200+ smart phone PWM tested and ranked (2026 edition)

geargeeksp

Hey guys, this is Lee (from Wild Lee's screen tech)

or 大胖鸽 from bilibili.com

just did a video in English for global PWM sensitive community .

p.s. the gears and methods i used are a bit more accurate than most opple and stuff,

so the result might be slightly different.

but they are all brightness fluctuation measurement, mine is 100k with a customized sensor so that it can be used to pinpoint a certain area on the screen instead of the whole brightness (which i think is very important)

anyways I am still in the learning process of temporal dithering,

bought the mini microscope and stuff

but I dont think 240fps is enough to tell the whole story, and nobody locally is even really talking about this.

(i have 100k subs on bilibili and i think at least on phones, people are more into eye-strain protection in Chinese community)

so on the pwm side, I have done all that i can for now, I dont own a mac myself just yet, but i got a cam with 960fps

should be a good start.

Cheers

Lee

AshX

geargeeksp

Welcome, Lee! This gentleman is the real deal, folks. He’s doing some fantastic work with some very high quality equipment. Very optimistic for 2026.

Harry

simplex

geargeeksp

Great work, Lee!

Could you help us and share some Chineese forums regarding eye-strain of monitors or PCs..?

And 2nd questiin, regarding phones - can you share LED spectrums ? 350L can measure it also 🙂

JTL

geargeeksp Welcome Lee!

I don't mean to put you on the spot, but I'm vaguely aware of potential differences in foreign (i.e non English) communities regarding this problem, so to have someone here whose involved with such communities and research is certainly very appreciated.

axhng

Been following your channel on bilibili and on youtube now and thanks for the great work you do! Hopefully you would be able to shine some light on the temporal dithering issue since no one on CN side is talking about it at all. Hopefully some CN brands will take notice and start doing something too because it's killer for my eyes. Especially on LCD phones, which people usually have to turn to in order to completely avoid eyestrain from PWM.

I even suspect that some who find those phones ranked T2 on your list for PWM intolerable might be due to dithering. I have a Redmi K80 and on paper the DC-like dimming should have been great, but it causes me eyestrain when using it. Not as much as LCD iPhones which dithers quite heavily, but enough that I can't use it for long. And it's definitely dithering from what I can see under 250x microscope with slow motion. Xiaomi list "12bit 色深" for the phone (along with a lot of their higher end phones), and pretty sure they're not using a true 12bit panel for the budget devices (or if there is even a true 12 bit panel for phones).

Cheers!!!

sakraycore

axhng The problem with iPhone 7 in that video is caused by iOS 15 I think.

For whatever reason, dithering was added in iOS 15 or later where it "assumes" the panel will need dithering.

I actually recently acquired an iPhone 8 on iOS 14.5.1 and I'm pretty sure on iOS 14.5.1 (or earlier) dithering isn't really a thing yet, but it is unfortunate about iPhone 7 on iOS 15 though.

You can see on ebay or whatever that iPhone 8 on iOS 14 is like double the cost of iPhone 8 on iOS 16.

Anyways this is according to ChatGPT though:

1. iOS 14 is not one homogeneous display pipeline

Apple shipped many silent rendering changes inside iOS 14:

iOS 14.0 → very early, conservative pipeline
iOS 14.4 / 14.5 → transitional
iOS 14.6+ → noticeably different GPU / color handling (this is where many people quietly started reporting issues)

geargeeksp

axhng 12bit is probly from dithering , but i need to see them from faster than 240fps camera

been working on this for a while now btw

cheers

Lee

Clokwork

Very happy to see any channel showing the issues we face and bringing awareness. Thank you for your hard work!

I'll be checking out your audio equipment 🙂

parkmallbaby

Welcome to the forum, Lee.
I subbed to your YT look forward seeing you review monitors as well. I'm from the Philippines and I'm curious with these new brand of monitors like GOMA from China and sold online like Shopee or Lazada. Some of them look really nice and I even came across an actual 4:3 monitor sold as portable.

geargeeksp

i have been talking to one of our brother who is having some serious issue

I do hope to get to the bottom of Dithering but so far , i have found other issues that prevents me from isolating them completely, but I am leaning towards the idea that …

if they wanna have hdr and 10bit across the OS , then yeah , probly they might need to dither a lot for most of the panels

I have always used a 10bit panel ( 8bit + FRC) forever, i do own pure 10bit panel, but as a win11 user (at the least system), i can't say the whole thing bothers me at all, but again , this might only be something that goes extreme on mac .

regardless, I have been super busy with work , i will dub some of our videos to youtube….for now, again , economy is tough, i do hope to be able to ready the script again in english and do some simple editing from our existing project, but i would rather put those time into doing more research about dithering, if anybody has anything they wanna share , plz do let me know , i am on facebook and telegram a lot, I would be 100% free if I we r going on a trip during CNY (which is like for the coming 20 days or so), before we go, I do really need to finish my day job first.

looking forward to learn more about this topic.

cheers

Lee

p.s. yeah a proper 2000fps cam is involved as well btw.