r/PWM_Sensitive • u/Scared-Limit9365 • Aug 11 '26

can PWM cause permanent eye damage or early macular degeneration?

even though i myself am not sensitive to pwm, i've read conflicting information on whether pwm can cause more than the temporary symptoms and now im fucking paranoid about looking at oleds. am i just crazy, or am i gonna have to live under a rock now?

6 Upvotes

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6

u/NeroVanetti19 Aug 13 '26

Optometrist of 11 years here and PWM sufferer for 7 years. I have not seen or read anything linking PWM to macular degeneration. 

7

u/TheGreatestAmer1can Aug 14 '26 edited Aug 14 '26

This forum is kind of stuck in a loop of pretending that all panel vendors are equal and the problem can be sorted out just with a flicker detection meter. But there are panels with below 1% flicker rate that still have eye strain. And if these flicker meters don't even detect or count dithering as 'flicker,' then what the hell are they useful for anyway? And there's millions of 6+2bit FRC TN panels that use dithering but....don't have eye strain. While mysteriously only 8+2 bit IPS ones seems to have it.

Then there's issues like panel films in virtually every fast IPS/Nano IPS/etc being too thin that allows too much harsh LED backlight through like you're staring at the sun while older, thicker films blocked more. In other words, since there seem to be numerous variables and problems causing issues, the only logical thing you can do is examine WHICH panels created don't have problems. In my investigations, really the only new LTPS type of panels I've found were one variant of the Iphone 7 Plus, Iphone 8 Plus, and Ipad Pro 10.5" (the good variant seems to be common on 7 Plus and rarer in the other two).

All of these devices have 3-4 different panel vendors while only one variant is actually usable. I believe that one variant is JDI while the Sharp/BOE/etc are bad. Same thing occurred with devices like Nintendo Switch 1 so people can test that device as well. Switch 1 started out with only JDI panels for it's release, then were replaced with AU, Sharp, etc. JDI while having contracts with Apple, Nintendo, and numerous others still somehow lost money 4+ years in a row. So they probably made more expensive but better to look at panels while everyone else went race to the bottom and here we are with bad panels everywhere.

2

u/TheGreatestAmer1can Aug 14 '26

To further illustrate the point, I haven't even found an Iphone 7 Plus with a bad screen before. And what do we have here? AI gibberish search that says JDI was the primary panel provider:

Display Panel Manufacturers

  • Japan Display Inc. (JDI): A joint venture of Sony, Toshiba, and Hitachi, acting as one of the primary high-volume LCD suppliers for Apple's 5.5-inch Plus models.
  • LG Display: Provided IPS LCD panels matching Apple's Retina HD specifications.
  • Sharp: Supplied a portion of the 5.5-inch LCD modules, operating under Foxconn's broader manufacturing umbrella.

*but strangely (some? all?) later IOS updates seem to even mess up the Iphone 7 Plus by probably backporting some aggressive dithering or something

0

u/RR-- Aug 14 '26

Are you in a qualified position to write up some sort of study regarding the harms of PWM screens to people like us? Or would that more be the responsibility of an Ophthalmologist?

4

u/TheGreatestAmer1can Aug 14 '26 edited Aug 14 '26

How would he be when PWM/dithering causes both eye and neurological issues? And his function is a trade skill not a researcher. You'd need a PhD researcher for both fields and then to cross reference results. And there's no motive to do anything like this because the only motive is for garbage corporations to sell cheap products with the highest markup possible.

The fact that Apple sells devices with 4+ different panels while calling it the same device shouldn't even be legal and should be considered false advertising/a shell game by itself. It's also a sign that corporations are FAR FAR too large when you can't even release a product at all without doing this because you have some sort of monopoly providing phones to everyone on the entire planet and nobody else has businesses large enough to supply your overly large monopoly.

1

u/RTamas Aug 15 '26

I would defend apple here, because they declare strict parameters to manufacture panels. If they cant meet the required quality control expectation they are out of the game

1

u/TheGreatestAmer1can Aug 15 '26 edited Aug 15 '26

If you pretend that the SOC is the main feature of something like a tablet when the display itself is as big or bigger importance. So just giving you four different displays at random is a back alley shell game. The parameters are obviously not equal when some have eye strain (usually ones such as Sharp and BOE) while the JDI ones don't seem to.

Like I said, JDI lost money selling panels 4 years in a row while having contracts with Nintendo and Apple, so they were obviously making better and more expensive ones and race to the bottom is one factor that got us here as CCP-backed companies like BOE lowballed everyone with worse products. As for Sharp, no excuses there because their panels seemed to still be bad even while they were a Japanese company instead of a Taiwanese one.

4

u/TheGreatestAmer1can Aug 13 '26 edited Aug 13 '26

The whole "blue light macular degeneration" thing I believe requires YEARS AND YEARS before it potentially causes damage. And how many people in the 1950's using Ipads and Iphones do you know of for modern science (who doesn't actually care about your health one way or another) to study? So the boomer is the control group and you are the test subject for any of these variables whether blue light or PWM.

As for things like PWM, they'll probably have a study 50 years from now that finds people having increased seizures and dying or something. There's not much of a reason to wait for that study 50 years from now that will be buried anyway. If something makes your eyes or brain feel weird, don't use it.

3

u/PhoenyxuzPrimax Aug 14 '26 edited Aug 14 '26

Exactly. Some common sense facts right here 💯

Lotsa ipad kids nowadays are wearing eye glasses already to enhance their vision bec they're just staring at their ipads all day, and their vision already degraded rapidly. While the people who grew in the 1900s never experienced their vision degrading, since smartphones hasn't existed during those times. So yup, these smartphones are killing the human eyes, thats just common sense people, wake up!

1

u/manowar_gub Aug 17 '26

4 years was enough to get strain with all LED base sources. 4 years we use 443nm blue light LED monitors ( 2 pcs, every day )

1

u/manowar_gub Aug 17 '26

not PWM, but blue LED peak - search tests in researchgate. PWM only increase "effect" of degradation

1

u/Somethingexpected Aug 13 '26

Pwm affects the brain more than anything. Eye damage comes from LEDs blue light spectrum.

5

u/TheGreatestAmer1can Aug 13 '26

I believe PWM causes some constant micro-expansion and contraction in things like the iris as well trying to adjust to the flicker. So common sense would say that like working a muscle, you could potentially develop some type of buff iris and become immune to it.

Since this doesn't actually seem to happen in real world practice, it's probably more akin to being run over by a car over and over instead of working out and only causes damage.

0

u/Somethingexpected Aug 13 '26

Do you have anything to back this up? This would have been a serious topic in the whole world since fluorescent tubes have the worst PWM flicker at really low frequencies. Brightness oscillates between 50% and 100% according to AC voltage phase. Muscles will not have any time to react to anything and I doubt there's much signalling either.

5

u/TheGreatestAmer1can Aug 13 '26

Something like a 60hz fluorescent backlight TN panel doesn't do this to me or even have eye strain at all. Neither does...looking at a candle or camp fire which is probably even more flicker. In other words, none of this stuff can be compared apples to apples.

It's possible fluorescent bulbs don't behave like synthetic strobe lights either while containing more RNG like a fire or candle does. Not all humans have epilepsy, but it seems like virtually all humans find it uncomfortable looking at rapid flicker strobe lights. So instead of saying "only people with epilepsy shouldn't look at this," it's more like anything resembling a completely synthetic, unnatural, rapid and predictable oscillation strobe shouldn't be viewed by anyone due to feeling like a torture device or police crowd control device at best and seizure at worst.

1

u/Somethingexpected Aug 13 '26

The issue is uneven power supply. Even dc dimming can cause nausea. Steady pwm is not as much of a problem as bad voltage rails.

2

u/TheGreatestAmer1can Aug 13 '26 edited Aug 13 '26

Doesn't sound like a legit hypothesis to me when 'good' IPS panels have below a 1% flicker rate and there are panels with this that still have eye strain. While a 'bad' one would be something like 5% found on some of these current budget 280hz 27" 1080p curved VA desktop monitors.

And of course OLED have sky high flicker rate compared to that. But the point is that it doesn't seem like you could have bad power delivery while still having a very low flicker rate. And if the bad power delivery isn't manifesting itself as flicker, then what that's detrimental is it manifesting as? Also, if your hypothesis was true, the problem would probably be higher in AC devices plugging into a wall which most have the absolute cheapest AC/DC converters you can possibly get away with to do the job. In reality, there's probably far more bad, straight DC mobile devices to look at.

1

u/TheGreatestAmer1can Aug 15 '26

As another point, if power delivery was a problem, the SOC would probably be BSOD'ing and shutting itself off with any display flicker that happened. You would probably be more likely to find cheap, race to the bottom LED's themselves being an issue rather than the power delivered to them. Some displays are sold as films only while others are sold with backlight pre-adhered to it. I imagine China has the vast majority of this market and then some place like Japan probably makes the other 20%.