@DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs What I don't get is, if stillcolour is enabled and that removes dithering, what is it that's bugging me about the white? I thought dithering was the color managing flicker?

Been playing around with screen settings and better display. Also just downloaded iris tech, seems to be working better for me than night shift and apple settings. HW brightness is up full, and lowered with iris.

axu2

I'm not an apple developer nor a well-connected business person but I do occasionally read this well-regarded blog called Stratechery. The blog author has interviews with the CEOs of these tech giants. It would be amazing if he brought up these issues with someone in a relevant position seeing as he talks about Apple's "strength in design and user experience". Seems like they're neglecting the basics of user experience.

      Ruoma I have issues with white backgrounds on recent MacOS versions also. Its the worst in Safari. Other built in apps are better. Not sure why.

        DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs Apple has remapped “white” to something less than 255-255-255, leaving headroom for HDR values, should they be called for. The operating system is complicit in this trickery, so the Digital Color Meter eyedropper shows “white” as 255, as do screenshots.

        With Catalina, Apple quietly changed what “white” means for millions of Macs, and none of us noticed.

        By the way, another unsolved issue with e.g. the M1 Air is that there is currently no way to disable HDR on the internal display and prevent the sudden shifting in brightness and color profile/tone mapping whenever there's something resembling HDR content on screen.

        In some Intel Macs like the 2018 MacBook Air you could Option-click display preferences to uncheck Use extended dynamic range, but no such option appears on the M1 Air at least in Ventura.

        When I Quick Look an HDR image, the brightness still increases and shows extremely bright HDR areas on that image much brighter than the white of the desktop (in cases where I'm not at maximum hardware backlight). And if I open some apps such as Blender, they very slightly activate HDR mode as well and shift around the entire color profile. With dithering disabled, this is super obvious as if I have a banding test image open at the same time the banding will shift a ton during the HDR transition.

        I've messed with about every possible IOMFB numeric/boolean property that can easily be modified and cannot get internal display HDR to disable.

        Unlike iOS, the "double invert" trick does not work — if you combine Invert Colors with the Option-click "Inverted Framebuffer" option in BetterDisplay, HDR will still be present. (This is different to iOS where in that case if you combine two Invert Colors, Zoom and Classic Invert, HDR can be disabled)

        You can also search the Console app's log for "SkyLight" or "headroom" and see messages relating to the HDR changes taking place.

        It's also really deeply embedded into the color management system as well — so even if you use max brightness (to "prevent" there from being any headroom for HDR) but then apply color profile dimming or even overlay dimming, the HDR image will still "shine through it".

        One way to semi-bypass HDR is to activate full screen "Ctrl-Scroll" accessibility zoom, but you can still notice the hardware backlight behind the LCD changing whenever e.g. the Quick Look window is hidden and shown even if the colors are now "clamped"

        It also points to a flaw of the "quantization" feature of BetterDisplay @waydabber, as even if quantization is set to 16, and I have a gradient displaying 16 shades on screen, there can still be an HDR white showing on screen that is brighter than that which is implying that the video card is not actually being limited to 16 shades. (I understand this may be a limitation of achieving the quantization directly through the video card LUT, as the video card is probably not taking the values given to it exactly as specified. There's also another issue with quantization I noticed where macOS will sometimes display in-between "smoothing" shades that are more precise than the set quantization level, the video card is definitely doing some kind of smoothing out of the LUT and not using it directly.)

        This "fake HDR" is something that is not present in say, Asahi Linux, at all, so it's another piece of the puzzle to investigate in regards to macOS

        @aiaf

            Hello, As you probably know, the MacBook Pro 14" A2442 and A2779 has a problem with the display being somehow paired with the logicboard. If one replaces the display with an original display from another Macbook, backlight artifacts are displayed. I am interested in this thread because it deals with various hidden settings of the t-con board. I'm currently trying to research as much as I can about how this t-con board works and figure out if there isn't a software way to allow replacement of displays on these macbooks without backlight issues. It seems to me that the problem with the calibration could somehow be related to the uniformity correction property, because the replaced displays have artifacts in the upper part (they are the most pronounced), but the backlight is also weaker around the edges of the display. Can anyone guide me where to direct this research? Thank you

              Andrejmm1234 If you have a 14" MBP with a replaced display with you, if you disable the uniformity2D setting in either Stillcolor or BetterDisplay Image Adjustments does it affect the replaced display? I'm curious

                  DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs That is quite interesting. When I turn the uniformity correction feature on and off in better display or Stillcolor, nothing happens - the display looks exactly the same with it being turned on or off.

                    axu2 i was last year, asked a couple teams, they never heard about our problems. I shared with them our community. Nothing changed as you can see..

                      Apologies for not regularly following up with this thread.

                      I appreciate all the investigations re. the various properties. Is IOMFBContrastEnhancerStrength verifiably problematic re. eyestrain? Any before/after pictures or videos? What does it do exactly?

                      I still firmly believe that the community should spend its time and effort on reverse engineering the TCON's firmware, understanding it, or at least doing some comparative analysis between the various versions. In particular, comparing the payloads/configs of the M1/3 Air TCON against an M1/3 MBP, for a start.

                      @DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs re. Asahi Linux, IIRC, they do not expose any methods from user space to change these properties. They sort of go with some default values and rely on mostly on default driver behavior. Maybe you can raise it up as in issue their Github to explicitly disableenableDither and see how that goes.

                        Andrejmm1234 I believe this is a TCON firmware issue, upon replacing the display, the TCON must be accordingly updated by Apple to drive the display correctly. We've uncovered a few frameworks and code that deal with updating TCON firmware.

                            Applesexual this should never happen unless you restart your Mac. What macOS version are you running?

                              aiaf Is there any way how to update tcon board right now or any sign that it could be done without Apple software? Because Apple refuses to pair displays that were not purchased through Apple.

                                aiaf

                                IOMFBContrastEnhancerStrength controls the level of system gamma enhancement based on information from the ambient light sensor.

                                If you open the "Color LCD" profile in ColorSync utility, you'll see that the "Apple display native information" is gamma 2.2 (which is to be expected -- the panels are gamma 2.2 native), but if you open the "Parametric tone response curve", you'll see that ColorSync uses gamma 2.4. What the system then does is try to push the gamma closer to 2.2 in a bright room, while remaining at 2.4 in a dark room. The rationale behind this is complicated; there's a display tech consultant with a PhD named Charles Poynton who is the best source I've found for trying to explain exactly why.

                                Turning off auto brightness is supposed to reset IOMFBContrastEnhancerStrength to zero and keep it there, but apparently sometimes something goes wonky. Note that IOMFBContrastEnhancerStrength is an inverse value, despite the name, so 0 means highest contrast, and larger values meaning less contrast.

                                  deepflame is that dell ccfl monitor better than that eizo one you mentioned on a post years ago?

                                      jordan Hi Jordan, atm I use a Dell U2711 with CCFL backlight. This is the best I have currently.

                                      But I use it at 1920x1080 resolution and sRGB color preset ( think this disables the FRC the screen has ).

                                      AND I use it on Windows with an RTX 4060. Here I can disable dithering with an app called ColorControl . As a browser I use Edge with hardware acceleration disabled. When I need other machines like Linux or Mac I remote login with NoMachine.

                                      Hope this helps.

                                          async

                                          Use Accessibility Zoom on iOS with "Invert Colors" filter, Full Screen, and 1x zoom — aka not zooming in at all, but just activating the invert colors functionality within the zoom feature

                                          Then, enable the "actual" invert colors (the Classic Invert accessibility setting)

                                          These two invert colors will now be active at the same time and "cancel each other out", but instead of this simply looking like a normal non-inverted screen, suddenly some very interesting differences occur

                                          • All P3 color will be disabled, for example in the color picker within the iOS screenshot markup tool all of the P3-exclusive colors will be entirely clamped and appear as the same color
                                          • HDR will be disabled
                                          • Reduce white point now will have the opposite behavior (it will now increase contrast and black levels instead of reduce them)
                                          • The color of red will change in an really odd way — on P3 devices it will become very washed out (and more relaxing, IMO), and on sRGB devices like the iPad 6 it will become more oversaturated

                                          It also affects screen comfort, and has a totally different result in terms of how it affects every device I've tried it on. Not a "fix for dithering" etc. by any means but it's actually improved some of my devices in a noticeable way

                                          • iPhone 14 Pro iOS 16.4: image becomes much more stable, not entirely stable but certain screens now look very still that didn't before. obviously PWM is still an issue. double invert actually made this device tolerable for me even though my eyes still get super strained if i use it too long indoors
                                          • iPhone SE 2 iOS 17.2: does not really change much, very slightly better and it does help dim down the super unnatural oversaturated colors my SE has, but i still hate this screen. this screen is even worse than OLED IMO (on the other hand, iPhone 7 is fine to me)
                                          • iPad Pro 2018 iOS 17.2: significantly improves screen comfort, night and day difference

                                          double invert works all the way back to iOS 8, i've noticed interesting effects on older devices too

                                              DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs Thank you. That's interesting for sure. Finally something that feels like messing with color profiles. Seems somewhat better. Too bad nobody figured out a jailbreak yet so it is possible to make some bigger tweaks

                                                  deepflame hey thanks for that info. I think I'll try to source one of those monitors to try. What motherboard are you using?

                                                      dev