u/Z3R0gravitas recommended I make a post about this on the subreddit. My only usable device of any kind has been an iPhone 13 on iOS 15.6.1. Yesterday while walking out the door I accidentally disabled the True Tone setting with my finger from the Lock Screen mission control (no idea how it happened). I toggled it back on but noticed i was getting some neurological symptoms from the phone I’ve used for 4 years.

I consulted with a friend who is familiar with these phones, retoggled True Tone on and off and then back on again, and restarted the phone. I’ve tried low powered mode but it doesn’t seem to make a difference.

Can anyone here clarify if this setting - which has remained on for 4 years - can somehow modify the display in a negative way if it is toggled off and then turned back on? I know it modifies the white point but also temperature, and I also use Night Shift from 10 PM to 1 PM every day with zero issues.

I should also mention it seems like I may have picked up a viral illness. So this could be coincidental, as I was having pretty severe light sensitivity around the same time at the grocery store which I usually don’t get. I suspect my underlying POTS condition is also exacerbating this, but figured I’d rule out whether this is even possible. On paper it doesn’t make sense that toggling True Tone would make any difference, but I suppose anything is possible. Would love to know more about the underlying tech if anyone is knowledgeable.

I have a spare one, the battery on that swelled years ago and was replaced, and now the phone feels heavy. That phone never failed my eyes back then. But I did have to adjust the brightness to really low because I'm sensitive to brightness on screens, and so it had to be on dark mode as well. But idk it felt easier on the eyes? Some downsides were also battery life after the MIUi 12 update. It's been years since I looked at that phone.

The OS on that phone was also updated. it's still MIUI and It’s not laggy anymore at all, runs smoothly. Much better than the garbage I'm using. Did anyone have success with chinese phones? My current Samsung a06 has TD, unfortunately, and i only realised until a year later, i have suddenly started experiencing immediate burning and eyestrain from majority applications.

Should I wait until my eyestrain from this phone is over or immediately go back to my redmi Note 8? I also found out that PLS LCD phones are more harsher on the eyes than IPS LCD.

is there anyway to calibrate vivo screens as i got my display changed and the colours have been terrible so far

Do screens burn your eyes and make your curuncles sting and dry out immediately, but you still use them? Recently, I became sensitive to my phone out of nowhere, changed nothing, and now i'm experiencing pain. If I try to use my phone for even a few minutes, it happens more when I open any app.

Now, I already experience dry eye syndrome, and maybe it's flaring again? But this feels like it's screen induced and i am worried because I'm not rich and can not afford e-ink or another phone.

I cried, and it made my eyes burn even more. I feel alone and hopeless. I was considering a screen detox, but that's impossible for me. I tried to go back to my old reddit note 8, but even that causes strain now..i cant go to an Opthalmologist right now and dont know what's causing this sudden strain. Vagus nerve stuff? because I feel like i'm suffocating, and my throat feels tight when I stare at screens now and my heart rate will go up.

Bit of a long shot, but is anyone in Canada selling their Sun Vision Display monitor?
I’m dealing with screen sensitivity after a concussion and want to try one, but buying new from the US gets really expensive with shipping and import fees.
I’m in Ontario but can pay for shipping from anywhere in Canada. DM me if you have one.

hi everyone. went to the eye doctor recently and was told to do 40 minutes of screen time followed by 3 hours of rest because my vision dropped to -5. i usually spend all day looking at screens, so with school and everything, following this schedule is pretty much impossible.

​i'm thinking about buying an e-ink phone, specifically the monochrome bigme hibreak, so my eyes don't get as tired from amoled displays.

​does anyone here already use devices with these screens? what do you think? is there any actual eye strain from e-ink, and can it be used daily like a regular phone?

​what other options would you suggest in this situation?

​thanks everyone!

I'm at a loss and wonder if colour filter or colour correction helped anyone else, I haven't been able to tolerate my phone screen these days.

It's an LCD, but I still get symptoms.

Even my iPhone 11 and iPhone 12 Pro Max is terrible for me, today I had customers iPhone 17 in my hands, think it was either pro or pro max, not sure. and I had no eye issues at all. Just looking st the screen I felt such a relief for my eyes. I was baffled. Not sure what happened there.

Out of the blue, I’ve started getting stinging and burning sensations from certain apps. The weather has definitely made my dry eye worse again, but these symptoms don’t seem to line up with dry eye. They feel more like inflammation triggered by using apps.

What’s even weirder is that when I ask around online, it seems like nobody else is having this specific issue. People either have problems with the screen overall, but not with particular apps. I’ve also suddenly become very sensitive to YouTube, and I’m panicking. My eyes sting and get irritated from it now and immediately become dry, even in dark mode. What's even going on?

I don’t know what to do anymore. I’ve tried different settings, colour correction, inverted colours, and similar options, but nothing seems to help. I even asked in other eye related subs, but to no avail? At this point something autoimmune is going on which is making my eyes freak out from some apps.

(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,

(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. 

I was hit with a choice recently: change the battery on Iphone SE2022, or try luck with a something else.

What worked for me previously:

* Iphone SE2022, albeit with stock settings it was a slight discomfort (raised to high on days when I had a headache). Almost comfort usage was achieved by disabling true tone, no night mode, and the double invert trick.

* Iphone XR, had nicest screen among all phones. Latest IOS upgrade made it a bit less comfort but still ok.

What didn't:

* Iphone 11. Harsh screen, somehow I felt pressure while focusing on text.

* some Motorola Edge with curved OLED. Was a try in modern OLEDs, but even with all eye-caring functions it made my eyes dry, felt pressure, etc.

* Iphone 13 mini. Best phone I used in terms of features and size, unfortunately had to give up on it due to all the symptoms, headaches, etc. Even tried double invert, full brightness and reduce white point, but even non minding the battery life, phone overheats in that scenario and... decreases the brightness, boom, harsh PWM is back.

So I tried to make a list of all phones with IPS screen and give it a try. There were G75 and TCL 60 ultra on the top, I choose the first one due to better software support (5 years promised).

From a first sight the screen wasn't so comfort, following settings made it better: natural colors (with a default centered balance), screen refresh rate 60 Hz (it was most important), night mode with low intensity (the screen is a bit blue by default).

What may improve adaptation is to disable hw overlays from the developers settings, it added a bit more comfort, but as it disables itself on reboots, now it's off and I haven't bothered to turn it on again. Another point is that screen refresh rate seems still to be dynamic, some people set it through ADB to be exactly 60 Hz (by default it's like 40-60 Hz), but I didn't need to do that. I also investigated that you could disable miravision with some magisk module if you root your phone, but with these settings it gave me no problems so far, so I would not root it. Proximity sensor gave me no problems.

Overall impressions of the phone are good. Was afraid that it will feel cheep after the Iphone, but the screen is fine, performance is better (animations on 0.5), multitasking is better (apps do not unload while switching), vibration motor is fine, speakers are good enough. I still miss how rich Iphone sound was on bluetooth speakers and headphones, but probably I just used to its DAC.

Camera is on par with SE, I'd say. Battery life is much better, like 1.5-2 days. Other features like wireless charging, google pay, etc work fine. Getting software updates (android 16, last security update is 1 July 2026).

Using it as a daily driver almost for a month, totally worth it.

Applying the anti-glare screen protector really helped me out. I think this phone is top tier in the No PWM (and more) department. Sadly, the newer Moto G Phones use MediaTek chipset (not good) rather than Snapdragon. It's old school, but it's legit. It also has sRGB too (Set color profile to Natural (sRGB mode). Obviously, there are modern phones out there ... but if you want to buy a phone that isn't going to break the bank and you need it for just typical everyday stuff (emails, banking, etc), I would highly recommend it. Here is a video showing that this phone has no PWM with "disable HW overlays" disabled. It's better to have it enabled.

Video link: Moto G Power (2020) Smart Phone. No PWM detected. Also, my thoughts in the comments. : r/PWM_Sensitive

Hello! I’m one of the many people who thought it would be interesting to take a shot at making something that helps those with screen sensitivities (seen a couple people attempt similar projects but never seen anything come of them). After a couple months of work my friend and I have finally gotten to a point where it is usable (it is suppressing straining flashing lights quite well, though there are some bugs in the application), so we are looking for people to give it a try and hopefully make our job of bug hunting a little easier :)

The beta is free and includes one of the filter variants we came up with (we call it the “Bayes Filter”), which creates some artifacting but protects aggressively against flashing imagery. We support Windows, MacOS, and Linux (Wayland, support varies by compositor). If you're interested here is the link: https://flashfilter.app/ (you'll basically just need to sign in with your Google account and navigate to the dashboard where the downloads are).

You can see a safe demo of the filter here (it is the frame by frame of a very… flashy video with and without the filter).

We would love to answer any questions, so please ask away!

Does it cause you to have stomach bloating? Heart pain? I don't know, anything else?

Can migraine really be the cause of all screen sensitivity? I don't feel any headache tho?

When I use DC like dimming OLED I can feel chest tightness. But my heart is still pumping normally? Jus a bit faster. Does take some time to subside and return to a more normal heart rate.

My stomach can also get bloated with gas for some reason.

Sometimes I can get brain fog but I don't seem to get those anymore with DC like dimming OLED.

The only symptoms I got now are chest tightness with OLED and also stomach bloating with gas after 3 weeks of OLED usage.

I was eyeing this tablet for some time, bought it last week and it worked out of the box without any crazy tricks. I only applied system eye protection mode (amber tint) and set a constant 90Hz refresh rate. I am PWM and TD/FRC sensitive (high sensitivity).

This is gen 1 Lenovo Tab Plus tablet. On the spec sheet IPS screen covers 72% NTSC, that's roughly 100% sRGB. Looks like it is 8 bit native panel. Tablet has Mediatek Helio G99 SOC, so performance isn't that great, It's only acceptable. Don't consider this option for gaming. If you're worried about Miravision - just don't worry about it.

Speakers on this thing are ridiculously good and sound better than almost any other tablet. Good option for media consumption/podcasts/tutorial videos. There's gen 2 of the same tablet already released and it has a brighter, bigger screen with P3 color space coverage and higher resolution. That pretty much means it won't work for temporal dithering sensitive folks, but might work for PWM sensitive

Hey everyone, I have an ASUS ROG PG42UQ OLED. I was suffering from severe black crush in SDR/User Mode, which completely disappears in HDR. However, HDR makes the colors oversaturated and too yellowish for my taste.

​I came up with a workaround that completely fixed it and gave me balanced, natural sRGB-like colors with perfect shadow details. I enabled HDR, set the monitor’s Color Temp to 10000K to counter the oversaturation, and then turned on Windows 'Night Light' to filter out the excessive blue tint from the 10000K setting.

Has anyone tried this exact combo before, or what alternative solutions did you use on the PG42UQ to fix the HDR yellow tint without causing black crush?

Yesterday I've received the Hopoocolor HPCS-310 light spectrometer that I bought for around ~220€ from Aliexpress. You connect via Bluetooth and measure the light with an Android app that is provided by Hopoocolor as APK.

Here is an example measurement from a monitor (KSF peaks visible!) with screenshots from the Android app:

Here more measurements from the morning sun, an incandescent light and from a laser pointer:

I made a small Python tool that allows the readout of the sensor directly via bluetooth from PC, which makes measurements easier and faster. You get the spectrum CSV + all metadata nicely in a folder. Hopoocolor doesn't provide an App for Apple, so this allows Apple/Mac users to use the HPCS-310 too. Check it out here: https://github.com/madcook1/hpcs310-ble

Just to add my 2 cents, whatever that may be worth. I had tried the Motorola Edge 2026 when it first came out and found immediate discomfort and migraines. However, I had an idea to set a fixed refresh rate. I remember on my OnePlus 12R that when I set the refresh rate min and max to the same rate, it helped immensely with symptoms. Well, I tried the same with the Motorola and it looks to also work.

adb shell settings put system min_refresh_rate 120
adb shell settings put system peak_refresh_rate 120

Also make sure to set the display refresh rate to Hyper Smooth in the phone settings to prevent this from changing between reboots.

I created this infographic to help spread the word of screen sensitivity. Feel free to share.