Try reducing saturation

ensete

Back when YouTube changed their video renderer making it trigger my symptoms, I wrote a desktop app to play YouTube videos through PotPlayer so I could mess with the video controls and try and find a pain free display setup

All it took was dropping the Saturation 50% (from 50%to 25%) and all YouTube videos became pain free. I've been watching daily for months with zero problems.

So whatever setup you have try dropping the saturation by 1/2 and see if it helps. I strongly believe that flicker/PWM/dithering has nothing to do with many of our issues and the problem is actually color temperature and rendering.

JonnyT

ensete is there an app on iPhones to try this or MacBook?

Liberator005

ensete

I think everything contributes to issues. All types of flickering, but also oversaturation and different types of rendering.
I've experienced so many different combinations of hardware/software and something that I have noticed is how inconsistent the "results are".
After 3 years on this, I can't say that I know for sure more than at the beginning, which is crazy.
A same motherboard, same hardware, same software and you can have different experiences.
Sometimes, in my laptop even unplugging and replugging the screen can trigger a different visual experience. And I have to replug it many times and even reinstalling windows to get it back to "normal".
Even websites have different rendering now.
I also noticed that a windows update can change the rendering but then it doesn't get back to how it was even if you reinstall windows. Which means a windows update can trigger something directly in your hardware (gpus i suppose) and it doesn't get back by itself...
I've given up trying to figure out everything cause it's vain. There are too many parameters, image rendering is getting more and more uselessly complex.

I just try to find something that works and stick with it.

DannyD2

JonnyT Yes! iOS 17 finally allowed global screen desaturation. Go to Accessibility -> Display & Text Size -> Color Filters -> Grayscale, then pull on the Intensity slider to desaturate the screen. I find this enormously helpful.

Not sure if this feature has been made available in macOS Sonoma yet.

DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs

DannyD2 yep i only found out about this yesterday… changed to grayscale and then slid all the way to left, makes my SE 2020 (17.2.1) look a lot better honestly

still way less good though than iPhone 7 (15.7.1) with its completely default settings and bright colors though… i have no idea what they changed between the 7 and SE given that they both have P3 and the same resolution, but i still like the 7 so much better — the saturated colors are totally fine on the 7 but annoy me on the SE

bqqq3rcv

What a great idea! Definitely worth trying. I recently stumbled across this post. The author claims that certain colours decrease sensitivity towards PWM with specific screens ("Higher PWM hertz with lower modulation depth %"). See here https://www.reddit.com/r/PWM_Sensitive/comments/13eck7y/for_decrease_of_sensitivity_towards_pwm_try_the/?rdt=62607 .