DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs I am glad I read this before purchasing the M2 TB Pro! Your symptoms were exactly what I felt when I purchased it last year, so I was hesitant but willing to try again. I changed course and ordered a M1 Air instead based on your feedback. Fingers crossed I get the same results. Completely lost about the metal color adjustments, but hoping you guys can guide me once I receive it lol.

    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.

      DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs In BetterDisplay using Metal, when I minimize a window then bring it back, the screen goes bright then applies an overlay over it to adjust the screen to the settings I made. Does this happen to you. I am not using any virtual screen.

      Also I found that in BetterDisplay setup - Reset colors on neutral settings for HDR capable screens OFF - makes things smoother for me (no Metal).

        Rikl In BetterDisplay using Metal, when I minimize a window then bring it back, the screen goes bright then applies an overlay over it

        this doesn't happen for me on m1air, maybe because I'm on Ventura 13.6.6.

        are you using Stage Manager? when Stage Manager is enabled, a totally different animation engine for window transitions is used. if you aren't though, I don't know why lol

        the only time it goes it bright is when using certain apps in fullscreen (because the overlay window can't appear over it, I guess) or while using Mission Control/Exposé

        in my case I only have like a literal -1% Metal color adjustment for the sole purpose of activating the overlay and not really changing anything, which still seems to improve the screen for me LOL might be placebo but hey, if I feel better, I feel better.

        (however, on M2 TB Pro, it went bright in a LOT more places, because that laptop seems to have an "enhanced" implementation of fake HDR/EDR)

        • Rikl replied to this.

          @DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs Sorry if you already mentioned this, but do you use some sort of software to turn off the touchbar on the M2 13 inch Macbook Pro? I found on the intel ones the touchbar and the keyboard backlight flicker pretty bad. My intel 13 inch MBP has function keys, but I have the keyboard light turned off and its an incremental improvement in eye comfort.

            I should mention that I'm using BetterDisplay with -30% contrast on the better panel MBP TB. I also think blacks are too deep and the whites pop without it and I don't mine not using the Metal and HDR workaround.

              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!)

              Lauda89 interference from other things can affect cable bandwidth. Try another cable or high quality hdmi. You could also have different setting from the initial negotiation stored on one of the usb-c ports on case you switched port

              photon78s Either solution works for me. Contrast and Gain in Betterdisplay are key!

              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)

                  async Quick horizontal gaze. I swear I can feel some refocus or annoyance happening while passing over. Almost like it gets pulled in.

                  Yep this happened to me all the time while using 14" mini-LED MBP. I almost suspect that it's my eyes getting confused by the mini-LED backlight zones behind the display which is [literally] at a different depth.

                  The thing about mini-LED is that it's totally arbitrary the way the screen is going to display a color at any given point. If it's a large block of gray, it might use pure white on the LCD layer but then "dim" it with darker mini-LED dimming zone levels in the center, but then the very edges of it will be gray on the LCD layer but with much brighter mini-LED zones. Maybe even in some cases it will choose to display a large zone of gray entirely with gray on the LCD layer instead of "dimmed" white! Who knows!

                  And add to this that each mini-LED zone is using a slightly different PWM level per each zone depending on the zone's unique brightness level, meaning the screen is flickering at different, arbitrary frequencies in every small square area, and also doing (most likely) TCON-level FRC to emulate 10-bit at the same time as all of that.

                  With this mini-LED tech, "you're supposed to" be able to process these "similar looking" colors that are created in entirely different ways with different mixtures of dimming zone brightness, LCD layer RGB levels, and (literally) slightly different 3D depths as "the same color". That doesn't work for us and it's probably one the reasons why the very edges of things feel so "spiky" and "magnetic" to our eyes on the 14" mini-LED, almost feeling like "barriers" that take so much effort to move my eyes past them.

                  FYI, even though this happened to me all the time moving my eyes across my 14"…

                  Even on m2air, it happens SO much less, especially moving my eyes left was much easier.

                  On m1air, it's even better, and I can move across the screen from side to side with generally minimal effort.

                  By the way, I sold my 14", so I don't have a mini-LED Mac anymore.

                  But switching to m1air basically solved so much of this. It's a problem with mini-LED for us IMO.

                  Remember, this is what's going on behind your mini-LED.

                  Really the only thing that made my mini-LED marginally usable, even after Stillcolor and uniformity2D, was adding a matte screen protector over it which made it a lot flatter. But that was only enough to make me feel like "hey, at least I can finally make music and edit videos on here now", but not enough for me to actually want to read anything on it, especially anything studying-related is still a big NO on mini-LED for me.

                  Meanwhile on m1air with Stillcolor I am typing so fast right now lol VERY good experience so far. Night and day compared to mini-LED.

                  Something m1air does right (that not even Intel Macs or the M2 TB Pro do for me!) is that focusing on the m1air literally does NOT have that weird "bounce" right after I focus my eyes.

                  Like my eyes don't focus a "second time" like they do on mini-LED/OLED and bad LCDs too. On m1air, the focus just seamlessly completes and that's it, even if I'm super close up to the screen.

                  That was actually what made me choose m1air in the end instead of M2 TB Pro, despite the m1air's PWM. Very few screens have such a seamless ability to focus to me "without any weird things happening in the few seconds after I focus". Even e-ink still kinda has that problem for me! But the m1air doesn't 👀👀

                  Final verdict: VERY satisfied with m1air. Good enough for me to keep it. Recommended to try.

                  Stillcolor is installed.

                  I also enabled a VERY slight Metal color adjustments gain layer (just for the sake of activating the layer, not to actually change colors) and change overdriveCompCutoff to 0 through BetterDisplayCLI after each reboot — not sure if these last two actually change anything, but IMO it seems to improve it further. If it works, it works.

                  Feels generally like a good Intel, nothing feels too saturated or too bright. Amazing antireflective coating, contrast level and black point is mild in a good way, nothing ever looks "too contrasty", turning down hardware backlight actually makes the screen look dimmer instead of the "somehow both 'still too bright' and darker at the same time feeling" that I would get from bad screens.

                  m1air is the only Apple Silicon laptop out of all of them where colors truly feel "relaxing like Intel" and "not too vivid" to me. (Even M2 TB Pro has the "oversaturated feel", but m1air does not.)

                  When focusing the screen, the "extra 'bouncing' re-focus I get immediately after focusing on bad screens" doesn't happen here at ALL. Essentially every refocus so far has been just a single seamless move, nothing weird happens afterward. The m1air (or at least my m1air's panel) is worth it even just for this benefit alone.

                  There's only a few other usable screens I know that easily and "seamlessly" focus for me like this (iPhone 4 iOS 7.1.2, 2013 Nexus 7 Android 6, iPhone 7 iOS 15.7.1) which is a VERY good sign. Even some other usable screens (like iPhone 5 on iOS 6.1.3) and even E-ink! still have the "focus bouncing back and forth after I try to focus" issue for me — but m1air does NOT!!

                  Main thing I had to get used to is realizing that I could finally relax my eyes so much more, because the screen still focuses properly even if my eyes are half closed. Bad screens can't even focus in that state for me! Once I started letting my eyes relax (yet still able to focus), strain decreased by a significant amount.

                  Also, I had to learn that on m1air, I no longer have to refocus my eyes anymore after I pinch-to-zoom into something. On bad screens zooming in feels like it totally changes the plane of focus, but on here I can keep my gaze "entirely frozen" while zooming and the zoomed-in text/image will already be clear with no effort.

                  There are also things m1air does noticeably better than Intel, like black text on white backgrounds which has veryyyyy little glow and reading feels very smooth to my eyes while scanning across from left to right. Vertically repeating UI elements and text on m1air also feel very "lined up" and even (instead of "off-balance").

                  Despite that it's still a glossy screen, there is very little glare. Totally different compared to m2/m3air and the Touch Bar Pros which are extremely reflective in comparison (and especially the case when you get a bad panel on those). On m1air, I pretty much do not notice the reflection of my face on the screen during use.

                  The m1air's slight "PWM brightness dips" on every frame doesn't seem to bother me at all. This is probably because this "PWM" has very low flicker depth, it is NOT "strobe-like"!

                  Only possible symptoms are like very slight tension and dryness in eyes. And I mean REALLY slight. The "level of strain" never seems to go above "gentle enough to be easy to ignore" while using this laptop, even after using it for hours. Surprisingly similar feeling and "strain levels" between using m1air and using my perfectly usable 2012 Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 13.

                  (In contrast to the bad "FMX" panel M2 TB Pro, which kept getting worse and worse in strain the longer I used it. That M2 TB panel felt like it was "forcefully pulling my eyes open" no matter what I did…)

                  I do NOT get any nausea or "seasickness" while (and after) using m1air at all!

                  I may still prefer my 2012 Lenovo laptop's "non-retina" 1600x900 IPS in a few cases but these two are VERY close in comfort for most use cases including reading, note-taking, and studying. It's really incredible getting such a good experience out of a totally modern device.

                  Also, one problem that I had mistakenly suspected was "coming from the screen" was actually an ergonomic issue — sometimes I'd get tired or really tense while typing. This was actually only coming from how low the keyboard is since the laptop is so thin.

                  Then I bought and put on a clear hard shell case (which raises up the keyboard quite a bit, and my case also seems to "counteract" the wedge shape making the keyboard angled more flat), and now the keyboard feels PERFECT and I don't feel tense while typing any longer! The thickness and weight added by the hard shell case make it feel comfortable to type in MANY more locations and postures. IMO putting on a shell is essential for typing comfort!

                  I am on Ventura 13.6.6 with 1280x800 @2x Retina resolution and Color LCD profile!

                  Refurbished M1 Air (Silver, 16GB, 2TB, 8CPU, 8GPU)

                  Panel ID (ioreg -lw0 | grep -e "panel-serial-number" -e coverglass):

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

                    DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs I did notice that Metal uses 5-6% cpu constantly on my M1MBA. I'm going without it for now, still setting gain in BetterDisplay. It doesn't seem to make much difference.

                    BTW. The M1MBA is as usable as any current laptop screen now. Not perfect. But as long as companies use marketing features like a bazillion colors and thousands of nits, there will always be compromise.

                      DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs Macbook air M1 definitely did not work for me so I have sold it quite a few months ago. Then after macbook break, I bought Macbook air m2 all excited. Initially was ok'ish (new product excitement I guess), although I could clearly see in a mirror anomalies with my healthy eyes soon after: 1) Getting more red lines or blood lines whatever those are called, and eyes became much more popped out. Now Air M2 is on classifieds waiting for new victim 🙂 Or maybe some will enjoy it.

                        Donux m1air was definitely NOT good before Stillcolor. When you tried it a few months ago, Stillcolor hadn't been released yet. Stillcolor is what has finally made it good

                          Rikl It doesn't seem to make much difference.

                          Funnily enough, I actually turned off Metal adjustments on my m1air recently as I was starting to see a little bit of flicker/static (with my own eyes) on gray colors when in a pitch black room. Quitting BetterDisplay / turning off the color adjustment seemed to stop this or noticeably reduce it… I think?

                          It was veryyyyy slight though so not sure if I was actually seeing anything coming from the screen itself, or if I was just noticing the PWM for some reason, or just the non-screen-related static I usually see in dark rooms? But I feel pretty good without the adjustments at all though, possibly better?

                          The Metal adjustments seemed to help on M2 TB Pro, but not sure if they are useful at all on m1air.

                            dev