I finally made the move from my 11 to OLED with my 15 Pro Max, and man am I disappointed with the screen. Apparently I’m sensitive to PWM flicker, and at lower brightness it’s very distracting and tiring on my eyes. I don’t know if this is an OLED limitation, or just this particular kind of panel, but it’s not something I’ve noticed with LED displays.
OLED has always felt like a stopgap on the way to other tech like micro LED, which hopefully doesn’t have the same kinds of drawbacks like burn in and PWM flicker.
PWM dimming is only necessary if you value color accuracy. Chinese OEMs tend to provide a choice to use DC dimming, but I do not think Apple will ever accept the burden of adding another list item to their settings pages.
Most people only notice flicker during saccades. A larger proportion of people will notice scrolling purple/blue smear, that manifests itself at extremely low source current, when you have really dark shades of grey on a dimmed screen in low brightness environments.
As an aside, burn-in and mura seem to be solved problem these days, due to display driver ICs constantly characterizing the I-V curve of individual subpixels and applying compensation using aging models. Variabilities introduced during manufacturing are also optically captured for compensation.
Additionally, there exists compensation circuits within the TFT plane for fine-adjustement of uniformity for each subpixel.
Cheap LED lighting typically uses full-wave rectification and strobes at double the AC line frequency, so 120Hz or 100Hz depending on region. It's the same flicker as seen with magnetic ballast fluorescent tubes, which also lit up on both halves of the AC waveform. I personally find 100Hz flicker annoying. Many LED lights are available with better power supplies with no visible flicker.
Half-wave rectification is possible, but I've personally only seen it in indicator lights, not room lighting. I imagine 60Hz or 50Hz strobing would be unacceptably annoying even to people who are not sensitive to flicker.
I'd argue LED flicker to be more noticeable than fluorescent or incandescent flicker because LEDs typically go from 100 % brightness to 0 % brightness in one cycle. Incandescent lights dim smoothly, so you don't get the "phantom array" effect. Fluorescent lights actually go through a range of hues during a cycle but typically don't reach complete black.
You are being very dismissive here. How do you know that everybody that complains about screen or LED flicker are "imagining things"?
Case in point, I agree with GP. I am also sensitive to LEDs flickering at 50 or 100 Hz (EU resident here). The flickering is more apparent when moving the eyes as opposed to staring at the flickering source. I assume some people's eyes have more "integration time" than others.
I am particularly sensitive to PWM/LED light flickering. I was recently in a hotel, and the WC was lit with some extremely dim, low-frequency lighting. I waved my hands in front of my face, and could easily make out a stroboscopic effect. PWM flickering gives me a massive headache, and I really wish manufacturers would use slightly more complex circuitry to give out a constant light (whether display, or household lighting) at different brightness levels.
I also dislike 60 Hz displays for this very reason. We should definitely normalise higher refresh rates for displays throughout, from smartphones to monitors.
"imagining things" - That's always hard to be sure of. In my case I have no idea what it is but I just don't like looking at OLED screens, especially reading. I got a samsung a couple of years ago and as soon as I had it I didn't really like reading on it, especially in low light. So for my next phone I went back to LCD and immediately preferred it. I couldn't care less about color reproduction scores (or whatever) on a tiny screen. If I want perfect color I'll go outside.
I finally made the move from my 11 to OLED with my 15 Pro Max, and man am I disappointed with the screen. Apparently I’m sensitive to PWM flicker, and at lower brightness it’s very distracting and tiring on my eyes. I don’t know if this is an OLED limitation, or just this particular kind of panel, but it’s not something I’ve noticed with LED displays.
OLED has always felt like a stopgap on the way to other tech like micro LED, which hopefully doesn’t have the same kinds of drawbacks like burn in and PWM flicker.