phone and found it doesn't work for them.
Your best bet is to try out as many as you can.
iphone 8P with Toshiba screen I heard.
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Android Central has posted an article with positive results using the new Moto Edge Plus 2023/Edge 40 Pro:
Best phones for PWM/Flicker sensitive people 2023
"Motorola debuted a relatively new flicker-reduction option with the Edge Plus (2023) that ensures the phone's display is on 99.51% of the time during the duty cycle. In practice, this is identical to DC dimming, which means the phone is actually reducing the voltage to the OLED diodes instead of using PWM flickering to fake a dimmer display.
Above 35%, the Motorola Edge Plus (2023) uses DC dimming to achieve a flicker-free display. As is telling from DC dimming measurements, the brightness dips a little bit each time the display refreshes. In this case, the display is refreshing at around 120Hz. This is normal for all DC-dimmed OLED displays.
Below 35%, the phone switches to 720Hz PWM dimming to ensure the display still retains a high-quality image and correct color accuracy.
This is my personal favorite premium phone and I have no comfort issues from using this phone all day long."
I'm very tempted by this phone even if it means leaving Apple.
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Below 35%, the phone switches to 720Hz PWM dimming to ensure the display still retains a high-quality image and correct color accuracy.
And that is where sensitive people need more support from the manufacturer. They don't care about high-quality image and color accuracy at all. What they need is an option to disable the PWM completely, no matter how much the image quality degrades. I don't get why the manufacturer goes kind of a long way to implement his "flicker-reduction" just to stop at the most important part: low brightness conditions.
Its a technical problem. The light output of LEDs at low voltages is much more varied than at higher voltages. A bunch of identical LEDs at a high voltage may have a similar brightness, but the lower the voltage goes the more different they will be, till you get the point where some be brighter, others will be dimmer, and some may not light up at all. I believe this applies to OLEDs as well, and most likely MicroLEDs if they become commercialized.
Accommodating this without PWM will lead to higher costs / low production yields. Presumably it is possible though.
They hard-coded the value to whatever 35% translates to. A few years ago, a developer has proven with a Samsung Galaxy smartphone that this is not a technical limitation and he managed to set it to 0%, effectively enabling pure DC dimming for the full brightness range. Sadly, I don't find the link anymore. But I think many of us remember it. Those arbitrary limits are done to hide panel imperfections, but those with eye strain don't care about that and should have an option to enable the full range down to 0%.
KM All these implementations have the objective of saving battery, only. We with sensitive eyes are f*ck*
If it's and Android phone try turning on developer options and disabling HW video rendering That helped a lot for me
Xiaomi low budget series work best for me. Right now I have Xiaomi 13, not as good as previous generation, but completely usable device, no eye strain at all.
I'm moving the majority of my phone usage to a boox palma, yes this requires me to carry an additional device, but it seems to be worth it.
I have tried so many phones after the first device to ever cause me eye strain, blurred vision, headaches and nausea was a Samsung Galaxy S21 5G. The best smart phones by far with no Dithering, PWM and no weird contrast or depth issues are the Redmi Note 8 and Note 10s - perfect screen I could look at for 10 hours with no problems.
This is no one smartphone
Try disabling HW Rendering in Developer options, tht has helped me a lot with some phones
I'm keeping my eye on E-Paper/E-Ink phones. They seem like a step back in terms of image quality, but on paper, it seems like a good choice in general for those suffering from modern displays.