I disabled dithering on Apple silicon + Introducing Stillcolor macOS M1/M2/M3

asus389

I tried as listed as "10 bit" Eizo ColorEdge CS2740 with some PCs. Don't have the display anymore. Hope someone with a similar or better panel can test again with Stillcolor. Is this "true 10 bit" (it costs more than some cars): https://www.eizoglobal.com/products/coloredge/cg3146/index.html#tab02

NewDwarf They do I can clearly see and feel moving static patterns / dithering on my iPhone SE 2 (LCD) screen (it has iOS 17.2.1) and gradients also look more smooth than they "should" on my 14 Pro with iOS 16 too.

Not sure about the OLED iPhones (since it has backlight precision per pixel, it might be using that instead to achieve greater color depth i.e. different PWM frequency per pixel), but for the LCD, it's so obviously using temporal dithering to my eyes. I have an iPhone 6 and iPhone 7 with the same resolution and size screen that feel so much more comfortable than the SE does.

However I have some older devices that don't dither or dither less, like an iPad 6 with an earlier version of iOS 15 that shows way more banding on gradients, shadows, and transparency effects.

deepflame I'd recommend the M2 Air or M3 Air instead. The M3 Pros and other Pros with XDR displays have a lot more quirks with their screen (for example, they have 10,000 individually controlled backlights behind the screen that all basically use different PWM frequencies per zone to dim at independent amounts) that we don't know everything about or how to solve yet.

I've already discovered two additional properties unique to the Pros that are needed in addition to disabling dithering to further improve the screen output, there are a lot of extra things the Pro displays do that are currently unknown.

Meanwhile, M2 Airs have a simple, traditional edge-lit LCD for the most part with a PWM-free backlight, and Stillcolor can resolve a very significant amount of issues with their display output.

photon78s yikessss lol. All that color changing stuff sounds like a mess. Can we just get basic displays without all this wacky tech! haha. Wow even if we don't perceive flicker it still affects us, definitely angering when I see people post stuff like that. Most people who "aren't affected" just haven't connected it to their screens I'm sure

jordan No idea, the old Plus phones use scaling FYI so they're not pixel accurate, it's taking a 2K image but then downscaling it down to a 1080p panel like how Macs do when they're not on @2x resolution. If you're sensitive to that I'd recommend a regular 7 instead.

All I know is that my regular 7 with an earlier version of iOS 15 is very comfortable compared to my SE 2. It does have a P3 color display, but it doesn't seem to affect me — even though it still does display brighter reds than sRGB, it doesn't have the extremely oversaturated reds that my SE 2 has.

The only reason I don't use my 7 really is due to 60% battery health and a broken "loose" charging port, meaning I can't use it while it's charging and mine only lasts for 1 hour. But you can definitely find a 7 in way better condition than mine is, lol.

I've heard some people here talk about iPhone 7 suddenly becoming unusable with iOS 15.7 or 15.8, so look for one on an earlier version.

IIRC I remember iPhone screens starting to feel "weird" (way before I learned what temporal dithering was) when the iPhone 8 launched, I knew a friend with an iPhone 8 and even on its original version I thought the screen looked "weirdly smoothed out" or "overly glowing and shiny" to me. So iPhone 7 is probably the last "good" iPhone LCD, at least concerning how the software is choosing to render to it.

JTL

If what I read is correct, color accuracy, power consumption, reliability, and probably more would suffer. So much marketing and competition with everything else as we all know is focused towards colors and more "accurate" colors and to satisfy that greed of making the screen look like "reality". I echo Jordan's view. I just want a basic usable display!

photon78s Yep, this is where my username comes from, I care about displays that allow me to work and be productive. I really wish all digital displays in laptops, phones etc. would also be benchmarked by how well they display text and user interface elements, not just how realistic they display colors, photos, games, and videos.

Not every display should be built and benchmarked in the same way that a TV is. I might care about those things when buying a TV, but when I'm looking for a monitor, laptop, or even a phone, I'm looking first and foremost for something that can display documents, emails, and text correctly, and does not move when the screen is supposed to be still. And most modern displays and operating systems totally fail at that.

I would say the biggest group of people modern displays impact is actually college students. I've talked about before how this is a very real problem for Gen Z too, not just older people.

I was literally failing classes when all I had was an M1 Max XDR MacBook Pro and iPhone 12 at default settings. I couldn't study for more than an hour without feeling like I wanted to fall asleep.

The moment I stopped using those devices and switched to better displays (such as an ancient 2012 Windows laptop, and reading PDFs on my old iPad mini 2), I became so much more successful in school and was able to read textbooks on my devices again without feeling like I had, like, a severe reading disability. But for the most part, all of that is tied directly to which screens I use.

In addition to this, more recently, I've felt like my cognitive ability has noticeably increased even more by swapping out the flashing 120hz LEDs I lived under for years with just a few Waveform bulbs — and also choosing to study outside when I can, instead of in campus buildings filled with probably hundreds of different types of cheap LEDs & flourescents all flashing at different rates.

It's so surprising how many of my reading and processing issues either become much more tolerable, or even literally vanish, the moment I stop looking at devices with temporal dithering, PWM, or HDR capabilities.