Screens under microscope in slowmo (dithering / FRC tests)

andc Could you please do one subjective test for me please? When you are looking through the microscope at the display thats causing you issues (flickering subpixels), if you keep looking longer just through the microscope, does it start giving you issues or not? If not, then it would prove that the flicker is not the cause, but the eye fixation is - when there is such a clear outline as individual pixels to focus on, the problem could disappear no matter the flickering. Without the scope then, the eye fixation could be more complicated and thus the issue comes back. Please let me know.

hpst Youre trying to find one reason behind it all and thats the biggest obstrucion on solving it. I am bothered by aliasing (aliased subtitles in bsplayer gave me headache, turned it off and voila, its gone), I am bothered by PWM (tested with oscope on my LED ASUS work monitor, PWM below 100% brightness is painful, full brightness and Im using it for very long time now). It can also be bluelight, it can also be dithering. And the reason it can be so many things is because in my opinion, each of them disturb vision and especially binocular vision.
User erwin has just proven with his case that its both - new tech does something (many things) differently, and we might all have certain kind (maybe not all the same kind) of visual problems ( i do, getting treated now). Its a combination of things, thats why its so elusive. It has to be considered screen by screen, device by device. Unfortunately. And that is because the vision we all have (or lack) also plays a major role.

Also paper is way more textured than any screen ever will. Ink might be fuzzy, but the canvas is not and its in the same visual distance. Also some people reported that putting very textured matte cover on their phone screens solved it. Movement and fuzzy fonts might appear the same to an eye, both are hard to fixate upon.

martin I think the "that's the biggest obstruction" comment was unfair. I do believe there IS a primary technological root cause. I know you don't agree. Too many of us have the same symptoms with the same types of tech for it to be "everyone is different". It is impossible that each device has some qualititatively different cause and is far more logical to thing there is a primary root insult. I also disagree erwin's case PROVES what you claim. Erwin's relief could have been coincidental, because of or in spite of the meds, or he just got used to the new display as some people exerience initial strain and then relief. It doesn't prove anything.

I think we need to do practical things like shut off dithering and see if that helps. It's a clear and objective change and test. We can avoid PWM, block blue light, not use LED etc and those have proven not at all a common culprit. I think by claiming its 7 different factors and different in each person all you do is muddy things to the point you can't ever be sure what is or isn't working. How many times have you seen peolpe post "cured!" with some claim its a panel type or PWM or whatever, only to see them later say it is back? Nearly every time it is like that. I have had those eureka moments many times myself. I have not once seen more than ONE person say "I fixed my convergence, eliminated PWM, and use only CCFL and everything is fine now for good. I firmly believe that's because we haven't found the cause...once we do you will see MOST people noting relief in the same way people in an office stop having breathing problems once mold is removed etc. There is a noxious stimulus and we haven't found it.

hpst I mean for you it might be obstructive. If you manage to find one single reason behind all of these (apart from a health issue/eye problem, that would render all these issues nonexistent, which I hope for with my eye therapy), so if you find one technological culprit that applies to all, Ill congratulate you and will be very happy.
However from my experience so far it seems its multifactorial.

Can you please make test on iPad as well... It supposed to have Retina display as well, but my eyes are cool for looking it for hours... But MacBook Pro 2018 takes only minutes for the first symptoms to appear. Just to understand the difference.

I made a USB video with a cheap microscope.

On Sony XZ 2 not on max brightness there is lots of ficker. Dont know how reliable is the camera.

Can anyone watch the video and see if it causes any strain symptoms?
Watching the Sony Video on Computer seems to trigger me the symptoms. Have to rewatch it later.
Be careful watching the following video, too much flickering:

Sony Xz 2: https://1drv.ms/v/s!Ai2kKt-CrSGog4lbfMO-b1Gfo0iNqA
Original file: https://1drv.ms/u/s!Ai2kKt-CrSGog4lcKNFY32S7Z0H0lw
For some reason when converting to mp4 didn't convert it to the end.

On HTC One at máx brightness, there seem to be background noise probably seems on backlight.

HTC One: https://1drv.ms/v/s!Ai2kKt-CrSGog4la7Kj7wzV3pRnu9Q

Btw usually dithering works at what frequencies?

Andc, it's really amazing this thread. I have watch the first video. It seems i feel the neurological symptoms of watching this video, led's flickering on my 27'' monitor. Crazy.

Do you have the HTC 10 video? I am considering buying. BTW, do what is the microscope? Is it expensive? I might buy one.

Btw i bought a small filter 450nm, it only lets passes blue light. There's so much blue light everywhere. Even in your video of red, and green led's only there was so much blue light coming from the filter. THis means that this devices acomplish this color with lots of blue. There is no other way since the spectrum is has so much blue in it. A huge spike.

https://www.peauproductions.com/products/blue-light-filter

Weve done similar tests now under a powerful industrial microscope with some extra tools to get rid of intereferences like PWM and screen refresh rate. I can confirm some of the findings here - iphone 4s which was good for me showed no subpixel flicker at all. Iphone 7 shows quite a strong flickering. I also noticed flicker in apps, where the app layout and fonts doesnt flicker, but what the app loads (website browser) does. We will record our findings and eventually make an article and post it here. It is possible that PWM is a separate flicker from subpixel flickering (temporal rendering, dithering) and screen refresh rate. If these frequencies meet in a weird way, it produces flicker of way lower frequencies than what is safe. Also those may not be a whole screen occurence, but localized in different parts of the screen.
@andc Could you write me an email specifying what exactly you did in those tests? mjanas555 (at) gmail (dot) com

martin This matches the info on the patent I posted a while back. So it’s somehow creating a ‘pseudo 15hz’ flicker or something similar. Anybody setting their monitor to even 24hz will tell you how horrid that is.

It would be good if this research could expand to PC’s - use a known good GPU/PC/Monitor but load good and bad OS/Driver combinations to see if a trend emerges.

Surely the labs that make this technology would have inspected everything at a microscopic level before mass manufacture? This is to assume it is the panel at fault, which I still largely believe it isn’t.

diop Yes it does and no I dont expect they would. It seems to be a somewhat unfortunate combination of features that span monitor, OS and driver issues. It might even be a coincidence of the industry, where the left hand doesnt know what the right is doing. Seeing some industrial cases in the past years (c8 pollution by dupont for example), I higly doubnt anyone checks anything, yet on microscopic level. Or that they care even when they know to do anything about it if its not cost effective. This issue is not life threatening (unless you wanna suicide from it, which I dont blame you if you do), so its easy to disregard on industrial level compared to what other horrid stuff came from large industries.

martin It is not life threatening, but I would say it is certainly life limiting. I still think the industry have simply mass-imposed dithering (at driver level/hardware level) in new tech as a shortcut to avoid producing expensive 8bpc+ monitors, and to hide any signs that the display is of a lower quality. It wouldn’t surprise me if our expensive phones are using sub-par or older display tech, which relies on dithering to keep the perceived colours 99% perfect across the board. In many ways it could be said that dithering is an RGB standard in effect as it almost guarantees the same perceived color range as 10bit, minus the cost.

What I don’t understand after all this time is why there isn’t an off switch. Even when directly speaking to graphics developers, they either don’t know or don’t care about it. The freedesktop Linux post on another thread has been open for weeks, I simply want a black and white answer to.

What dithering is currently used on consumer devices? Can it be disabled? Somebody had to have created this pixel movement therefore it can be disabled in just a few lines of code.