Gurm

  1. If you use ditherig, on your Dell XPS, do you see banding? I am wondering if there are laptops with high-quality screens that don't need dithering to display 8-bit color.

  2. The Galaxy S9 has a slow-motion camera. Probably not enough FPS for our needs, but worth trying to capture some computer/smartphone screens if you were trying the phone anyway.

  • Gurm replied to this.

      ryans Honestly, you'd THINK that ditherig would wreck colors, right? But honestly it doesn't, in my experience. I forget it's even running.

          JTL I read somewhere that TN panels basically always have to use dithering (and are thus faster in response time), whereas many IPS panels do not.

          @Gurm So I think we can conclude that Dell XPS screens don't need dithering to display all colors?

          • JTL replied to this.

              ryans I thought all laptops that had IPS panels used dithering still (with the exception of some known HP Elitebook's that supposedly do 8+2 bit FRC to do 10-bit color depth.)

                9 days later

                Gurm Can you post a picture with and without dithering running on your Dell XPS laptop?

                  6 months later

                  Hey,

                  @Gurm

                  do you just use the laptops panel or do you also have an external monitor?

                  The laptop panel, although I have plugged it into the monitor with similar results.

                  2 months later

                  Hi, testing old XPS 9550 fullhd.

                  Dithering.exe does not show any difference. Am I doing something wrong?
                  Old Windows 10 with old drivers seems a bit more usable,.. but still bad.

                  What makes screen look better — disabling both Nvidia and specially Intel drivers.
                  But with drivers disabled I can't control screen brightness anymore.

                  Overlay screen dimmers kind-of help, but ignore pop-ups, which makes them not an option.
                  Does anybody have an idea how to control brightness with dedicated drivers disabled?

                    It's been REALLY hit or miss for me with XPS 15's. There seem to be multiple iterations of the hardware, and some are much better than others.

                    a year later

                    poliakov Just to chip in with my experience - my most comfortable setup which I can use for hours at a time is the XPS 15 9560, Windows 10 ver 1511 with Intel & Nvidia graphics disabled in Device Manager. I find that for most tasks this works absolutely fine and is a great relief for me as I was starting to struggle to find any system I could use day to day.

                    The two major drawbacks are:

                    • you can't change the screen brightness, as you said. This is tied to the Intel driver. The workaround is to enable the Intel driver, chenge the brightness and then disable again. Fiddly I know, but actually I prefer the brightness down very low at all times anyways.
                    • the HDMI out doesn't work. Again this is driven by these drivers, so when I'm presenting I have to enable the drivers temporarily. Incidentally, there have been times when I have forgotten to disable them again but this has provided a perfect testing scenario as I have developed a migraine unaware that the drivers are currently enabled, thus concluding that this definitely is the route of the issue.

                    With this in mind - I feel like I personally have a setup which would be ideal for testing purposes by someone at Intel as I have a known working- and non-working setup, but I can't live without my laptop (especially in lockdown!).

                    Anyways, just thought I'd update with where I'm at with all this. Glad to have a working system that is fine for my temporal dithering sensitivity.

                      I think I'm almost OK with this machine after some tune here and there. And I'm using all latest drivers ON and latest windows update also.

                      1) Use ONLY native screen resolution and no UI scaling (are we speaking about HD version here?)
                      2) Turn off Clear Type
                      3) Never use Chrome, Firefox or Edge (give me strain in any case). I'm fine with Vivaldi and Opera browsers
                      4) Never use dark theme.
                      5) Never use plain wallpaper, use bright detailed photo instead
                      6) Never go to bottom 30% of brightness range — this is where PWM starts to work
                      7) Never use keyboard backlight. Even worse PWM.
                      8) Play with color profiles/video settings to reduce contrast a bit and maybe add some yellow tint (but not with windows night light, use dell utilities).

                      May sound like nothing big, but it went from heavy strain to usable for me this way.

                      And any use of HDMI cable gives me severe problems anyway.

                        poliakov That's very interesting - thanks for the detailed post. Just to confirm, would you say you believe your primary issue to be temporal dithering or PWM? And yes I'm on the FHD matte version), but using ClearType, Chrome, backlight and brightness minimized is fine as long as I have the drivers disabled and using Windows 1511.

                        poliakov any case). I'm fine with Vivaldi and Opera browsers
                        4) Never use dark theme.
                        5) Never use plain wallpaper, use bright detailed photo instead
                        6) Never go to bottom 30% of brightness range — this is where PWM starts to work
                        7) Never use keyboard backlight. Even worse PWM.
                        8) Play with color profiles/video settings to reduce contrast a bit and maybe add some yellow tint (but not with windows night light, use dell utilities).

                            I do not know what is the main issue. PWM affects me. Dithering — probably, but I do not know how to turn it off to test. Any UI scaling (like default 125% on windows) gives me severe strain, maybe that is some kidn of dithering used for antialiasing.

                              poliakov Yeah that sounds like a possibility. Weirdly I updated to Windows 10 1909 recently and although I only tried it for a day (and I really hammered it - graphics drivers enabled // gaming etc) I was so sick the next day (see: https://ledstrain.org/d/842-update-to-windows-10-version-1909-focal-aware-seizures/11) that I immediately went back to my working setup, so I never managed to test for a working setup in it.

                              Out of interest, how long have you been using this working setup and can you use it for 8 hours a day?

                              • diop replied to this.

                                  si_edgey Weirdly I updated to Windows 10 1909 recently and although I only tried it for a day (and I really hammered it - graphics drivers enabled // gaming etc) I was so sick the next day (see: https://ledstrain.org/d/842-update-to-windows-10-version-1909-focal-aware-seizures/11) that I immediately went back to my working setup, so I never managed to test for a working setup in it.

                                  It's so easy to forget how acute the symptoms are when you're using a known good setup all the time. It isn't a trivial issue and every time I try new hardware or try to upgrade my system somehow I once again am shocked how bad the symptoms are. This is all using the same monitor so LED/monitors have been ruled out completely for me.

                                  I'm also glad you've found something to keep you ticking over. I know you do music production and most plugins and software nowadays are dropping W7/8,1 support and insisting on the latest W10.

                                    dev