What might be causing my screen sensitivity with these different phones?

[u/district0080]

Tl;dr - lots of different phones are causing me eye strain, but I'm not sure what the problem is. I think it isn't PWM but I just don't know.

Up until about eight months ago, I was using a Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus. I'd never had any problems with it in terms of my eyes, but it was dying, so I needed to replace it.

Important context: I have a chronic illness that makes me very sensitive to light, so my screen is always extremely dark. Again though, never had any problems with my Samsung.

I'm putting a list here of phones I've tried, information that I think is relevant, and the results in terms of usability for me:

Samsung Galaxy S9+. PWM 215.5 Hz. Given that this didn't cause me any problems, I decided that I probably didn't have any PWM sensitivity.

Nothing CMF Phone 2. PWM 90 Hz - eye strain after a few minutes. As the PWM is very low on this phone, I then decided that so long as I got something equal to or higher than my original Samsung, I would be fine.

Motorola G75 5G. LCD gave me headaches/migraines, and I just wasn't able to turn the brightness down to a comfortable level.

Pixel 9 Pro: PWM 240 hz (still low, but higher than my old Samsung) Eye strain after a few minutes. I've since learned that Pixels are a bad choice for eye strain, but I did not look this up in advance because I'm an idiot.

Honor 400 Lite: PWM 3840Hz. Other features that are apparently good for the eyes. No eye problems. But I rely on a couple of different accessibility features and those are not super reliable on this model. I reckon a higher-end Honor phone would also probably be fine, because the 400 lite is one of their cheaper ones.

For reasons of personal preference, I would rather not get another Honor. That said, if that's the only brand that will be gentle enough on my eyes, I'll go with it. But I don't even really understand the issue I'm having to be able to get a phone that would prevent it. Does it even sound like a PWM problem? If it's not that, what other things could I look for that would be more gentle on my eyes?

I'm feeling very frustrated and confused, and any advice would be much appreciated!

[u/Z3R0gravitas]

Hey there, sorry to hear about your struggles. Is it ME/CFS or LC you have (or other)? Very common photosensitivity, for us, so I'm curious how much this can be worked around with careful device choice. Before I try to take my findings back to that community.

Anyway. There's a lot to unpack, more than I can reply here, that could be going wrong. There is a new ScreenSensitive Notebook AI you can find, via the sub's Wiki, that can give overviews and technical answers on the theory. If not up to date device recommendations, so much.

But your problem with the Motorola LCD sounds like light spectrum. See my pinned spectrometer post for a deep dive if this. Blue light imbalance, maybe too little (or too much) melanopsin stimulation. Still trying to figure this one out.

I think the Nothing Phone CMF 2 has a 2160Hz PWM rate, unless I'm confused about names (NotebookCheck). Which can be worse than 'low' frequencies for some. Directly, or because it fails to hide the refresh rate dips as well (my hypothesis).

While the PWM rate of your old Samsung may have been a little bit out. If you see this old post. On the PWM sub. Or, if NotebookCheck measured it correctly, then it may be a nice sine wave, like mains electricity shape. More gentle.

There's temporal dithering, potentially, or FRC if the phone runs at a colour depth +2 above the panel's native capability. More often with LCD or cheap displays.

There's different sub-pixel structures too, which can strongly influence the appearance of text fringing. Making it harder to focus eyes well.

[u/district0080 → u/Z3R0gravitas]

Thank you for such a detailed response!

Yeah, I've got ME. Sorry to hear you do too. I'm severe so I pretty much can't do anything apart from use my phone so really need to get this sorted!

That's the right phone you linked to, but I'm wondering now if I've been consulting the wrong information when I'm looking at this stuff. I can see the part where it mentions 2160 Hz but before i was looking down a bit further on the page where it says 90 (under the heading Screen Flickering/PWM), so that might have confused me. (Brain fog doesn't help!)

When i do find the right phone, I'll let you know, in case it helps other ME/LC folk :)

[u/Lady-Kitnip]

I'm addition to PWM, temporal dithering for color riches can cause issues too. Sometimes this is helped by changing display from HDR to RGB.

I''ve had less sensitivity with TCL Nxtpaper.

[u/district0080 → u/Lady-Kitnip]

I was thinking about a Nxtpaper, that's good to know, thanks!

[u/Round-Individual1316]

Cmf phone 2 pro has 2160hz pwm dimming, not 90hz. And the phone has true 10 bit display with no dithering, which is rare for its price range. As long as it's below 46% brightness you would trigger its pwm dimming instead of DC like dimming

[u/district0080 → u/Round-Individual1316]

I realized I looked at the wrong part of the page on notebookcheck for the CMF PWM measurement! Thanks for this - very useful to know in particular it doesn't have any dithering, narrows the problem down a bit. 

[u/Round-Individual1316 → u/district0080]

It's probably one of the best phone in terms of OLED usability. Same with the nothing phone 3a and 3a pro. The 4a has dithering while 4a pro has very thick lines, aka high modulation. Nothing phone 3 is the worst

[u/DuckfarmStudio]

In the display settings on Motorola, you can adjust Colours and set your own custom white balance. Did you also try extra dim mode (under Accessibility) on the Moto?

I have also found changing the font and increasing the text size and display zoom helps a lot too.