"OLED is HARMFUL to your eyes!"

AshX

I mean, if you looked at the OP of the video he responded to a comment about the iPhone 15 Pro saying, “Apple screens are completely fine. They have little to no shimmer. So you can safely buy any Apple products with an OLED screen.”

Experience says this is not accurate. So I don’t know how much weight I would lend to that video and the conclusions drawn from it.

There is nothing inherently bad about OLED tech just like there’s nothing inherently bad about LCD tech. I’d take a stable, low modulation OLED over an unstable LCD with shimmer any day of the week.

The conversation has to move beyond demonizing specific pieces of tech and instead toward understanding and analyzing combinations of hardware and software and how it influences pixel behavior.

JTL

AshX I mean, if you looked at the OP of the video he responded to a comment about the iPhone 15 Pro saying, “Apple screens are completely fine. They have little to no shimmer. So you can safely buy any Apple products with an OLED screen.”

Well. I don't know if the uploader was involved with the speech or just an aggregator.

K-Moss

AshX All OLED has a refresh rate you can see on a camera. I don't see the same on IPS. The screen is simply stable, at least when comparing an IPS phone to an OLED phone. Ergo, IPS all else being equal is easier on the eyes?

AshX

JTL

Seems like they were a student, or colleague, based on the comments.

AshX

K-Moss

Yes, OLED has a refresh dip. I’ll give you my own personal example.

I have two phones: iPhone 5 on iOS 9 and iPhone 13 on iOS 15. Most users on this forum would assume the iPhone 5 would be more comfortable. It’s a 13 year old phone with an older LCD screen running an old operating system. Most here would take that phone over an iPhone 13 that is OLED.

My experience? The iPhone 5 is dithering nearly constantly. The whites are uncomfortable with the constant backlight. Text is harder to read. This is proven under microscope.

The iPhone 13 by contrast is comfortable in all brightness levels with all colors. The whites are more paper like and the text is crisp and clear. Is it dithering? I don’t know; I don’t have another smartphone capable of 240 fps slow motion. But if it is, it is seldom given the fact that it is close to 10-bit given what we know about OLED iPhones and iOS 15.

So functionally my choice is an iPhone 5 that is utilizing temporal dithering at a fraction of the 60Hz refresh rate. Maybe it’s dithering at 30 Hz or even 15 Hz.

Or I can choose the iPhone 13 OLED with a PWM frequency of 610Hz with a low modulation.

The choice is 610Hz flicker or 15Hz. Most would experience less symptoms with the former if they are flicker sensitive.

The point of this real world example is that it proves that it’s not as simple as “OLED bad, LCD good.” Because if that were the case, I could not use this phone. And I can’t use any of the Macs that utilize dithering because of their low frequency. I can’t use a 2015 15” MBP or a 2019 iMac. They’re all LCD.

It’s not just a fluke either. I get symptoms from certain LED or fluorescents at specific stores. But other stores or certain LED bulbs in my house are fine. Why? Frequency and modulation of flicker.

We have to move beyond stigmatizing certain technologies and instead try to analyze why these technologies are triggering us. There is so much guesswork done on screen sensitive online spaces and so little actual empirical testing being done. This is why we continue to go year after year making no progress. And you don’t have to be a programmer or a scientist to test - I’m a musician for heaven’s sake! But as time has gone on I’ve made great progress connecting specific symptoms with specific frequencies as well as types of flicker (PWM, spatial and temporal dither, BFI, etc.) in hopes of not only finding usable devices, but also figuring out why this is happening.

K-Moss

AshX Why do you think Apple chose to disrespect customers with 15 Hz dithering? That's brutal. Do they just not care about eye health? You think they were trying to cut costs via FRC instead of using the correct bit panel?

RE: OLED looking like paper, it doesn't matter how it looks. It's definitely not paper and will irritate the eyes far more than paper, so looking like paper is not an indication of how comfortable and benign is the screen technology.

My G Play 2024 has no dithering and uses IPS. Doubtful there's an OLED screen as comfortable.

JTL

K-Moss Why do you think Apple chose to disrespect customers with 15 Hz dithering? That's brutal. Do they just not care about eye health? You think they were trying to cut costs via FRC instead of using the correct bit panel?

Presumably in part. I'm also curious how "good" (in terms of native bit depth, resolution) the "best" LCD panels for a laptop can be ignoring that.

AshX

K-Moss

It’s not personal for them; it’s business. Apple was sued in 2007 for faking 8-bit so this isn’t new. Look at the cost of true 10-bit external monitors. You can expect to put a 10-bit LCD panel into a MacBook Pro or an iMac would raise the price significantly. The Apple Pro Display XDR is marketed as true 10-bit and it’s what, $6,000 including the stand?

The computing and phone space is competitive and marketing and sales departments are dictating design. We are the unfortunate casualties of these choices.

You can’t speak with certainty as to the health of any of these screen technologies because it hasn’t been studied.

I’m not interested in complaining for complaining’s sake. I’m interested in data, testing, solutions, and action. I’ve advised on this message board and others we should be taking a two-prong approach:

Developing 3rd party tools like Stillcolor to disable forms of flicker like dithering on devices. And this doesn’t mean letting aiaf do all the work himself. It means putting our money where our mouths are and hiring developers if need be.
Raising awareness on social media. I’m working on preparing documentation to send to The NY Times. We need to get out of our little online community bubbles and start advocating. A Change.org petition is nice but it’s passive. We need to consider a class action lawsuit in the U.S. or E.U. on the basis of health and Accessibility.

This is not an unsolvable problem. But posting on these forums is sometimes like speaking to a brick wall or herding cats. I’m tired of guesswork when we have tools to do even the most basic testing and it’s only a handful of users who even bother here and on Reddit. Half the time posts here are the equivalent of stepping outside and saying, “Looks like it might rain today.”

I can assure those of you reading this post that those in the community who have contributed much in terms of programs, protocols, and informational documentation are growing tired of the collective screen sensitive community. Some very talented and intelligent individuals have already left quietly. I am expressing my frustration because these same discussions pop up over and over again. I understand this is a stressful and upsetting problem, but we have to keep our focus on testing and gathering data.

K-Moss

AshX Motorola at least cares about the eye health of their consumers by featuring the Flicker-Free Edge OLED series and the zero PWM and zero dither G series. I have no interest in Apple's overpriced products.

macsforme

AshX Developing 3rd party tools like Stillcolor to disable forms of flicker like dithering on devices. And this doesn’t mean letting aiaf do all the work himself. It means putting our money where our mouths are and hiring developers if need be.

I think in the case of StillColor we were fortunate that this method was discovered (reading through how he described it). Other than that, there is no guarantee that such methods even exist. Depending on how the graphics stack is designed, and what APIs are available, these algorithms may be baked in deeply and impossible to disable through software. Not to dissuade anyone from working on it (quite the contrary), but expectations should reflect that we do not know whether it is actually possible.

AshX

K-Moss

And that is your prerogative. But for many of us, we are restricted to iOS and MacOS for work purposes, hence our effort to find workable solutions.

AshX

macsforme

Others include the dev himself are still pursuing deconstructing the TCON as well as different parameters of iOS and MacOS. There is the fact that ColorSync among other things within the display pipeline are operating autonomously, but from what I understand having spoken to those who are attempting this, there must be a mechanism just like “enableDither” even if it is more complicated. Remember, these devices and displays are not “magic” - they were designed by engineers.

Where we are unfortunately stuck is how locked down MacOS and iOS are. I think that is the limiting factor, especially considering how OS updates can drastically change display comfort. Stuff like MiniLED is much more difficult to wrangle because of the way the hardware is designed. But for LCD and even OLED it is at least theoretically simpler.