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?

                                  jordan before you do, let me tell you that I still have issues with it from time to time. At the moment I do not use the sRGB setting but the gaming mode. Seems to be better for now. However it is better than the other CCFL screens I used before.
                                  I want to try the Dell 3008wfp. That has 8 bit and no FRC.
                                  But first I will wait for the MSI MPG 321URXDE 240hz QD-OLED.

                                  I cannot stand LED backlighting. It gives me throbbing pain. So I resort to CCFL screens for now. But I tend to get dizzy a bit ( at least better than the eye strain ).

                                  Motherboard is an old Asus prime b250m-c.

                                      async Finally something that feels like messing with color profiles. Seems somewhat better.

                                      Yep, seems like it generally improves OLED iPhones, mostly because it disables HDR which is usually always-on on OLED iPhones even in the system UI (for example, Control Center volume sliders and the clock on iOS16+ lockscreen both use "brighter than white" shades of white, and double inverting is able to stop this)

                                      Also, it finally lets me fix the super bright HDR white used in the screenshot flash that always feels like it's blinding me if I take a screenshot in a dark room. BTW, "Reduce Transparency" also disables the HDR white in specifically the screenshot flash (but not anywhere else). But with double invert I can keep transparent backgrounds on if I want while still disabling HDR here and in other places too.

                                      It still seems like the one device it had the most noticeable and significant effect on is the 2018 iPad Pro. I was actually super shocked when I first tried it (I discovered the technique while messing around with the settings on that device) because on specifically the 2018 iPad Pro it seems to stop the "false 3D" effect in tons of places. Also, very wide or very long elements in the UI, like the search bar in Google Drive in landscape mode, become a lot easier to see all at once instead of only being able to focus in on a small segment of it. This was on iOS 17.1 I think.

                                      Unfortunately on newer LCD devices like SE 2020 it doesn't have the same effects, SE 2020 has one of the worst "false 3D" effects I've seen on an iPhone even on stuff like the home screen icons against the wallpaper, and double invert doesn't change it. I've been only been able to get as many changes as that on the 2018 iPad Pro.

                                          deepflame on that u2711 make sure it's set to 8bit otherwise 10 will use frc. another one I was considering is the dell u3011 ccfl monitor.

                                          That rtx 4060 could be causing issues too, some newer gpus dither regardless of native color depth.

                                            Just got an M1 MBA, unfortunately I still experience eyestrain with Stillcolor enabled. Trying to change other settings now, see below.

                                            And also ordered a M2 MBP 13“. Lets see which panel…

                                            @DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs

                                            Can you perhaps post a list of bullet points for all the modifications you made for less eye strain on your M1 MBA/M2 13 MacBook Pro?

                                            This thread is getting kinda long…

                                            • Disable dithering with Stillcolor
                                            • Disable uniformity with Stillcolor
                                            • Betterdisplay: Stream Display with integer scaling (perhaps post a screenshot of the exact steps you took?)
                                            • Disable fontsmoothing
                                            • Disable truetone and nightshift
                                            • Standard colorprofile (?)
                                            • Keep the brightness above ~ 70% with BetterDisplay to avoid the high frequency PWM flicker?
                                            • Adjust whitepoint?

                                            Do we all agree that TCON issues affect also external monitor? - As I am always switch back to windows, because macbook with external monitor still creates very big eye tension. It may be lower than laptop panel, but it is unsustainable. Only windows with Intel UHD 620 GPU is tolerable and allow work unlimited amount of time. I really think panel has nothing to do with most issues people are experiencing, even PWM is like not a big deal for some anymore in comparison to current macbook situation.

                                              Donux Only windows with Intel UHD 620 GPU is tolerable and allow work unlimited amount of time. I really think panel has nothing to do with most issues people are experiencing,

                                              Does this mean that you think the internal LCD display on laptops with UHD 620 graphics is comfortable? I'm thinking of trying a ThinkPad T480 (FHD) which has UHD 620 (I care way more about internal display comfort than monitors as I like not being tethered to one desk)

                                                  DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs I had a ThinkPad T480 a few years ago. This was before my eye strain started, but I remember the screen looked comfortable. I thought 14 inches at 1080p was a weird resolution, between being too fine for 1x resolution but too coarse for 2x high-DPI, but on Windows at least there is decent fractional scaling support.

                                                  My main complaint with that machine was actually with the keyboard. While it felt amazing, the rollover (number of keys you could press simultaneously) was quite low, so it would beep at me if I typed too fast. I don’t know whether this was ever resolved by a firmware update, if even possible.

                                                      dev