One important trick to use MacBook Pro comfortably for hours

Kelviz

Just discovered an easy trick to significantly help improve the viewing experience of a MacBook:

Go to System Settings / Displays. In Preset, choose Internet & Web (sRGB).

I have a hypothesis on why this works. MacBook uses 8 bit panel + frc to achieve 10-bit color depth, and this introduces flickering. By choosing sRGB, we basically use the panel as an 8-bit panel, and eliminated flickering.

This is just a personal experience, and it may not generalize well.

Still worth sharing, and hope that it can help some of you guys.

Donux

Kelviz Yes, this approach is well know to many of us. For me personally sRGB is still too much of a flicker, but it is also much lower then full Color LCD which is P3 adjusted for specific display. With sRGB I would get popped out eyes, clearly irritated. But Generic RGB, it is the one most usable. And with latest betterDisplay app, latest Mac OS, I can clearly see the effect of turning off dithering on gradient test (http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/gradient.php), i.e. it introduces color banding on Generic RGB. Before when dithering option was released with stillColor, I could not see much change in banding at all, just some artefacts appear and disappear. Also, one thing I have learned - evaluation of screen effect on eye strain needs to be done for at least couple of days, because in short period there is just too much risk of placebo. I mean everyone is usually excited with new macbook, but when that excitement wears down, reality kicks in.

Aquila

Kelviz That's not flickering but dithering.
Flickering is in the panel, dithering is in the software.

bpo19

Donux Are you saying still color didn't work for you before but now it does? I tried it on a M3 air but it didn't work for me.

Zodios

For me sRGB IEC61966-2.1 works great. Much better than default.

Donux

bpo19 Yes, just will need to test on macbook screen without using chrome force RGB flag, as I do not recall now if I tested this on both internal screen and external monitor. What I can clearly say, it works on external monitor (BENQ PD2705Q) for sure. But you have to run generic RGB color profile to see it clearly, maybe even YCbCr mode. Once you do that on external monitor banding is very clear when you select and deselect dithering. I will try to post some phone camera photos later on in a more structured way.

Donux

I can confirm now, having chrome with standard settings (no legacy flags for force color), dithering disable and enable does introduce more vertical lines in gradient test for both sRGB and Generic RGB. However on external monitor YCbCr has something special going on, because in this mode dithering gradient lines are very evident, especially on low grade color profile such as Generic RGB. But not so much on the RGB mode. I have now only tested laptop panel, but will test later again external monitor. But this goes in line what other people said - i.e. that HDMI sometimes better for eye strain, maybe because it YCbCr mode. Or maybe because this mode to my understanding - limits color information, so colors are not that intense, hence the dithering also probably. Also, as someone mentioned, monitor might have its own differing, so this needs to be tested on all machine and monitor combinations, because results can be variable.

macsforme

Interesting article on MacRumors today regarding MacBook displays. The new QD technology appears to have a more even (gentler?) spectrum. I am slightly concerned about the 1,000 nits brightness, though, and likely PWM dimming to bring it back down to a manageable amount.

Even more interesting to me is the information about the previous MacBook display technology, which was confirmed as having a KSF phosphor (news to me, but it explains the harsh red tone I always sensed). The red spike on the spectrum for the previous model looks extremely harsh.