On this planet of shows, it is usually stated that quicker refresh charges are higher. We have seen smartphones extensively undertake 120Hz shows prior to now few years, whereas the PC gaming aspect of issues has seen displays launch at 360Hz and past. However the refresh fee you see together with your eyes is not the one refresh fee you must care about.
The Honor Magic 6 Professional just lately launched with a PWM refresh fee of 4,320Hz, eclipsing the earlier report Honor set with the Honor 90 and Honor Magic 5 Professional final Summer season. That quantity is turning into an increasing number of necessary as ultra-bright telephone shows have gotten extra frequent, serving to to alleviate eye pressure when utilizing these telephones in mattress at evening.
However whereas an growing variety of firms are beginning to promote elevated PWM refresh charges, only a few of them are keen to speak in regards to the expertise behind the glass. It is nice to see consideration paid to a subject that might have an effect on hundreds of thousands of smartphone customers, but it surely’s additionally irritating to see a scarcity of transparency from the businesses behind the change motion.
Secrecy and proprietary strategies
Industrial espionage is a time period for a purpose. Firms that develop difficult, profit-making merchandise do not need to reveal their secrets and techniques to the remainder of the world to be simply copied. That drawback has accelerated tenfold in an period the place merchandise might be cloned on manufacturing strains and offered below a random model title on Amazon.
In simply the previous two years, we have seen substantial competitors within the show market from names like BOE, China Star, and Visionox, names you will have by no means even heard of till this text. Till these firms got here alongside, an OLED panel in your favourite machine was virtually assuredly made by Samsung or LG.
Nevertheless, Samsung’s dominance within the AMOLED market meant that any choices the corporate made finally trickled right down to firms utilizing Samsung shows of their merchandise. As any PWM-sensitive individual will inform you, Samsung AMOLED panels are the worst sort of show for eye well being.
Honor makes use of a BOE panel that will get to five,000 nits brightness below the precise situations, but it makes use of fascinating expertise to make sure it is not searing your retinas.
Unironically, not one of the finest telephones for PWM-sensitive folks have shows made by Samsung. That is as a result of a few of Samsung’s greatest options depend on flickering the show to trick your eyes into seeing one thing that is not truly there, and it wreaks havoc in some folks’s brains — together with myself.
That is a part of why I used to be so excited to get to make use of the Honor Magic 6 Professional, as its PWM fee is 10x the refresh fee of the Galaxy S24 sequence, making certain that I will use it for lengthy intervals of time.
Whereas that is nice — and it means I can lastly use a telephone with a snug show and digicam — Honor’s methodology of reaching this excessive fee is much from typical. In brief, meaning it does not work for everybody.
With out entering into the weeds, my mild meter cannot correctly learn the backlight refresh frequency of the Honor Magic 6 Professional’s show, despite the fact that I can see what’s taking place with a digicam. It is a aspect impact of Honor doing one thing “bizarre” with its show, so I requested the corporate to enter a bit extra element on it.
Honor’s show panel works in another way from every other I’ve examined, and whereas that works nicely for me, it does not for some people.
Sadly, all I used to be met with was a disappointing “sorry, we will not present additional particulars on this expertise.”
This makes it obscure why this telephone works extremely nicely for my eyes however immediately causes ache for different flicker-sensitive customers. It is an issue I’ve had with different firms, like Google and Samsung, who each have refused to remark or present extra particulars on how their shows work past what every firm’s advertising division gives.
In the meantime, Motorola continues to be one of many solely firms that may focus on the subject at size with me. They even boasted how their flicker-reduction expertise ensures that the show is on 99.51% of every responsibility cycle, a extra technical time period I’ve by no means heard from every other firm.
Motorola is among the solely firms speaking about the way it actively performs market analysis to learn the way a lot of its buyer base is negatively affected by show flicker.
Motorola has even disclosed to me that it performs market analysis research particular to show flicker in an try to determine what number of Motorola prospects are negatively affected by flicker.
That is the form of market-leading conduct I count on from an organization like Samsung that might doubtlessly negatively have an effect on the well being of a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of individuals around the globe. It is simply as necessary as making certain that telephones do not emit dangerous radiation, one thing all manufacturers have to do earlier than getting approval by governing our bodies just like the FCC.
Fortunately, I used to be capable of sit down with Invoice Maffucci from Kopin Company, an organization that focuses on creating shows and lenses for XR units, to debate a few of the finer factors of how shows work. It was a refreshing dialog and it helped me perceive the tenuous relationship between applied sciences like PWM and LTPO.
Applied sciences like PWM and LTPO complicate the already difficult nature of OLED panels, and firms aren’t notably keen to reveal how these work collectively.
Maffucci defined that an OLED show can mild up and switch off in microseconds — one microsecond is one millionth (0.000001) of a second — which means that firms now have choices for dimming that they by no means had with LCDs. Couple that with the truth that lowering voltage on an OLED panel an excessive amount of could cause dangerous coloration replica and noise, and you will rapidly perceive why firms have began utilizing PWM — which glints the show on and off quickly — extra usually to manage brightness.
Nevertheless, this turns into much more difficult if you throw LTPO into the combo, a expertise that adjusts the refresh fee of the show based mostly on what’s taking place on display. However whereas this feels like it might intervene with the “backlight” cycle on an OLED, Maffucci confirmed to me that the majority LTPO OLEDs do not truly alter the refresh fee of the show itself.
Fairly, what’s being adjusted is the graphics driver’s rendering fee, and it is normally carried out at a quantity that divides evenly into the show’s precise refresh fee. For Honor, meaning the 360Hz fee additional complicates the state of affairs in methods the corporate is not keen to reveal.
I’ve observed that extra folks than ever are flocking to PWM-sensitive online communities, and I believe it is each a mixture of extra flickering shows than ever plus folks’s raised consciousness that this can be a actual concern — not simply one thing of their creativeness.
Even Google is taking part in round with new brightness controls on the system stage, purportedly baking in a brand new “even dimmer” possibility into Android 15. Whereas that might assist some folks, the present “further dim” possibility in Android appears to wreak havoc on delicate eyes.
Nevertheless, the development for extra eye-friendly cellular shows has considerably improved over the previous yr. Firms like Motorola are main the way in which, however show producers like BOE, Visionox, and China Star all appear to acknowledge that one thing wants to alter to stop extra widespread issues from taking place.
Now, if we might solely get firms to be rather less secretive about issues which are problematic to their customers’ well being, that will be nice. Regardless, I am blissful to see firms like Honor attempting to make higher shows, even when the corporate does not need to reveal its secrets and techniques simply but.
