Dithering, alternative perspective

Donux

What if the general claim that dithering is black and white bad. The reason I ask, because there was mixed feedback on dithering switch off success on macbooks, and maybe it does help to deal with modern bright panels which emit very bright light by each led, and this static led light, can harm the retina, like some sort of "led burn in". Introducing chaos with dithering, situation is resolved, as well as it expands color gamut. This would also mean, disabling it, makes the whole house to collapse, as it was not designed to be operated this way in a first place. What do you think ?

AshX

Donux

There are some fantastic posts by the mod of r/Temporal_Noise going in-depth to the different types of dithering. Recently he utilIzed the new program shared by a user here and on that sub on disabling HDR on Android phones. He has several threads showing the results: https://www.reddit.com/r/Temporal_Noise/s/P7WLVh77gl

From what I understand, different refresh rates resulted in different dithering techniques: temporal dither and FRC. Depending on the setting it introduced more or less frames, and was therefore more or less uncomfortable. I’d recommend reading his posts because he’s doing great work.

So to your question, in theory, yes. But it depends on the frequency and the type as well as when it is engaged.

In actuality it seems like dithering is not being used to increase comfort but rather to extend battery life and make 8-bit screens look flashy. A cost saving measure driven by shareholders and the marketing department. If this were actually a good thing, we wouldn’t be seeing an influx of users since the M4 MacBooks were introduced. But we are.

There definitely are consequences to disabling dithering on devices like the new M4 MBA models that very clearly rely on the technique in a fundamental way. I think Sequoia is the worst offender as of late. The MacBook Pros are probably much more complicated because the dithering noise interacts with PWM.

DisableUniformity2D on Stillcolor seems to make the new Airs even worse. It breaks something in the way the display functions and you can see and feel it. Intel Macs probably are benefited more by disabling dithering than newer ones. I think MacOS Sequoia is heavily dependent on dithering and I’m not sure it’s usable for most of us. But we would need an analysis to truly see that.