Reduce OLED flickering and increase eye comfort

LukasF

Hello everybody,

this thread is meant to share fixes for the OLED flickering that causes eye strain, why it happens and how to combat it. While there can be medical reasons for eye strain, this thread is meant exclusively for fixing issues with OLED tech. If you have medical issues please discuss this in other threads. From my personal experience I have had eye strain from a QD-OLED screen and these helped reduce it, if not completely eliminate it:

Disable variable rate refresh (VRR makes OLEDs flicker)
Set screen refresh rate to the maximum available. This reduces the interval any brightness fluctuations happen, making them less impactful.
Raise the black level of OLEDs in the screen settings menu. This is something I have found myself after looking at the rtings review for my monitor https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/dell/alienware-aw3423dwf In the picture you can see high latencies in the first row of up to 6.1ms, which is a whole frame on my 165Hz refresh rate monitor. This behavior seems to be normal for all OLEDs. They struggle when going from 0% brightness to anything higher. This creates a pulse width modulation (PWM) like overshoot in dark scenes. Raising black levels made a huge difference for me subjectively. You can test your monitor black level by displaying a completely black image in a dark room. There should be a faint glow and no complete darkness (contrary to what you are used from OLED). I hope this eliminates the first row in the image I posted, making transitions between frames more uniform and not having the black Pixels lag behind or overshoot. It may also help overall latency.
Set a comfortable brightness depending on environment light. Too bright or too dim will strain your eyes.
Have some light in your room behind your OLED screen.
Night light color / red shift in the evening or all the time if you prefer. Your operating system should have one variant of this available. This helps relax the eyes and improve your sleep because of the melatonin production from red light.
Disable HDR to disable the automatic brightness limiter. Depending on your screen this will work or not work. For my screen I needed to disable HDR anyways to raise the black level in the monitor settings. HDR content also has high brightness that can strain the eyes. For me personally stable luminance is easier on the eyes.
Choose the highest available color bit rate. This makes it easier to see detail content. If you can only choose either high bitrate or high refresh rate, choose high refresh rate. Beware though, depending on your monitor higher (or lower) bitrate can be FRC (frame rate control), which is a kind of temporal dithering that some people perceive as straining.
Color calibrate your monitor. If you have (or know someone willing) with a colorimeter, then you can color calibrate your monitor. This will make it easier to see things and as a side benefit improve the quality of the picture.

These are all my recommendations for now. Your mileage may vary, but I have found these very helpful in improving eye comfort and usability of my OLED monitor. Point 3 of raising the black levels is something I have discovered by myself and it has made the biggest difference to me subjectively. Thank you for your attention and I hope this will help alleviate issues you might have with your own OLED ☺️

Best regards

LukasF

So after some further testing I have determined that this doesn't solve the OLED flickering. It improves it, but I can still feel the eye strain. Its really frustrating.

K-Moss

LukasF Which display technology has worked best for you? IPS LCD?

DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs

K-Moss

Not the original poster, but the best and worst screen technologies for me are:

good LCDs

TN LCD is often easy on my eyes, provided there are no graphics driver-induced problems.

(TN panels manufactured by AUO consistently feel the best, especially in regards to the backlight.

On the other hand, avoid Samsung-manufactured TN panels, they are much worse than others and frequently have harsh backlights.)

In addition, Sharp's ASV VA LCD panels from their early to late 2000s Aquos HDTVs are consistently VERY comfy.

Some ASV TVs also have the best matte coating I've seen on any screen (crisp and no grain at all).

To avoid PWM, the above 2 panel types should be run at 100% backlight level.

high HZ CRT

High HZ CRT monitors (100hz+) also feel comfy and easy to read to me in most cases. The type of more "smooth" flicker that's used on CRTs seems to simply not affect me as long as the CRT is high HZ.

ePaper

E-ink is also good -- however, there actually are a few "bad" e-ink panels that feel much worse than others due to poor quality matte coatings (some Boox tablets are uncomfortable due to this). Thankfully, most of the time e-ink is fine for me though.

Black and white e-ink feels much better than color, as I find color e-ink's "color filter" very distracting.

BTW, I also find the third-party generic "e-paper" panels made by competitor company "Oed ePaper" much MORE comfortable than the usual "E Ink" banded panels!

An example of one of these generic panels is in the Minimal Phone MP01, which I own. The Minimal screen is my favorite e-paper, and IMO is easier to read than the "official" E Ink panels.

OLED?

OLED is actually sometimes tolerable, particularly OLEDs that are both known to have PWM at lower brightness BUT turn off PWM entirely at higher brightness levels -- these ones are occasionally OK to me at max brightness, although they're definitely worse than TN/ASV/E-Ink.

I can enjoy shows on an LG WOLED TV, but ALL processing settings need to be off in the TV settings, and 4:4:4 passthrough turned on.

I also need to use a PS5 as the system that TV shows play from -- the TV felt much worse when I tried an Apple TV instead, pointing to GPU-level issues with the Apple TV.

With the right setup though, LG WOLED TVs are actually decent enough for me.

However, even OLED at it's best is often just "adequate", usable but not great, can actually be OK for an hour or two, but never ideal for extended use.

(Caution: I've had a worse experience with the newer OLED panels marketed as "DC dimming" in the last few years -- in addition to the panels that use PWM at ALL brightness levels for obvious reasons.)

untested

Although I mentioned previously that I love Sharp's 2000s-era ASV VA panels, I do not have any experience with other VA types like MVA or PVA.

FYI -- Sharp's ASV is known to have a very different crystal structure than other VA types, ASV is kind of it's own category of screen entirely, so what I've said about ASV only applies to specifically ASV.

the worst LCD is IPS

The absolute worst screen tech IMO is IPS LCD.

Even without PWM, IPS panels generally cause me so much discomfort and I've had more serious issues with IPS -- such as being unable to understand or process text -- than even the "worse OLEDs" can cause.

Even though the majority on this forum seems to keep testing IPS, there have only been VERY few IPS that felt ok-ish to me, and generally I would say to just avoid IPS entirely -- IMO, you will have so much more luck with any other LCD type

K-Moss

DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs

"(Caution: I've had a worse experience with the newer OLED panels marketed as "DC dimming" in the last few years -- in addition to the panels that use PWM at ALL brightness levels for obvious reasons.)"

So why are those DC dimming OLEDs irritating you if not because of the sheer brightness of those screens? You tried turning down the brightness and still found the display(s) intolerable?

Also how best to search for TN workstation displays? Mostly see IPS now.

You write: "To avoid PWM, the above 2 panel types should be run at 100% backlight level."

However, most screens now are PWM-free.

DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs

K-Moss You write: "To avoid PWM, the above 2 panel types should be run at 100% backlight level."

However, most screens now are PWM-free.

AUO TN laptop panels as recent as 2020 have PWM at lower backlight levels, so running them at 100% is best.

I was also referring to ASV panels here which are of course very old being from the 2000s --

although ASV devices use CCFL, which means the PWM is not too bad because the flicker waveform is smoother (even though it still looks like a strobe on camera at lower backlight levels) -- I still prefer running ASV panels at 100% backlight regardless, because it makes them entirely PWM-free and they no longer flicker at all on camera