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Comment by noncoml | Hacker News Reader

Grew up with CRTs giving me horrible headaches and LCDs was a breath of fresh air for my eyes. Headaches gone! Then came OLEDs and brought back headaches.

Luckily Apple still sells the iPhone SE with LCD. I really don’t know what I will do once LCDs are gone.

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Is it OLED displays themselves that bother you, or the truly horrid subpixel arrangements they use on phones?

I love my LG OLED TV, with a full matrix (RGBW at every pixel). Phones, using something like PenTile, usually have half the number of red and blue subpixels, and in funny arrangements at that. Phone OLED displays make my eyes hurt, especially when anything is scrolling.

Pentile is a pox on the entire phone industry that they use to justify using crappy low resolution displays under the guise of something higher resolution. "1080p" Pentile is really like an 880p RGB matrix display.

Is that the same with iPhones too?

Yes it is. Deranged subpixel arrangements aren't an inherent feature of OLEDs, but I believe they're easier to manufacture so they're used in everything. The only OLED product I remember having normal RGB stripe pixels was the original PSVR, and that was dropped for the PSVR 2.

Samsung especially likes to mess with this, these days they are using triangular pixels for some reason.

I wonder why? With CRTs there is noticeable flickering but no such issue happens with OLEDs. Is it just the contrast ratio?

Regarding CRT flicker: for monitors, you don't want to drive a CRT below 90Hz (120 Hz is pretty stable), even TVs were at the end 100Hz (refreshing frames multiple times). The problem was "cost effective" office PCs with graphics hardware just capable of 60Hz refresh, which isn't a great idea, unless you have a monochrome monitor with slow phosphor. (Meaning, this was just an abuse of technology – and workers.)

> even TVs were at the end 100Hz (refreshing frames multiple times)

Maybe in Europe? But 100Hz is a terrible thing to do with 60Hz signals. Possibly US bound HD CRT TVs did 120Hz? But I don't recall hearing about those ever.

Yes, my experience was definitively European, as in PAL. It was rather neat, until the image panned… (The problem being, apparently you still have to alternate between fields in order to maintain the illusion of interlaced video, so you get an A-B-A-B C-D–C-D… sequence. Some attempts were made to improve the resulting interlace clash by comb filters, etc, but this only started to work somewhat properly, when the days of CRTs were already numbered.) I actually don't know if there were similar developments with 60Hz standards.

Not entirely sure but I think OLED pixels modulate brightness with PWM, which causes high frequency (though invisible) flickering.

LCDs have PWM-dimmed backlights, so if your laptop isn't set to maximum brightness, you're probably staring at a flickering surface too.

Perhaps a simpler explanation is just contrast? Both OLEDs and CRTs can produce much higher contrast than LCDs.

No PWM is common for LCDs https://www.notebookcheck.net/PWM-Ranking-Notebooks-Smartpho...

The PWM frequency is typically much higher for LCDs than OLEDs, if it is used, and much less likely to be a problem.

Some OLEDs don't use PWM, and some PWM fast enough not to cause problems.

Also badly driven LCD backlights can flicker badly too.

My wife has issues with bright screens, for her, matte coatings/films are a lifesaver. Have you tried those?

I'm not sure how OLED can give you a headache, but not an LCD.

What about MicroLED? New Macs and iPad Pro use them.

Not the OP but I am sensitive and sadly found the MiniLED to be unusable as well. Had to switch from a 15’ MBP to the low-cost 13” with the old-school 500nit display.

You mean MiniLED?

i'm holding out for LED-C

Apple is thoughtfully calling the Vision Pro displays microOLED, not to be confused with microLED.

In this situation microLED should be the same as OLED, also those don't use it.

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