Eye strain from LED backlighting in MacBook Pro

Maybe my last posts on this matter.

Tried an e-ink 13.3 inch monitor to a Mac, for someone like me who search &read alot I found my ultimate solution.

yes, 0 backlight, 0 flicker, 0 nothing!

***** at watching videos but I can't complain!

Reason? I'm scared! I mean scared!

from iristech.co/pwm-flicker/

Monitors are like a light bulb. But instead of one light bulb, we have millions of them in the size of several inches.

In order to reduce their energy use and brightness, you need to turn them ON and OFF hundred of times per second.

And this thing, this ON and OFF thing is called flicker.

Our brain is slow and we do not perceive this, but our eyes are fast and our iris starts to open and close like this

Of course, the amplitude here is much bigger the show the effect since the flicker rate of the monitor is much faster but basically, our eye starts to contract like a muscle.

You can test this by turning the light in your room ON and OFF fast and take a video or look in the mirror.

The science behind this thing is that in dark we need more light and our pupil is dilated.

When there is a lot of light around us or there is lots of daylight our pupil is undilated.

This is how our eye controls the amount of light entering it.

You may be thinking why do the monitors need to turn ON and OFF and why they can’t just glow all the time, but it’s not that simple.

LED lights will use a lot of energy if they are constantly ON and they may also overheat. Same goes for other monitor types.

The bigger problem is actually that the lower the frequency of this flicker and the bigger the breaks between this 2 states, the more energy efficient the monitor is.

For me thats the 1 pic better than 1,000 words moment, i'M done, I opt out!

Hi BecksBhanu2013

Upgrading to 10.13 eliminated the previous eye strain on MacBook Air

We did it in our workplace as we saw the download is available,

the intruding flicker is gone now,

So......for the new 2017 Air model

10.12.5 no eye strain

10.12.6 eye strain

10.13 no eye strain

Gut feeling? Apple's been tweaking under the hood back and forth

most like a kernel/driver thing.

So Get high Sierra and see what happens😉

Me will do it when I get home tonight

Curiosity kills the Mac? let's see...

PS new Air users might have some fun by first updating to 10.12.6 for that macStrain and then upgrading to 10.13 to feel the whole drama, don't miss this unique opportunity 😉

A 4th kind, of flicker! 😠

BFI ===> Black Frame Insertion { lot worse than PWM, more in the following link }

This is a technology used to eliminate Motion Blur.

When a display sure is of no PWM, and no dither either, yet still gives you crazy, there is another thing to look into.

BFI

This may be a decent read :: https://www.rtings.com/tv/tests/motion/image-flicker

we now have four.

1. BFI { likely most severe ⚠⚠⚠}

✅ low freq at 60 Hz in most case { if sync with 60 Hz refresh ; GPU driver BFI switch in place? }

✅ extreme irritation when large area of bright color displayed {

flicker graph :: extreme

bright color <vs> black inserted }

2. PWM { less severe ⚠⚠}

✅ higher freq, easily above 200 ~ 500 Hz { GPU driver PWM tweaking ? }

✅ bad irritation when large area of bright color displayed {

flicker graph :: extreme

bright color <vs> backlight off }

3. Dither { we may bark up the wrong tree regarding eye strain ⚠}

✅ low freq 60 Hz when FRC. Frame Rate Control { GPU driver Dither on/off switch ? }

✅ maybe ok ??

flicker graph :: relatively flat

proximate, neighboring colors used to create mid tone

4. Inversion { rarely cause any problem }

✅ low freq at 30 hz { half the refresh rate if 60 }

✅ can be bad with defective panel

Also......google "Sample-and-hold LCD", a more eye friendly approach.

For example, 1st result 1st page :: https://www.blurbusters.com/faq/oled-motion-blur/

Rabbit hole too deep

I will post this weekly, until someone from Apple responds. Bad news, people.

I own a 15' Macbook Pro 2015. From the beginning, my eyes hurt immensely. The black colours were too sharp and there was no way of making them softer (I tried everything, from using special apps, to recalibrating the screen).

After a month, I decided to buy a matte screen glare protector from Moshi. It helped a little, but the eyes still hurt.

After another month I've noticed that there are white soft spots on the screen (a monitor defect). I was still under warranty, so decided to get my screen replaced. Apple service center confirmed the problem with the white spots and replaced my screen.

And guess what? My eyes didn't hurt any more. The new screen is much softer to the eye. The blacks are not that sharp. No eye pain, no headaches.

My guess is that Apple uses screens from several suppliers. Each supplier provides a different screen quality. And I was lucky to get my screen replaced with the one from a good supplier.

This is a crazy lottery, people. Some people will get lucky and have proper screens right from the start. Some will get a worser screen and have problems.

Apple will not admit this. Because this defect covers at least 30% to 50% of all released macbooks. Replacing this amount of screens will make Apple go bankrupt.

My specs:

Macbook serial number: C0*******8WP

New screen model: 0000A02F

I think my old (bad) screen model was: 0000A02E

If you have headaches, you can look you screen serial number under System Preferences -> Displays -> Color -> Color LCD -> Open Profile -> Scroll to bottom to 'mmod' and look at 'Model' below.

Hey folks, I've been reading this topic a bit (not everything of course), and since I started having really really bad symptoms (which I didn't realize that they're coming from my 27" Apple LED Cinema display) like lightheadness, nausea, neck pain, etc., I wanted to investigate what's the heck is going on. I came across this thread and I'm glad I'm not the only one. I've tried everything from changing my monitor colors to reduce blue, trying dimming the brightness, a lot of other things, nothing helped... Except one thing, which reduced the symptoms quite a lot. Of course this is not the ultimate solution, for me this is only transition until I sell this junk (mac pro with dual led cinema display monitors).

So, what I did that helped is reduced the resolution, which natively is 2560x1440 to 2048x1152 for both monitors. Of course this is a big no for a designer, but I have no other solution at the moment until I sell this. It's the only way to try to do some necessary work.

Please try this and post your replies. It helped me.

Cannot wait to buy a PC and a good monitor. I heard benQ makes good monitors regarding this.

UPDATE::

Despite the fact my Samsung monitor has been okay, I have got a chance to do an HD vs Iris graphic's eye strain test like on page 161 risvan77 has observed by himself.

My colleagues bought a new 2017 MacBook Air recently (with Intel HD 6000 GPU), we put two macs side by side:

The left is her Air, the right is my Iris GPU MacBook Pro early 2015

I must admit that for no particular reason I almost fell in love with the Air's screen immediately out of the box although the color appears "washed"and the viewing angle is bad (Air seems to have a TN panel).

We then simply had same webpages loaded on two macs to see if the "HD vs Iris" myth is real!

IT IS REAL!

THE DIFFERENCE IS ALMOST INSTANT !!!

Both of us agree!!!!

The HD graphics Air feels right,

the Iris graphics Pro JUST feels wrong, ESPECIALLY SO as sitting next to her sibling!!!!!

Case closed!

The 10.12.6 update didn't fix the eye strain!!!.

I will wait for High Sierra, if the strain caused by ****** GPU drivers (now I can't think of anything else) does not disappear at all, I will immediately sale it for an Air(I love it already), because I can't bring a 21.5 inch monitor "on the go"!

So why do I make that post?

Because my MacBook Pro doesn't have me too much leeway for any test that worth testing, Last month I decided to "mess with" three windows 10 laptops: a Dell Latitude, a Lenovo, an Acer TravelMate, all have the same resolution of 1366x768 (low ppi means large physical pixels, important in this test), and Intel HD graphics 520/ 4400/ 405 respectively. All kinds of "hacks" and driver test been done! I then deactivated and reseted the OS and returned them one by one with in 14 days (that's the plan, and we can have a moral discussion about that later.)

{Despite been reading posts on related forums, I thought it's important to do this and to see it for myself!}

Note: large pixels because easier to see the shimmering patterns among the flicker, important!

Note: the Intel HD 4400 Lenovo has a discrete card: nVidia GTX 850M (but which is basically hijacked by integrated HD graphics since you can't disable the latter in UEFI/BIOS)

What I found out is about as bad as people claim it to be!

All three laptops' flicker on Windows 10 (different driver combinations tested, even tried "disable" the graphics card, no effects) (PWM captured on Dell {except on full bright}, the other two passed the camera test.), and eye strains too!!

when the brightness was 100% on Dell, the flicker didn't change , the screen was never "calm", eye strain came in about 15~30 minutes.

Acer (this new model has unhackable UEFI/BIOS ) and Dell flickered terribly even in the UEFI/BIOS mode (that's a SHOCKER! ) ( GPU driver not loaded in UEFI mode ). Turned out Intel used a GOP (Graphics Output Protocol) driver as a low layer graphics interface (seen the GOP version in UEFI ).

Flickers in UEFI/BIOS without OS even boot in!!?? What the **** is that!

Something smells fundamentally fishy!. [MARKER 1]

I had Other OS's tested on all three laptops by live booting a USB drive ==> Ubuntu, Manjaro Linux, and remix OS (this last one basically transformed the laptops into a laptop Android which runs Android apps). Each chosen for a good reason.

Each OS successfully recognized the Intel HD card, installed the driver automatically (with no dithering enabled by default {as far as my google and gut can tell} ) (no PWM {noticeably} too), but it all resulted in the same eyestrain on each OS on each laptop with no different from that eyestrain on Windows 10 on each mode respectivelyl!

If I were to put High Sierra on them, I'd bet the flicker must have been the same. [MARKER 2]

With the cooperation of large, non-retina pixels {think "flicker zoomed in"}, it's easy to see the flickering pixels dancing, "rippling" fast around on the screen, I could clearly see a "residual flickering" pattern like a "45 degree rotated checkers board" with small squares and stripes shooting diagonally all over it( So NO! It's not that blue-and-yellow waves you capture on camera). I can also tell its frequency was rather low! And by its intensity it's not inversion.

And if you think cameras should also be able to see this flickering pattern?, ~Wrong!! Our cellphones/tablet were not able to capture anything, at all !!! (Asus zenfone, iPhone SE, NEXUS 9, All failed!, with or without 3rd party camera apps)

Whatever that is, it doesn't look like PWM,...much less dither, ( or another kind!, a new PWM, I thought) The intensity is sickening, unmistakably.

The timing of the flicker looks not uniform for each pixel, they take turns..., one moment some are on and some are off and vice versa the next, alternately! MAYBE it's in this way the area as a whole can retain a static brightness at any moment. (Cameras can only see "fluctuations", if there's none it sees nothing.) [MARKER 3]

Put together MARKER 1+2+3 :: that's when I thought something is missing, things just don't add up too well. I don't know.

Until~~~ I bumped into this BFI thing (which in itself is a huge topic) through tons of tons of random reference click.

it could quite possibly make the equation more complete.

I was trying to see whether PWM and BFI look indistinguishable to one another to the eye, or the eye can tell a difference between the two and how big the difference would that be, I did a simple simulation!

The idea is to draw keyframe images, and make them into a single GIF file. It would be like a slowed down version of their actual frequencies, but more or less it can give you some taste about it. And here it is! (I've tested the GIFs on Safari, Chrome and Opera I do like best the Safari's way of rendering GIF animation. )

NOTE: You may want to scale up if images appear too small on your screen. Flashes in these GIFs may cause eye strain though, so be careful!

Okay, PWM first!!

because PWM is like a 2-phase full-screen strobe {the whole backlight quickly turned on and off; } I only need to draw 2 keyframes:

...and make them into a GIF that quickly shifts between the two:

As you can see:

1. the brightness of the area around those letters are now dropped like 50%! In other words yes, it dims!

2. Think that's an eye strain? Read on!!

Let's move to BFI!!!

I started by creating a simple 5-phase strobe/scan pattern that takes 5 images based on the same template.

But this time only one fifth of the area is displayed(strobed) in each keyframe.

It takes one cycle to cover all areas, top to bottom!

Animate that sequence in a GIF:

I don't know about you but here's what I think:

1.It makes PWM flicker look like an eye massage!

2.it definitely disrupted my concentration.

3.it looks like a migraine trigger!!

4.I think flashes that came in arranged sequence can do more harm than just plain flash.

(sorry for the eyestrain folks, Ill see what I can add in the coming days )

Which version of Mac OS are you using? Try downgrade to Sierra. I can't use my MacBook (2015) on High Sierra. On Sierra my eyes are fine. Don't know why. Maybe it will help you. Please share your thoughts

UPDATE::

My colleague just updated the MacBook Air from 10.12.5(came out of the box) to 10.12.6!

And eye strain occurs (a very mild one)!! But I can notice too.

Guess I'm now a self trained strain teller, I use fast read scan method

Same lighting on the test site, nothing changed environmentally.

tested for a good 3 days now, eye strain by strange subtle "flicker"!

Now it's infected!

BE WARNED,

for mid-2017 MacBook Air owners out there,

Time Machine it before update or skip it all together.

Continued from last post

With all findings piling in this thread , no one from Apple has stepped forward (prove me wrong?) to clarify on anything, which means Apple definitely has full knowledge on this matter and/but they are sticking to their guns.

PWM is a cheap way to dim the screen, the alternatives(which do exist) is more eye freindly but more expensive to assemble, likewise by using dithering on cheaper(a lot!) panels Apple can save a lot cost, the result is higher profit, yet pricy panels that do million colors in hardware side are obviously better for eye health, guess not much appealing to shareholders on the top.

Am I right Apple.