iPhone 17 Models Include Toggle to Disable Screen Flickering (PWM)

[Cayden]

Its not essential for anything it is a cost saving measure mobile devices implemented without any regard towards users.

For example OLED tvs and monitors use DC dimming with no compromises.

That’s simply not true. Because of the way that LEDs work, they will appear at different brightnesses at the same voltage level. However, the differences between different LEDs brightness is significantly less at higher voltages. This means always using a higher voltage, but then keeping the display on for less time, allows full color accuracy while also allowing display dimming. If you use DC dimming, you will always lose color accuracy unless you have separate power lines for red, blue, and green LED sub-pixels, accounting for the brightness differences for each LED type. This might be possible in a large device such as a TV (though extremely expensive and would take a massive amount of engineering to make work), but that’s simply not possible in a phone. Additionally, a capacitive touch screen makes separate power lines significantly more likely to have interference. So engineers did what engineers always do, they made a design that hit the spec, a dimmable display with color accuracy that looks identical to the vast majority of the population.

 

[Jensend]

Its not essential for anything it is a cost saving measure mobile devices implemented without any regard towards users.

For example OLED tvs and monitors use DC dimming with no compromises.

Here is an RGB(0,0,0) to RGB(31,31,31) gradient on my LG CX OLED TV set to maximum OLED Light (brightness) in SDR mode with my DSLR camera set to 3.2 second exposure time:

Here is the same gradient, but with the TV set to minimum brightness, but with the camera set to a 15 second exposure:

The image quality is significantly worse at the lowest brightness setting.
There is about a 5x difference in light output between the brightest and darkest settings.

On my Pixel 8 Pro, there is about a 500x difference between the brightest and darkest settings when manually setting brightness. And it's nearly a 1000x difference if you include auto brightness when using the display under bright light.

The performance demands on a smartphone display are enormously higher. It's not about cost savings.

 

[tomtad]

Its not essential for anything it is a cost saving measure mobile devices implemented without any regard towards users.

For example OLED tvs and monitors use DC dimming with no compromises.

Presumably if that were the case it would be enabled by default on these displays and not an option

 

[Prince Akeem]

For all those hoping it’s coming to other pre-17 models I would argue let’s hope not. If it was that would mean it’s software based and there’s only so much you can do with that. Essentially turn the hardware brightness to max then dim it using software which still doesn’t work. Asus does this with their OLEDs and I tried it using Betterdisplay on a current gen MacBook Pro and it does very little.

Fair point. Although I already do this sometimes on my iPhone, with a custom shortcut for reduced white-point, combined with a high (at least 50% or higher) brightness setting it truly helps for me sometimes with eyestrain/headaches in low-light situations.

But yes, let's hope it's a true hardware solution so it could potentially completely fix the problem.

 

[Dextermmrr]

Dear friends,

I am really excited about the upcoming iPhone 17. I am looking forward to it and I am constantly checking the news about it. Could you please write me more messages about why you think this new feature will be great?

I really hope that it will work perfectly and I would appreciate any encouragement you can offer. Thank you for your support.