"It’s more like all humans are affected in some way by staring at a strobe light torture device. It just so happens the curve of how people are affected is variable and these new age LTPS panels and OLED (unlike older a-SI and IGZO) are high flicker devices that do a similar thing. I wouldn’t call that “epilepsy lite“ when it’s not really something humans have evolved with.
Yea, things like campfires and incandescent bulbs flicker, but I have zero problems with those. These panels on the other hand are a much more unnatural phenomenon and something that doesn’t exist in nature. Saying humans that can’t handle it have some type of defect would be the same thing as creating some type of sine wave and blasting people with it 24/7 then saying the 50% of the population that it causes issues to are defective when nothing like that exists in nature.
It’s a completely artificial stimulus that just so happens to function as a torture device to some. Some people handle being waterboarded better than others. Since these are artificial stimulus, it’s possible being well-adapted to them could even be negative evolutionary traits or even having slower reflexes/neurological system might save you from PWM.
For the screens themselves, it’s a two fold problem. Panel films are too thin in these new devices which lets more abrasive backlighting through so it’s like staring directly at a bunch of tiny laser beams which are basically what LEDs are, and then the electron mobility is much higher in LTPS panels than a-Si and IGZO which allows them to function with a sparse duty cycle, lowering energy consumption but increasing instability and flicker."
Got that from here: https://www.reddit.com/r/PWM_Sensitive/comments/1kmd1p3/comment/msm1m8p/
He goes by angrycustomer5000. Very well informed.
He writes also:
"Why do people keep typing nonsense like this when these issues only became prevalent with flickering LTPS and OLED panels. These issues did NOT exist on older a-Si and IGZO panels. The only panels that were a problem then were a handful of cheap, 200hz PWM TN laptop panels.
A giant swathe of the population didn't all magically become physically decrepit at once; the PANEL TYPE CHANGED, NOT the people. I repeat for the 5000th time. It's garbage, ultra-thin film LTPS panels that are the problem. They have higher electron mobility than a-Si and IGZO and thus do not need continuous power to stay lit. They seem to be inherently HIGH modulation devices aka garbage.
They use slightly less power than a-Si and IGZO so these batshit stupid, Chinese mega-companies and EU-eco fascists promote them as some kind of beneficial technology. They're not beneficial. The panel films are too thin and let too much abrasive backlighting through which is one source of eye strain, then the fact they require less power on time than previous panels to stay lit is the other. It just so happens the population is affected on a variable curve by having a strobe light beamed into your eyes."
Another interesting one:
"I think you’re approaching this subject from the wrong angle. To increase shareholder profits, almost all post-home button Apple LCD products are cheap Chinese brands like BOE with a smattering of LG here and there. Both of which are known to have eye strain in most of their products. Every single LG LCD TV I look up all have PWM for instance, so LG obviously does not give a F about eye strain.
Higher quality panel makers like JDI faced bankruptcy due to not being able to compete in bids due to Chinese race to the bottom companies like BOE, and the best panel maker (Samsung) stopped making LCDs for no reason to focus on OLED, so your choices now are bad vs worse. BOE does make a low eye strain 1440p 240hz panel, but that’s an a-Si and not an LTPS, so uses a completely different assembly line.
Ironically, I think this is why that guy that recommended you the One Plus Pad 2 saying it has no eye strain is probably on to something. It uses a BOE panel but it’s a very non-standard display of 12.2” and 7:5. BOE probably had to custom make this panel for them and likely upped their quality above normal. When calibrated, it doesn’t seem to have the dirty whites most crap LTPS panels are known for either. So if there’s any mobile tablet panel I’d place bets on of being usable, this would probably be one of them just because it was probably custom made for their flagship product, Android has less of a d1th3ring problem than Apple, and there’s a few Reddit posts saying the panel worked for them."
Another:
"OLED are a different subject than LCD, but in my experience, almost all new IPS you see over 1150ish contrast ratio are usually LTPS. So when you see a review for something like Ipad pro 11" and it has 1800 contrast...it's LTPS junk.
LTPS junk tends to also always have the trademark trait of whites being insanely overly bright no matter how low you turn down the brightness. LTPS seems to have been created entirely with cell phones in mind in order to have panels that use less power, but they also have slightly faster pixel response times so they started porting this junk to desktop and gaming monitors as well."
Full profile: https://www.reddit.com/user/angrycustomer5000/
Here he is on the iPhone 11 vs iPhone 13:
"I have both an IPhone 13 and IPhone 11 in the house. The OLED Iphone 13 is not only more uncomfortable to look at, but also has this enormous white glow to it on any screen with lots of white content that makes “IPS glow” look tame in comparison. For me it is a downgrade from LCD.
I don’t even use the more comfortable IPhone 11 because while it is usable for like 20 minutes or less before you start to notice some eye strain coming in, the IPhone 8 Plus on IOS 15 with JDI panel (not the eye strain LG panel version) can be looked at seemingly forever without problems instead.
What exactly am I losing by going from A15 to A11 chip? Pretty much nothing. You can play demanding games like Wreckest on the A11 with high resolution and frame rate. Anything that actually needs more power than that like Baldur’s Gate 3 is unplayable on a phone anyway."
On the challenges of finding suitably benign displays in 2025: "Samsung was the best LCD maker in terms of eye strain and they stopped making them and only make high eye strain OLEDs now, so I guess this is all you really need to know. Any Samsung LCD product from here on out will be some random Chinese panel with probably over 50% chance of eye strain.
Whatever vendor they used in the S7 didn’t have eye strain though. No idea who actually made that one. I saw it online described as an “LC panel.” Not sure what the hell an ”LC” is or if that’s a typo."
I'll close out this post with this comment:
There is no “eye doctor problem.” You’re making bogus astroturf posts. The problem is mostly with LTPS panels and flickering OLEDs. As I said, while there are some bad a-Si and IGZO panels, it’s the norm and not the exception with LTPS. The chiropractor is not going to fix your poorly designed, race to the bottom, Chinese LTPS panel that functions as a flickering torture device.
He said for a phone the most universally comfortable displays are the Samsung PLS displays in the A05 and A06. Those are very basic phones but cheap and I've never heard anyone say anything bad about the display comfort.
He said:
"I have an old Samsung 1080p 27" desktop PLS monitor which is about the lowest eye strain screen ever created and the PLS phone displays are worse to look at but not nightmarish like some others."