iPhone 17 PWM feature

JTL

tck175 Well. I have reason to believe this feature is imperfect to say the least, so I wouldn't entirely say it eliminates flicker as part of potential factors causing your problem.

tck175

JTL so which mobile phone you will suggest to use ? Motorola ? In Hong Kong, there is only Moto G73 5G available.

ITwebs

tck175

The new toggle seems to be designed for pwm at low brightness only, it does not address middle to high brightness level pwm. So you may not notice any difference.

tck175

ITwebs so which mobile phone you will suggest to use ? Motorola ? In Hong Kong, there is only Moto G73 5G available.

JTL

tck175 Afraid I can't help you there

ITwebs

tck175

I am also searching for a comfortable phone. Hopefully the new real rgb oled technology by TCL soon will bring people a better screen.

Clokwork

tck175 So , my problem is not PWM, maybe temporal dithering.

Certainly my biggest issue (TD). No major player wants to address that. I wish one of us sufferers was wealthy enough to make a startup for a phone minus TD and PWM. I wouldn’t care how low end the phone was. I sincerely hope I see this pop up on Kickstarter some day. A non scam campaign that is.

tck175

Clokwork 100% agree!

Rowe

'I wish one of us sufferers was wealthy enough to make a startup for a phone minus TD and PWM' Haven't we already got a pretty decent modern TD/PWM free phone with the TCL 60 Ultra?

I haven't tried the 60 Ultra, but I don't think other Nxtpaper 4 devices have PWM, or TD as long as all the epaper/nxtvision gimmicks are switched off. The screen on the Nxtpaper 4 11+ tablet was much more comfortable for me than any other modern screen I've tried except e-ink.

AshX

Just adding my own experience. I went to the American Dream Mall in NJ and checked out the new phones. These are the worst OLED iPhones I have ever used. Usually I can make it though a few minutes of use, but I could visibly see the screen pulsing in and out of focus. The PWM toggle did absolutely nothing. Honestly I am shocked how bad it was, and I use an iPhone 13 daily with no problems on iOS 15.

I also checked out the M4 MacBook Pros and the Studio Displays connected to a Mac Mini - all on MacOS Tahoe. This OS is the most unreadable, strange OS I have ever used. The font smoothing and dithering makes everything look like you’re staring at the screen through a paper with pinholes, and the text is blurry. It’s much worse than Sequoia.

Ironically the 13” OLED iPad was the most tolerable. At least I could navigate menus with it. The OLED iPhones and iPad definitely have sharper text. It’s unfortunate the PWM is so awful that it doesn’t matter.

I’m really, really disappointed. I was going to wait for the M5 MBP 14-inch to see if any improvement was made to the PWM modulation, but unless there’s some significant hardware changes (there’s not) then MacOS Tahoe is going be unusable for me.

After 15 years of using Macs in my professional life as a music producer and audio engineer, my time as a customer and user may be coming to an end. I’m going to try to find an M1 or M2 Machine on Monterey or Ventura, but that will only buy me time. Maybe it’s time to make a trip to the Microsoft store for the first time since the 2000s.

lukeb

AshX I'm in the exact same position after testing every apple silicon mac. But after trying a few surface devices I'm not aware of some great windows laptop with a stable screen either.

ITwebs

AshX

I wonder why no one is inventing software like stillcolour for iPhone. Is it way more difficult to make one when compared to macOS?

JTL

ITwebs Short answer, yes

Longer answer, Guessing if it were possible it probably depends on private APIs (which probably means it can't be distributed on App Store) and might need a jailbreak/root access. Which is an entire problem in itself, to state it simply.

AshX

ITwebs wonder why no one is inventing software like stillcolour for iPhone. Is it way more difficult to make one when compared to macOS?

No. iOS, iPadOS, and MacOS have been unified under the same team and a very similar design language since I believe MacOS Big Sur, if not earlier. This is partially why MacOS has declined. It would be very similar to Stillcolor

JTL Longer answer, Guessing if it were possible it probably depends on private APIs (which probably means it can't be distributed on App Store) and might need a jailbreak/root access. Which is an entire problem in itself, to state it simply.

This. It’s not hard to code - it’s hard to implement as 3rd party software on iOS.

JTL There are some potential "ifs" and "buts" in there, but I think it goes without saying that if Apple integrated an option and it works as advertised it would save large amounts of time that even investigating the feasibility of externally implementing such a feature would take.

Yeah. Whether or not it solves the issue for a lot of users is of course an open question, but it would eliminate that variable. I think this is the biggest benefit of these toggles. At the very least having a DC dimmed screen with no GPU dithering or panel FRC would ensure you know you have a “flicker free” screen. Yeah there are smaller things like inversion, which can be accounted for and avoided during the manufacturing phase.

The question I have is what happens when you disable dithering in particular. How does that even work with iOS or MacOS which is 10-bit? Does it mean we just have banding and other artifacts? Does it just look duller or default to sRGB as the bottleneck? In theory it’s as simple as downsampling to 8-bit. But this assumes dithering is only being used to render colors and graphics, and not being used for other means in addition, which some Apple patents would imply.

I’ve read some with interesting language utilizing dither to mask voltage flickering and other unwanted artifacts. So does removing dithering from the display pipeline create unintended consequences on certain devices, particularly thin, low powered ones that may struggle to maintain enough voltage.

I think this may be less of an issue on the LTPS OLED iPhones because they’re using more power than LTPO.

ITwebs

JTL

So the only chance to get this temporal dithering problem solved is to wait for the toggle option by Apple.

JTL

ITwebs There are some potential "ifs" and "buts" in there, but I think it goes without saying that if Apple integrated an option and it works as advertised it would save large amounts of time that even investigating the feasibility of externally implementing such a feature would take.

JTL

AshX No. iOS, iPadOS, and MacOS have been unified under the same team and a very similar design language since I believe MacOS Big Sur, if not earlier. This is partially why MacOS has declined. It would be very similar to Stillcolor

There are additional security controls on iDevices that might interfere.

And while still being "unified" I wouldn't be surprised seeing enough differences that even if the above issues were irrelevant it may not be a 1:1 port.

AshX

lukeb

Windows seems hit or miss. I’ve taken a cursory look at PCs and a lot have serious issues just from glancing at them (immediate vertigo).

JTL And while still being "unified" I wouldn't be surprised seeing enough differences that even if the above issues were irrelevant it may not be a 1:1 port.

Yeah. Apparently iOS and iPadOS doesn’t even handle fonts the same way as MacOS (no font smoothing) so there are clearly fundamental differences.

I just watched some teardown videos where the screens were being taken apart for the 2011, 2015, 2020, Liquid Retina and MiniLED Macs. The glass panel of the display is very thick on the 2011 and 2015 Macs. The 2016-2022 Retina screens are where things get thinner abs them MiniLED and Liquid Retina is almost paper-thin.

Take that observation for what it’s worth. I just found it interesting because in particular while looking at the Apple Studio Displays and iMac M4 it was as if I was seeing the light from the individual pixels through the screen. Sort of like looking through a video camera with poor low light, static almost. I really wonder how much of this is exacerbating everything.

Clokwork

Where is blackberry to come back with a banger phone 😅. Apps like stillcolor wouldn’t work for iPad and iPhone as they won’t get that level of access to the GPU. Is it confirmed that the TCL Ultra doesn’t have TD?

JTL

Clokwork Where is blackberry to come back with a banger phone

It's a long story, but I firmly believe BlackBerry dug their own grave through hubris, inertia and mismanagement.

Apps like stillcolor wouldn’t work for iPad and iPhone as they won’t get that level of access to the GPU.

I did expand on some of that.

Clokwork

JTL yeah the blackberry bit was a wishful joke. My old working iPad is almost due for a new digitizer and battery. Ios14 forever heh.

« Previous Page