jordan a lot of people having issues were using 10bit (8+FRC) monitors (for example, monitors with any sort of HDR support) that might typically use 8bit by default when connected to a PC — but become forced to 10bit (thus activating the monitor's own FRC) when connected to a Mac.

In those cases with HDR monitors (HDR monitors should be avoided anyway) you need a really old low bandwidth cable to ensure 10bit is never activated.

But with a monitor that is simply true 8bit with no 10bit support at all, that you know works well with some good Windows device, Stillcolor should work perfectly.

      new-jdm yeah that's what I'd make sure is to have no FRC in the monitor. Im really considering a Mac mini just hope there's no os things happening still

        DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs so a true 8bit with a high bandwidth cable should still be fine ? I wouldn't want to use low bandwidth since I would want high refresh rate. Can Macs output 144 or 165hz? I honestly dunno myself 😅

        My brain feels less bothered scrolling when it's high Hz refresh

            jordan yeah actual true 8bit (aka 8bit monitor with no FRC, with no HDR or 10bit support on the monitor at all) should be able to work with a high bandwidth cable & Stillcolor!

              Thank you for the new release!

              By the way guys, I've tried Uniformity2d=false on MBA m2 15' and still not sure about it. It removes vignetting effect and makes white colors like "true white", but makes my eyes harder to focus, especially when I read text. Need more testing for sure.

              What is you experience?

              Need to say, that with just Disable Dithering my MBA M2 15 is the only usable Macbook to date.

              I also noticed that changing any setting related to GPU (especially not default MacOS settings) , such as Reduced Motion, Reduced Transparency, Display Contrast or even enabling/disabling "Scroll & Zoom" settings in trackpad options (smart zoom, rotation, zoom in or out) somehow influence on text clarity and eye fatigue for me. So I am use to my current settings and just afraid to change something 🙂 I didn't face such problems with Windows, as I remember.

                aiaf Awesome. Didn't experiment enough with toggling uniformity2D as I just kept it off, but now I see that it actually makes the screen feel flat. At least with window shadows turned off. I can use my MacBook M1 Max for hours now. Still not perfect, but it doesn't get worse and worse while using it.

                While experimenting with diffing, did you manage to find a ffmpeg solution or similar to actually gets hdr / 10 bit / fullgamut or whatever recording from the screen? The command line args there are obnoxious, and even after googling and experimenting for an hour I still don't know if it can even do it. Just wanted to experiment a bit with an overlay that shows where HDR colors are currently shown. As that can be used to highlight if for example window shadows or other things are shifting things out of the regular sRGB color space. The regular screencapture tool can't do hdr.

                    Sentiny This is on MBP mini-led so not exactly the same, but I usually have to tweak a bit in BetterDisplay.

                    • Use 100% resolution so it matches the native one at 2x for retina. At least until things look stable.
                    • Disable colortable adjustments entirely, and enable the ones that use Metal.
                    • Force color profile sRGB in chrome://flags
                    • Open some webpage with a white background and adjust the color adjustments until text seems to be part of the white background, including the color sliders.

                    For me finding some combo where it seems as flat as possible feels more important than killing off the last flicker. But tbh I don't know any more, as I suddenly feel that my iPhone OLED doesn't strain with reduced white point 100% and 100% green/red color filter that kills off any bright red.

                        async Now Im more and more sure, that everyone should find their stable MacOS settings and stick with it 🙂

                        It's a bliss that we got such a breakthrough like Stillcolor app that fix major dithering problems for most of us.

                            async Interesting. That does sound like a similar noise. It’s a good idea to try an HEIC version of the test image to potentially circumvent the noise at the viewers end. Given they are reporting no noise with HEIC. That said, I’m already encoding the PNG at max quality. And it sounds like I should look more closely at HDR rendering in Metal. If they found Preview can display without the noise, it’s likely a very particular Metal texture backing that is being used by Preview when viewing HEIC’s.

                            I can sample the noise directly off the screen buffer using Pixie. It seems to be some sort of noise added by Metal, not a compression artifact. I didn’t experiment to see if it is a color dither or just random noise. It shouldn’t be a rounding artifact because it effects each sub-pixel independently.

                            This does make me wonder if the M2 Air has control over this additional noise at the Metal level, while the Pro does not. Which could be the ultimate difference between the effectiveness of Stillcolor on the Air vs the Pro. Just a thought.

                              new-jdm It doesn't work in my case. I have true 8bit display and connected with display port, FRC is still used somehow, and If i'm using HDMI I can see bandings on gray color, which means 8bit signal. But still even with 8bit signal on external display i'm having bad times, getting nausea and eye strain and only with Apple M chips.

                                  Sentiny

                                  I think you have something with the Scroll & Zoom. It's subtle, but seems to make text crisper. Thanks.

                                  I also have the display accessibilty settings all set off.

                                  I agree on uniformity2D too.

                                  Thanks to aiaf for the new release.

                                      Rikl I just told about few examples. In my opinion any OS setting which interacts with GPU somehow influence on display rendering. You can try to enable/disable any settings in display accessibility menu or trackpad scroll/zoom area and compare text rendering. You will be surprised. Even “tap to click” option makes a difference 😉

                                      I guess that trackpad zoom settings, such as smart zoom, make OS to do “zoom previews” which needs more GPU utilization, that’s why display rendering is changing. It’s just a theory, but I can feel difference.

                                      You can try to disable smooth scrolling in Safari and will see the same thing (text will be clearer to read).

                                      But if you try to disable 60 fps cap in Safari, you will get opposite result.

                                      Difference is not huge compare to dithering on/off, but it’s there.

                                      For me MacOS is not that stable compare to Windows, if we talk about eyestrain issues.

                                        Sentiny I also noticed that changing any setting related to GPU (especially not default MacOS settings) , such as Reduced Motion, Reduced Transparency, Display Contrast or even enabling/disabling "Scroll & Zoom" settings in trackpad options (smart zoom, rotation, zoom in or out) somehow influence on text clarity and eye fatigue for me.

                                        Had the same feel. I mostly credited it to breaking habitation in the brain. It can also work the other way around where doing some more significant changes forces something to actually do it's job with filtering. For example having reflections or shining a light on the screen makes it better for me, as the brain has no other option than filtering out things.

                                        But, seeing this I'm not sure anymore. I found that certain things can cause software rendering of the cursor, that causes dithering in a rather large area around it. For example using color tables.

                                        I've always felt that tweaking will just make everything glow again, but as I said earlier in the thread it is hard to know if it is neurological or if it is the panel, as it is transient. What if changing things clears some cache or that some already checked value used for dithering adjustments doesn't get updated, or even causes some timing mismatch. In which case it should at least disappear after powering down the machine (and gpu), and giving it a few min to cache, heat up or whatever.

                                        It would be interested if someone could measure before and after some of these changes, or even diff the ioreg. Or just try to induce it and see if recoding works without changing everything back.

                                            dev