iPad mini I didn't realize that 60hz on the iPad mini was this bad

[Blur Busters]

I don’t get it. I’ve never been able to tell a difference between 60hz and 120hz.

As I'm a known authority here in Hz (cites in >35 papers) -- you have to track your eyes while you scroll a screen. It varies on the situation and screen, but a good test is TestUFO Panning Map Readability Test, or the TestUFO Ghosting test. Stationary gaze is not as noticeable.

What I notice is LCD GtG throttles differences between Hz badly. The M1, while wickedly fast, is famously whispered hushly as one of the slower 120Hz LCDs, in terms of GtG speeds.

The approximate real-world differences in motionblur perceived by human eyes, for eye-tracking a smooth scroll/pan:

- Macbook Pro M1 ... about 1.1x motionblur difference between 60Hz and 120Hz on same display
- Macbook Pro M5 ... about 1.5x motionblur difference between 60Hz and 120Hz on same display
- OLED iPad Pro ... about 2.0x motionblur difference between 60Hz and 120Hz on same display

When you zero out GtG, the latter has the same amount of motionblur as 1/60sec shutter vs 1/120sec shutter, during eye-tracking a pan/scroll/etc. That's assuming eye-tracked pan having equivalent motionblur to a sports-panned photograph for the same motionspeed; as a reference scroll motionblur equality. Bigger screens (e.g. OLED iPad Pro) shows this more easily than small screens (e.g. iPhone) or slow screens (e.g. Macbook Pro M1)

GtG is pixel fading from one color to the next. It is like a slow moving camera shutter before/after refreshtime. You don't want a 10ms shutter movement before/after a 8.33ms shutter full-open time. Exhorbitantly slow GtG throttles Hz differences, even if GtG is slightly under a Hz. You need fast GtG (like an instant shutter) to eliminate GtG-derived blurring, and keep it pure MPRT blurring (eye tracked motionblur cannot be less than refreshtime on sample-and-hold, at GtG=0.0000).

Also, for those upgrading to future Hz, geometrics helps too (60Hz vs 240Hz at 0ms GtG is way more noticeable than 60Hz vs 120Hz at non-zero GtG -- you can have as much as almost 6-7x motionblur differential based on the combined Hz differential and the GtG being zeroed out). If any of you attend nuts and bolt supplier conventions like SID DisplayWeek, there is persistent rumors in the display panel manufacturing industry that Apple is moving to 240Hz OLEDs in a "Pro" model by year ~2028 for the even-further-improved scroll ergonomics.

Obviously, not everyone instantly notices, but GtG speeds and bigger Hz differentials, does amplify differences. The 480p-vs-8K effect, rather than 720p-vs-1080p, behaves very similarly in the temporal dimension during continuous medium-speed scrolls on big screens. Some people flick scroll with a fixed eye gaze rather than eye-tracking the scroll, and this makes the Hz differences less noticeable. Screens look different with stationary gaze vs moving gaze (there's a demo on TestUFO -> Green Menu -> Eye Tracking).

P.S. TestUFO 3.0 has launched. Display-P3 support has been added, and TestUFO is finally iPhone/iPad friendly too.

 

[headlessmike]

I have an iPad Pro and an iPad mini. While I can definitely tell the difference between 120Hz and 60Hz when using them, after a few minutes of using the mini I forget about the difference. I much prefer the mini over the Pro for almost every use case.

 

[leifp]

ProMotion is far from perfect but its absence is painful. It keeps me from the iPad mini. Perhaps next year’s refresh will have the hallowed and rumoured ProMotion OLED…

 

[MacCheetah3]

I didn't compare it to my other devices right when I got it. I compared it to them after I noticed that something was definitely wrong. And like @klasma said, it's likely not the 60hz that is the issue and I think that's true.

Correct, it’s not (primarily/simply) refresh rate. @Blur Busters might be onto something with the gray-to-gray (GtG) mention. I haven’t thought about, considered GtG for a while as LCDs rarely broke the 1ms GtG barrier.

An anecdote: my previous displays were the Samsung CF390 and Acer Nitro ED320QR. They were okay — my low budget trials of curved LCDs — though (text) scrolling was especially horrendous. Ghosting is probably the closest term I can think of to describe it. When scrolling at any speed, faster was worse indeed, and any display refresh rate, the text would have this stuttering semi-transparency. Basically, text was impossible to read until there was no motion. By the way, those two monitors are VA-type LCD panels, for what it's worth. When I switched to the MSI MAG321UP, a 0.03ms QD-OLED, the motion/text clarity experience is night vs. day difference. And yes, the improvement is at any refresh setting. During my purchase research, I did notice the GtG spec but didn’t put a lot of weight on it until this discussion.

So, perhaps, this is another case of Apple’s (far) more selective details publishing being a problem. For most customers, I think, less nerdy is more/better. However, not disclosing certain elements has, at least occasionally, been a surfacing problem. For example, the infamous iPhone throttling debacle — it made/makes sense but lack of documentation didn’t go well.

 

[Homme]

As a Mini iPad/iPhone lover you may not want to hear this but the iPad Mini 6/7 are just bad panels regardless of advertised PPI or color specs. The last great iPad Mini display was the 5, you could tell the 5 display was sharper, less ghosting, and the colors were richer. Apple **** the bed with the new gens.

The 6/7’s display is still decent even for a iPad like it

yeah the 5’s display was neat. Not a huge difference to the Mini 4’s display but the Mini 4’s display is the best Display in terms of technological quality ( and it was slimmer as well).

 

[Mity]

As I'm a known authority here in Hz (cites in >35 papers) -- you have to track your eyes while you scroll a screen. It varies on the situation and screen, but a good test is TestUFO Panning Map Readability Test, or the TestUFO Ghosting test. Stationary gaze is not as noticeable.

What I notice is LCD GtG throttles differences between Hz badly. The M1, while wickedly fast, is famously whispered hushly as one of the slower 120Hz LCDs, in terms of GtG speeds.

The approximate real-world differences in motionblur perceived by human eyes, for eye-tracking a smooth scroll/pan:

- Macbook Pro M1 ... about 1.1x motionblur difference between 60Hz and 120Hz on same display
- Macbook Pro M5 ... about 1.5x motionblur difference between 60Hz and 120Hz on same display
- OLED iPad Pro ... about 2.0x motionblur difference between 60Hz and 120Hz on same display

When you zero out GtG, the latter has the same amount of motionblur as 1/60sec shutter vs 1/120sec shutter, during eye-tracking a pan/scroll/etc. That's assuming eye-tracked pan having equivalent motionblur to a sports-panned photograph for the same motionspeed; as a reference scroll motionblur equality. Bigger screens (e.g. OLED iPad Pro) shows this more easily than small screens (e.g. iPhone) or slow screens (e.g. Macbook Pro M1)

GtG is pixel fading from one color to the next. It is like a slow moving camera shutter before/after refreshtime. You don't want a 10ms shutter movement before/after a 8.33ms shutter full-open time. Exhorbitantly slow GtG throttles Hz differences, even if GtG is slightly under a Hz. You need fast GtG (like an instant shutter) to eliminate GtG-derived blurring, and keep it pure MPRT blurring (eye tracked motionblur cannot be less than refreshtime on sample-and-hold, at GtG=0.0000).

Also, for those upgrading to future Hz, geometrics helps too (60Hz vs 240Hz at 0ms GtG is way more noticeable than 60Hz vs 120Hz at non-zero GtG -- you can have as much as almost 6-7x motionblur differential based on the combined Hz differential and the GtG being zeroed out). If any of you attend nuts and bolt supplier conventions like SID DisplayWeek, there is persistent rumors in the display panel manufacturing industry that Apple is moving to 240Hz OLEDs in a "Pro" model by year ~2028 for the even-further-improved scroll ergonomics.

Obviously, not everyone instantly notices, but GtG speeds and bigger Hz differentials, does amplify differences. The 480p-vs-8K effect, rather than 720p-vs-1080p, behaves very similarly in the temporal dimension during continuous medium-speed scrolls on big screens. Some people flick scroll with a fixed eye gaze rather than eye-tracking the scroll, and this makes the Hz differences less noticeable. Screens look different with stationary gaze vs moving gaze (there's a demo on TestUFO -> Green Menu -> Eye Tracking).

P.S. TestUFO 3.0 has launched. Display-P3 support has been added, and TestUFO is finally iPhone/iPad friendly too.

I'm using the LG 32UN880 Ultrafine monitors. Here are the picture quality specs:

I notice that LG states 5ms "GtG at Faster". Does this mean that GtG is less than 5ms? I'm trying to research what my monitor and high-end ones have, is it closer to 1ms? I wanted to compare the mini7's response times but they are not disclosed by Apple but Notebookcheck tested GtG at ~40ms:

And thanks a lot for explaining this. I only know of response times in general which is that 5ms is enough for productivity use and even lower is better mostly for gaming but it was great to understand why this is happening when eye-track scrolling.

 

[Traverse]

There is something else going on with the iPad mini's screen in my opinion. My Studio Display is 60hz and it's fine, my mother's iPhone is 60hz and I never have issues when helping her with tech support. However, on the iPad mini (both 6th and 7th generation) I use the "Reduce Motion" accessibility option. The 7th generation is fast enough where I don't notice long pauses, but motion on the panel they use for the mini just isn't as smooth to me.

It's pretty annoying. The iPad mini may be "budget" from Apple's viewpoint, but in absolute terms it is not a cheap device and yet the screen just doesn't feel nice. Also, on paper it has excellent specs, but it just seems dull compared to the other Apple LCD displays.

 

[Allen_Wentz]

I tested the v1 iPad air against the Mini and bought the Air because of the Mini's less good display. Then years later I tested the Mini 6 for weeks and again decided the display just was not good enough (I did not try to quantify why the Mini's display was not good enough). Briefly observing in-store I found that the Mini 7's display also was not good enough to justify the purchase cost.

It is too bad because I find the Min's size and weight ideal. I have been whining for a "Pro" quality Mini for years and look forward to the rumored iPad Mini 8. Most of my display tech day is spent looking at above average quality displays (iPhone Pros, Macbook Pros, Viewsonic Pro displays) so that may impact my opinion.