I have had and used the S9+ for several months on a regular basis and even read ebooks on it. Yet I could not tolerate my iPhone X past a month nor my Max past a week.
My Max didn’t seem to bother me at first but it somehow sensitized me after giving me one whopper of a goodbye migraine last weekend. It’s been a week and I still am sensitive to the pwm flicker of lights at the grocery and can’t use my S9+ display without discomfort.
I can’t explain it. I don’t have any clue what is different between the S9+ display or the S8+ I also own and the displays on the iPhones.
My iPhone X display had nice even color but I found it produced a bit of harsh glare. My Max display was beautiful. I loved it. I didn’t even feel eye strain on it for a couple of days reading and watching videos and using it normally. I thought I was free and clear like I had been on my Samsungs.
But one day the watery eyes and blurred vision started. Then the headache and a weird feeling in my head where I normally feel discomfort when I’m about to get a seizure type migraine. I didn’t get a seizure, but I did lose speech and struggled with aphasia for an hour or so while shopping at the grocery store under their lighting system that only bothers me after something else has triggered my migraine into activity.
When I look at text on any OLED display on a phone I see what I can only describe as a little vibration. When I look at text on an LCD display like the one on my 8 Plus the print looks still, completely unmoving.
Even though these OLED panels are all supposed to be refreshing at the same 240 Hz or whatever it is, the amount of vibration that I can perceive appears to ME, to be different. Text on my husband’s Max’s display for example looked pretty shaky like it had drunk an espresso. I could barely see the jitters on my S9+ or my own Max.
But after days of using my Max and getting sensitized, my S9+ display looks more jittery to me now.
Did the S9+ display refresh rate change? Of course not. Whatever the problem is, whatever the difference is that’s causing me to react to a familiar OLED display NOW, it’s within my own nervous system. Once I got my migraine condition triggered to produce a migraine, I became sensitive to other potential triggers that don’t always bother me.
I think, and this is just a theory, for me and my particular migraine condition, pwm is but a potential trigger. Something else, some other characteristic about the two iPhone OLED displays worked in tandem with pwm to set off my migraines.
Perhaps it was Face ID, though I did turn it off the last day, perhaps too late to make a difference. Perhaps it’s something about the unique calibration Apple supposedly insists on. I don’t know. Edit: Correction, I forgot that my Pixel 2 display also greatly bothers my eyes. I don’t get full on migraines but that’s because it’s too blurry for me to look at long enough! So Apple is off the hook on this one.
Eye strain is but one aspect to look at. It’s not just about the eyes. I think it’s about the brain and eyes working in tandem to create what we think of as vision. There theoretically, as far as what’s known, isn’t anything about OLED worse for the eyes themselves than LCD. The brain is another story.
