Calling all Mac owners: Let’s test the gray color flicker

Donux

AshX Unfortunately I am not on a apple or samsung, or other company drum roll, so still rolling with old smartphone that does not have slow mo, so can not really test it.

AshX

Donux

I spoke with aiaf about the gray color flicker. He brought it to my attention that three things could be impacting it:

The “enableDarkEnhancer” setting
Gray-to-gray response time
TCON FRC

He suggested the latter two could be interacting with each other to create that flicker. I’m curious about “enableDarkEnhancer” and if there’s a way to disable it. Can anyone with a Mac and the technical knowledge tinker around with the code? It’s also present on some of the Intel Macs and LCD iPads, so I wonder if they have a similar setting.

Donux

AshX Probably will need to branch out from stillColor and add this functionality. I am personally quite new to ios development, so it would not be straight forward for me, but I may look into it at some point. Problem of course here most things are undocumented by apple, so you need to tinker around to find out what those properties are. But I think even without going into much detail about behaviour of each property, those need to be brought up to the surface, and once we can see cleary of boolean, read-only and writable properties, we could play around and maybe discover something in different contexts (hopefully without breaking the system).

PazT

Just tested my new M4 1TB Macbook air and my girlfriend's M2 256GB Macbook air, both silver and made in Vietnam. They both have gray color flicker. I'm not sure why but I feel the M2 is slightly less harsh on my eyes, but it could just be that I spent less time with it. Both display's raw panel serial numbers start by GMG. I'm writing this on my 2015 Macbook pro that should also have gray color flicker, but it's way easier on my eyes than the M2-M4 Airs for whatever reason.

M2 flicker : https://youtu.be/0VtGsaRU_Hw

M4 flicker : https://youtu.be/tkHqsfRehLQ

AshX

PazT

Thanks for testing! A few additional questions:

What size (13” or 15”) and what versions of MacOS are the MBA’s running on?

Interesting that they both started with GMG. All the ones I tested started with FP1. I also agree with your assessment that the 2015 15” MBP is nowhere near as bad as the Airs.

I don’t think you’re wrong about the M2 being better than the M4. You can see it plain as day on your recordings: the M4’s flickering is much more aggressive.

PazT

AshX They are both 13" (my macbook pro 2015 is 13" as well). The M4 on Sequoia 15.4.1 and the M2 on 15.5, both with 16gb of RAM.

I ended up going to the apple store this afternoon and got a gift card refund even though I bought my M4 almost two months ago. They said their tech authorized it immediately because he has the same problem with the new macs !

I think I'll wait a while before giving another chance to a mac but I'll keep coming here in case new solutions arise.

AshX

PazT I ended up going to the apple store this afternoon and got a gift card refund even though I bought my M4 almost two months ago. They said their tech authorized it immediately because he has the same problem with the new macs !

Wow this is fascinating. Someone on the MacRumors Eyestrain thread said he went to an Apple Store and one employee was denying ever hearing of the issue and then another one came over and said something to the effect of, “Oh, yeah, we’ve been getting a lot of these complaints,” and promptly returned the device. So it seems they are aware at Apple yet nothing is being done.

But wow…the tech had the same problem! When even your own employees are having issues then something is really wrong.

PazT

AshX that’s crazy. Honestly I believe collectively buying and returning these harsh display macs is probably the best thing we can do to force Apple to fix it.

aydarms

Hey, I tested my MacBook M2 13' with old Lupin device to check pulse modulation on the gray/ darkish colors. It seems that flicker dissapears below certain level of brightness (around 1/3 of total brightness and below). Maybe it is just my Mac, but I will try to check other devices once I have them to test.

AshX

aydarms

What color, OS, and configuration is your device? Can you share the Lupin results here?

Jm31828

aydarms Oh that's interesting! I always use about 20% brightness as I can't stand a bright display- I wonder if there is some hope for me on that model, if I could find one to pick up!

mirrormystic

@aydarms less the 50% darkness is impossible to work with…

mirrormystic

I just tested my new M3 15" 15.5 and it has a flicker, i dono how to check the panel version, i feel like the M3 air is way more easier on my eyes then the M4 air, but still had issues i terms of burning feeling when i look at a white page (crying)

AshX

mirrormystic

This is anecdotal but others have reported M4 is worse than M2 or M3. Certain M3 panels seem more tolerable for some, but all the Air models have FRC plus horrible transistor leakage leading to a very unstable screen. Your symptoms are consistent with mine and others.

aydarms

AshX Sorry for the delay! I finally had a chance to test it.

At 100% brightness, Lupin shows modulation around 4%. While that might seem minor, IPS screens without PWM usually stay in the 0–1% range — so 4% is a bit high.

Then, I reduced the brightness to about 30% (5 bars on the MacBook brightness scale), and Lupin shows around 1%, which is within normal levels.

For comparison, I get similar results on my MacBook Pro i5 (2020), which doesn’t show any flicker at any brightness level.

I also took some photos of the results, but I'm not sure how to share them here.

Specs of the MacBook Air:

Chip: M2

RAM: 16GB

Storage: 512GB

Color: Polarstern

macOS: Sonoma (planning to update to Sequoia and will report if anything changes)

NewDwarf

What is the RGB code of the gray color used for testing?

aydarms

NewDwarf Profile "Color LCD), all settings are standard .

mirrormystic

https://www.eizo.be/monitor-test/ - im testing with the uniformity test here

mirrormystic

@AshX is there a Mac Laptop that works? If not whats the best linux one?

aydarms

Jm31828 you can probably test yourself with filming 120fps video at different brightness levels.

Donux

aydarms Is Lupin really a good tool for that ? Maybe visual high fps would work better, as Lupin has been used in various tests and showed normal flicker at each problematic machine. Also, we need to start testing monitors plugged into these macbooks, because I am convinced, that this flicker travels into "good" monitors. Also, specific area I am very interested, is whether apple on purpose creating something on Macbook air (or GPUs are stripped down versions of a real thing), in order to increase sales of macbook pros. Clearly, they might have experienced so-called "product cannibalization" when macbook airs with apple silicon started to absorb some of the pro users.

AshX

aydarms

Thank you for this. To clarify, this device is comfortable or uncomfortable?

I’ve spoken with a few knowledgeable folks outside of this community and we’ve narrowed down the likely triggers to several things:

LCD Macs are applying heavy FRC dither even on mid 2010s Intel MacBooks and iMacs
There is significant transistor leakage, especially on the MacBook Air M2-M4 models, likely caused by poor QC and battery life conservation methods resulting in instability
Liquid Retina (LCD screens with the notch) removed one of the diffusion panes of glass to achieve a thinner design, thus increasing the amount of direct light being sent out to your eyes
New screens (Liquid Retina and MBP MiniLED) have a different coating that is more prone to glare (nano texture is different)

Test on a gray background with 240 fps slow motion and upload to YouTube and post here, if you can. You can upload Lupin results to Imgur.

NewDwarf

aydarms It is not about the color profile. It is about 32-bit hex code of the gray color to test.

The gray color has many shades https://htmlcolorcodes.com/colors/shades-of-gray

@AshX what exactly RGB hex code you ask to test?