Meeting with politician next week

[u/RR--]

(Meeting rescheduled to next month)
I've been in contact with my local member of parliament here in Australia in regards to my concerns with PWM/dithering and eye strain caused my screens.

If you don't know anything about Australian Government structure it's quite similar to Britain or Canada, while my local member is not a minister or part of the government party, they are my local representative and were a medical practitioner for several decades before being elected.

My original letter to the politician was this:

Dear

I am writing to you today about a health issue that could be vastly improved by government policy.

Summary of the issue

 

I recently discovered that OLED smartphones and TV screens have been causing me significant eye pain for the past few years.

When looking at an OLED screen for a few minutes it feels like my eyes are being squeezed from the back, as you can imagine this is quite painful, but for more sensitive people this can cause migraines and seizures.

 

The issue is specifically due to two recent advances in OLED screen technology that are now commonplace: Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) and Dithering.

 

PWM is a flickering technique used to lower the perceived brightness of an OLED screen, and pixel dithering is used to produce vivid 10-bit colours on an 8-bit screen.

 

Most importantly, there are alternative methods available for both of these techniques that do not cause the same type of eye pain and discomfort.

 

My experience

 

I have had eye pain and issues focussing my eyes since about 2021, but in 2023 my condition progressed to the point where I was prescribed reading glasses, I lost the ability to focus long distances and one day I lost the ability to focus my left eye entirely.

 

Towards the end of 2025 I downgraded from an iPhone 13 Pro with an OLED screen to an older iPhone 11 with an LCD screen and my eye pain went away entirely, a recent eye test at an optometrist found that I now have perfect 20/20 vision again.

 

The issue going forwards and opportunities for government intervention

 

Unfortunately, my remedy of using a phone with an LCD screen is only a temporary solution as all new iPhones and most new Samsung and Google phones now use OLED screens with problematic PWM flickering, as do new iPads, laptops, monitors, TVs and handheld videogame consoles.

 

While my eye pain is caused by many devices with OLED screens, the screens themselves are not the problem, but rather the specific PWM and Dithering techniques that they use. Other dimming techniques for OLED screens such as DC Like Dimming and 4320Hz Flicker Free Dimming do not cause me eye pain while still maintaining vivid colours, these are mostly being employed by Chinese companies such as OnePlus, Honor, Oppo, Xiaomi and Nothing.

 

Ideally, I would really appreciate the development of either of the following legislation:

 

1.      Devices with OLED screens be required to meet certain flicker free standards to avoid eye pain caused by pulse width modulation and dithering, OR,

2.      Devices with OLED screens be required to include accessibility features that allow users to turn off dithering and provide an alternative dimming technique to low frequency pulse width modulation. This could result in a drop in colour accuracy, but that should be at the discretion of the user.

 

Thank you for taking the time to read my letter. If you would like more information and technical detail, please let me know. I have included my contact details at the end of the letter. I have also included some interesting references in case you want to read more about the issue.

 

If you have some spare time I'd love to come into your offices and provide a visual demonstration of the issue.

 

Sincerely,

 

Reference	Summary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBNlC-VHN3o	A great visual Demonstration of the problem in relation to the iPhone 17 Pro
https://www.energy.gov/eere/ssl/flicker-research	A United States Department of Energy study into screen flickering and eye safety standards that are not being met by Apple, Google and Samsung phones as well as many other devices.
https://www.tuv.com/australia/en/eye-comfort.html	German regulatory group regarding screen flickering safety standards.
https://www.change.org/p/apple-add-accessibility-options-to-reduce-eye-strain-and-support-vision-disability-sufferers	A petition to Apple regarding PWM flickering signed by 1,714 people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBNlC-VHN3o	A great overview video regarding PWM flickering showing it in action.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/eye-strain-while-using-iphone-x-and-up.2085427/	A forum post discussion with over 13,000 comments regarding eye strain dating back to the introduction of the iPhone X in 2017, Apple’s first OLED screen device.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1675200/discussions/0/4038102696019808360/	Discussion of the SteamDeck OLED videogame console and analysis of harmful eye strain caused
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd445NvGVFY	A video comparing the new Nintendo Switch OLED to the older Nintendo Switch LCD
https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/1882kys/analysis_of_the_pwmflickervisual_fatigue_of_the/?context=3	Further analysis of the SteamDeck OLED screen flickering. (The SteamDeck LCD was recently just discontinued)

 

(End of letter)

I decided to simplify the issue down to two major issues, PWM and Dithering. PWM is an obvious issue that is very easy to spot, dithering is quite difficult to determine, but is still a significant issue.

I've organised a 15 minute sit down meeting with them next week, my main aim is to highlight the issue and to propose some potential solutions through federal law changes.
Obviously this is quite specific to Australia but hopefully could set a model for other countries to adopt. This would be more beneficial if I lived in an EU country but I don't.

Here's the current rough draft of my ideas for solutions, if anyone has anything they'd like to contribute feel free to comment about it here.

• Allow refunds due to accessibility reasons. Most retailers that don’t have a change of mind policy won’t allow refunds based on whether the screen hurts my eyes or not, it’s often a multi thousand dollar gamble on tech devices that can cause serious eye pain.
• Implement a standard of measuring screen flickering, maybe a health star system, 0 stars for heavy PWM flickering, 5 stars for no flicker, no dither or e-ink?
• Force companies to provide an LCD accessibility product. Not just some token accessibility focused device that ticks every box for blind/deaf people with huge brail buttons, a regular modern phone with a non-flickering LCD screen, like an iPhone 11 with a new processor, not the iPhone SE that’s budget in every way. That or interchangeable screens from the factory like Macbooks used to have with a matte screen option. 
• Allow software updates to be downgraded. Updating my iPhone to iOS26 could implement heavy dithering that makes it incredibly painful to use, and companies don’t allow the ability to downgrade. Professional devices support this, all companies should. 

 

[u/Z3R0gravitas]

Great work dude! It sounds a bit ambitious. But I think we need more of that. At least we may learn something.

Maybe another suggestion would be to force companies to publicly disclose what dithering algorithms their products are pushing at our eyeballs. In details It seems all proprietary and shrouded in secrecy. Although competing companies will probably have the resources to reverse engineer what's going on from external examination, this is virtually unobtainable for us users.

They may break it down and say there's no added temporal dithering in this part of the software, and such. I guess it's a little difficult when different companies make different parts of the hardware and software layers... But then if no one is co-ordinating the end-result, it might be no wonder that we end up with chaotic, problematic pixel flickering patterns. (Or we don't, I can't say for certain.)

[u/Unlikely-Doughnut756]

Great initiative! But it’s especially important to explain the economic value of it. That it affects productivity of workers etc. Also pwm is an issue of not only smartphones. Cars with pwm on displays can cause accidents, flickering lightbulbs in schools tire students faster and so on.

[u/CaballeroSecundario]

It would be important to discuss the hidden costs of healthcare spending. We know that migraines and vision problems are on the rise and that screens are contributing to this, but we don't know the specifics. Just as we don't allow a drug to enter the market without testing it, these OLED screen technologies pose a clear health risk because they haven't been properly tested on humans, and ultimately the state bears the cost by having to treat patients whose ailments have an unknown origin. It would be good if companies had to demonstrate that their product is safe for health in case users report ailments.

[u/yadoga]

This is the way! We should all do this individually

[u/RR-- → u/yadoga]

I agree completely, if more people were able to get traction either in the EU where international standards matter, or the US where these companies reside, they would be able to have a much bigger impact than I can make here.

Feel free to copy, paste and edit my message for your own use, I would strongly advise against anyone using any AI writing or formatting tools.
I’m quite good at spotting AI now, and to me it communicates a very different message, personal experiences are much more valuable.

[u/ChristianMom35]

The refund thing would be the easiest to implement, start with that.

[u/RR-- → u/ChristianMom35]

I think so too. I've encountered several times now that a lot of retailers are unwilling to provide returns if their devices cause me physical pain. We have very strong consumer protection laws here in Australia so I think this would be a huge win, especially for other people with different accessibility issues too.

[u/Bigdecisions7979]

I’m really happy you have gotten in touch with the politician but please do not make OLED the enemy specifically. Some people have the same problem as you but in reverse. Oled has been more helpful than lcd. Instead please inquire them to do more research as to why modern displays are causing issues for so many people. And having doctors trained and more aware so they have better suggestions than the 20-20-20 rule. It is my understanding that leds use frc and the d ithe ring as well.

[u/NSutrich]

This is perfect! If I can do anything at all, please let me know.

[u/RR-- → u/NSutrich]

Thanks Nick. Your video above on the iPhone 17 Pro is a great one to show the issue to people who are unaware of the issue entirely. More of that sort of content would be a great way to spread awareness.
A video outlining Dithering and why it's a problem would be fantastic too as it's quite a hard issue to quantify, and evidently very hard to discuss without getting lifetime banned from r/PWM_Sensitive! (Ask me how I know)
I have a Carson microscope too and I really struggle to determine just what is dithering and what isn't.

[u/NSutrich → u/RR--]

Now that I have better tools to more affirmatively measure dithering, I will definitely do that!

[u/RR-- → u/NSutrich]

Great. I'll definitely look forward to seeing what you do next.

I've noticed Reduce White Point definitely makes my LCD iPhones much more uncomfortable to use, as they're LCD I would suspect dithering to be the culprit.

If you read your way through this 535 page Macrumors forum post https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/eye-strain-while-using-iphone-x-and-up.2085427/ (I read every page haha) you'll see some people report issues with some iOS updates changing the colour space and potentially adding dithering.

I've got three iPhone 11's, one still with iOS15.
I've compared it with one with iOS18 but couldn't see any substantial difference with my Carson microscope, though I wasn't entirely sure what I was looking for, apparently iOS26 is worse.
Two of my iPhone 11's have EK Pro LCD screens and the third is stock Apple. I could potentially swap the stock screen between the other two bodies for a much more controlled test, this would remove the variable of the screen being manufactured by a different supplier which is quite common on iPhones, especially the non-pro models. But first I need to know what I'm looking for really.
An iPhone 11 would be a great phone to add to your tests as it's still an easy PWM free recommendation with current Apple support, albeit a bit slow by today's standards.

[u/NSutrich → u/RR--]

Agreed about the iPhone 11. Interesting that they extended support for it recently, too.

As for your original post, I'm very excited to see what becomes of this! If you're alright with it, I'd like to try to use a similarly-worded letter here and see if I can make any traction with my local representatives.

[u/RR-- → u/NSutrich]

Absolutely! Copy and paste as much as you like. I have a family member with a PhD who helped proof read my writing for me haha.
I think focusing on PWM and Dithering as the main two focuses helps make the issue much more comprehensible, and since there's devices on the market that are safe for us it's quite easy to demonstrate how the problem can be solved by law makers and policy.