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

Returned my second M2 Touch Bar Pro (with the uniform but really uncomfortable panel, panel ID starts with FMX)

M2 TB Pros that have 00000000 in the panel ID are much more comfortable than the FMX ones. If you don't see the zeroes in a M2 TB Pro's panel ID then exchange as you probably got a bad panel. (specific to M2 Touch Bar Pro, not relevant for other laptops)

I am keeping the m1air, good enough for me

Here is my M1 Air's panel ID:

FP1223202CVP3WVBD+5AQK240320A9JA+PROD+Y218621852194+2122321L22322122322B223220+K10720181K11620413+5425A2205KT30T00TTUYYJY5A41424483+S23D688Z79S23D688Z79S23D688Z79S23D688Z

^ pretty uniform colors, awesome antireflective coating, no noticeable backlight bleed, no "glowing" black text(!), slightly washed out reds (this is good!), no heavy color tint but very slightly greenish (which I actually like TBH), every other row of pixels alternates between slightly brighter and darker (which was not true for the TB Pro, but lines up with older Intel Airs, not sure what causes this though. Pixel inversion related? Not sure whether seeing these "scanlines" is a good or bad thing)

m1air has flicker on dark gray on camera — which M2 TB Pro doesn't — but some other laptops I find completely usable have this issue too, so it doesn't seem to affect me! (which is surprising because many other forms of flicker affect me much more)

interesting fact about my m1air:

it's the only Apple Silicon laptop out of every single one I've tried where the Apple logo on bootup looks totally "normal", not too bright, not "glowing", not shimmering, no "halo" around it. it's just flat

it even looks better than how the bootup logo looks on Intel Macs to me

DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs

waydabber

I have installed the last version of better display 2.3.1 (pro version) but when I execute the command I get failed as return:

Am I doing something wrong? Sorry guys I am really noob with macos

Lauda89 was ok for 3 months then one day started to give me the usual migraine problem but I don't know why!

is Stillcolor still running? it needs to be constantly running in the background for it to work, sometimes it can report the wrong setting because macOS changed dithering back to on or something, so maybe toggle disable dithering twice to see if that resets it back into place

if that doesn't work though, I have no idea why especially as you are still on the same macOS with the same monitor and cable. anything else changed in your workspace recently like new lightbulbs?

also, given that you have an OLED monitor, who knows what it itself could be doing. maybe it has some sort of burn in prevention that adds flicker or changes the way the pixels are driven over time? (i'm only familiar with LCDs and personally wouldn't buy an OLED monitor myself)

also, the overdrive compensation thing won't affect external monitors at all, it is only for the internal display. and it only seems to do something on m1air (after changing it and then toggling sleep mode, I swear that the screen contrast reduces and lower brightness settings feel more properly dim on the internal display)

bpo19 Your symptoms were exactly what I felt when I purchased it last year

seems like you probably ended up with one of the "starts with FMX" panels on your M2 TB Pro too last year, lol

The 00000000 panels on M2 TB Pro are better and don't cause the same symptoms, but yeah m1air (at least my panel) is wayyyyy better in terms of more "relaxing" contrast, colors, and less glare as long as the "dips in brightness on every frame" don't affect you.

so if you're not extremely PWM sensitive, m1air with Stillcolor is probably a better choice

if m1air doesn't work for you however, it's still worth it to try an M2 TB Pro (but only ones with an 00000000 panel)

an example to compare to: I can "tolerate" my OLED iPhone 14 Pro indoors and definitely use it for basic phone tasks and reading articles, but after looking away from it everything kind of feels "washed out" and any "real" work like writing emails or note taking immediately makes me feel dizzy and I don't want to do it on the OLED. however, OLED phones are noticeably more usable for me outdoors in bright sunlight. (for some reason, my current 14 Pro is way better than my previous iPhone 12 which looked blurry, I hated looking at even outdoors, and really seemed to mess with my color vision. my 14 Pro at least actually looks "sharp and colorful" but is still pretty rough on me.)

in addition, watching a PWM TV for about 30 minutes makes my eyes feel very overworked. and PWM lightbulbs cause me really bad symptoms, I start to feel VERY tired being in rooms lit by high flicker depth LEDs for too long.

finally, temporal dithering REALLY messes with me, I've pretty much validated that it's the main source of my reading challenges because my level of comprehension and reading speed IMMEDIATELY goes up SO MUCH on any device I can successfully disable it on. I have many problems even with the more primitive FRC on old CCFL TN monitors.

given I'm not feeling my usual (and typically very obvious) dithering symptoms on the m1air, Stillcolor works!!

however, given all that, it still seems like the weird "60hz very mild flicker depth PWM on dark grays" on the m1air (and on one of my usable Windows laptops too) doesn't really bother me much at all!

I'm having a really good time with my m1air so far, one thing that's awesome about it (with Stillcolor) is that repeating vertical lines of the same text or UI (checkboxes/buttons) seem to appear "perfectly lined up", it looks like all of them are in focus at once instead of "some randomly and inconsistently being in focus to me and others not".

also, black text on white backgrounds looks great and doesn't look like it's glowing much at all! this is one of the most important things for a screen to nail and the m1air does it exceptionally well

I'm actually running the m1air at low backlight (5-6 squares), I actually find adjusting the real backlight much more relaxing than "100% backlight + screen dimmer" surprisingly. Some other laptops I have to run at 100% backlight all the time to be comfortable but not the case for the m1air, "true" low backlight feels good.

one thing to keep in mind when adjusting to the screen is that at first, my eyes were opening really wide "by default" because I was used to needing to do that on "bad screens" to even be able to focus, lol. of course this was making my eyes work more than they actually "needed" to, which I finally realized after a few days of using it.

once I relaxed more and allowed my eyes to only be like, half open, I realized I could still actually focus on text on the m1air perfectly even when my eyes aren't fully open, which I usually can't do at ALL on bad screens! low backlight level is also what helped my eyes get used to this "new way" of focusing on the screen with less effort.

asus389

yes touch bar OLED strip flickers on the M1/M2 MBP models with touch bar too, same as Intel

reposting again:

DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs there's multiple ways to approach [turning off the Touch Bar]…

[Method A] easiest: set touch bar to Quick Actions + turn off Control Strip on keyboard preferences to entirely black it out. then set "hold Fn" behavior to Show Expanded Control Strip. you can then hold Fn to control volume and brightness (but will lose access to the "real" F1-F12 keys)

[Method B] if you want to toggle between black and shortcut keys, but ALSO want to maintain access to real F1-F12 keys when needed: Hide My Bar app (trial, then paid)

[Method C] if you want a completely black touch bar but still want access to shortcut keys at ALL times: build a custom setup with the MTMR app (free) or BetterTouchTool (40 day trial, then paid) with black-colored "invisible" buttons that control volume and brightness (this is what i did!)

DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs just dropping this here as you have really similar symptoms and seem able to detect whatever small thing that happens in your body as well.

Try this: look smoothly and rapidly from one side of the metal case like above the keyboard to the other end and feel your eyes, now do the same from the edge to the edge of the screen in the same tempo, while trying to simply follow the screen without refocusing. Just. Quick horizontal gaze. I swear I can feel some refocus or annoyance happening while passing over. Almost like it gets pulled in. It was really prominent while I experimented, and worked like a 1 sec test to see if some change was better while experimenting. You can compare the feeling to a black screen as well, and see what is needed before it starts to trigger.

Of all the stupid things I found that works to make my eyes understand at what depth the monitor is at turning off the notch also helps.

photon78s contrast is a color tables adjustment. You should try disabling the color tables entirely in the settings. if you still need brighter blacks you can try the display calibrator I wrote about in this thread. do note that while using it that it bases the adjustments off the currently used color profile

Does anyone know if color profiles (icc) are applied before or after OS dithering and other adjustments? Seems almost like many of them are applied after. I tried looking into the specs for creating custom profiles, but it was fairly advanced. However I think it would be possible to create a profile that shows dithering and other issues, for example by having really granular color changes on the gamma curve.

Attaching some random color profiles unpacked if someone wants to see what the format looks like. They can be widely different. Might even be possible to modulate 8-bit with it. There is a color profile on mac called WebSafeColors, but I couldn't make it show for the display, as you probably need to modify it a bit and find a way to pack back to icc.

https://swiftsend.io/d/9bcl3q3qs9

edit: semi relevant
ledoge/novideo_srgb: Calibrate monitors to sRGB or other color spaces on NVIDIA GPUs, based on EDID data or ICC profiles (github.com)
dantmnf/AMDColorTweaks: Calibrate monitors to sRGB or other color spaces on AMD GPUs, based on raw data or ICC profiles (github.com)