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Other Eye-strain while using iPhone X and up

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Are you experiencing this issue?

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Skwermo said:
I returned my iphone 14 pro due to nausea. Eye comfort was ok, it just felt “off”.
I have had issues with PWM in the past so because the symptoms were different I thought it might be due to promotion.
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That was my initial suspicion as well with the 14 Pro. I never tried the 13 Pro so this was my first experience with variable refresh rate on an OLED with PWM. And perhaps there is some truth to that for some people. It could just be a bad combo of everything mixed together.

The difficult thing about this issue is we are all different and sensitive to different aspects of the screen behavior. From my time with the 14 standard yesterday, I had no issues but that doesn't mean the flickering wouldn't get to me eventually. The only real way to know is to try the phone for a bit. Thank goodness Apple is hassle free on returns. At this point, since purchasing my XR, I've bought and returned the iPhone 12, 12 Mini, 12 Pro, 13, 13 Mini and now 14 Pro. I have to be on some kind of list at Apple at this point, haha.
 
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Chrispy said:
That was my initial suspicion as well with the 14 Pro. I never tried the 13 Pro so this was my first experience with variable refresh rate on an OLED with PWM. And perhaps there is some truth to that for some people. It could just be a bad combo of everything mixed together.

The difficult thing about this issue is we are all different and sensitive to different aspects of the screen behavior. From my time with the 14 standard yesterday, I had no issues but that doesn't mean the flickering wouldn't get to me eventually. The only real way to know is to try the phone for a bit. Thank goodness Apple is hassle free on returns. At this point, since purchasing my XR, I've bought and returned the iPhone 12, 12 Mini, 12 Pro, 13, 13 Mini and now 14 Pro. I have to be on some kind of list at Apple at this point, haha.
Click to expand...
Haha i am also on that list for sure... i did some phones multiple times in the past.
I received my 14 pro today, will try the phone this evening and report back in a few days.
 
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dstow said:
Need more iPhone 14 hands on - I’m writing off the iPhone 14 Pro lineup as officially aneurysm certified - all eyes (no pun intended) are on the 14/14 Plus
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Agreed! I'm very interested to see more reports on the 14 and 14 Plus when it lands. My dad is on an iPhone 7 Plus and he's going to need an upgrade in the next year or so. I've been at a loss for what to suggest as the replacement because the Pro Max is too expensive and heavy. But he needs a big screen to use his phone comfortably so the size is perfect. He also gets eye discomfort from some screens so I have my suspicions he may be sensitive to PWM but doesn't know it. The 14 Plus, in a year when the price drops a bit, would be the perfect candidate. But the screen, as always, gives me pause. However, my hour or so using my friend's 14 yesterday was good. My XR still felt easier to read but that's probably in my head at this point. It was way, way easier to look at and focus on the 14 screen vs the 14 Pro. All eyes on the 14/14 Plus!
 
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PwmMen said:
Yes I'm a little crazy. I ordered an iPhone 14 Pro Max today. It is available to tomorrow. I've tested the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14, and I want to stick with my iPhone 12 Pro. But somehow I thought it might be worth testing the iPhone 14 Pro. I'm curious how I tolerate it. I tolerated the 14 and 14 Pro relatively well.
Click to expand...
Why are you going to try the 14PM if you “want to stick with the 12 Pro”?
 
Chrispy said:
That was my initial suspicion as well with the 14 Pro. I never tried the 13 Pro so this was my first experience with variable refresh rate on an OLED with PWM. And perhaps there is some truth to that for some people. It could just be a bad combo of everything mixed together.

The difficult thing about this issue is we are all different and sensitive to different aspects of the screen behavior. From my time with the 14 standard yesterday, I had no issues but that doesn't mean the flickering wouldn't get to me eventually. The only real way to know is to try the phone for a bit. Thank goodness Apple is hassle free on returns. At this point, since purchasing my XR, I've bought and returned the iPhone 12, 12 Mini, 12 Pro, 13, 13 Mini and now 14 Pro. I have to be on some kind of list at Apple at this point, haha.
Click to expand...
I genuinely worry about that too. So many phones I’ve purchased and returned. People keep saying there is no bad list that if you’re on that if you get one return, you’re cut off forever. But it sure feels like there might be one. And if so, I’m definitely on it. Though I wish we could have an asterisk by our names. Like oh, okay, OLED issues, okay, you get a pass.
 
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jm31828 said:
And does it have to be at 100% brightness, or are we good anywhere between 80%- 100% if trying to mitigate PWM?
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From slo-mo videos I've watched and cursory readings online, it seems we're good from 80-100%. I've played within the range and not noticed much difference in flickering, battery use, or annoyance to my eyes. As long as I have my RWP to 90%, I'm good.
 
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I just played with 14 pro and max on the store and these phones are definitely improved over 13 pro. I mean 13 pro felt unnatural to even scroll with it. New screens feel more smooth while scrolling and a lot more bright. But but but after 10-15 minutes i started feeling pressure at the top/back part of my head :(

Screen of 14 is exactly the same as 13 pro in terms of brightness and color reproduction. I believe it felt even more eye friendly compared to 14 pro but my head was already messed up so I ll try it one more time tomorrow from the beginning.

At least i know I won’t even try to purchase and test 14 pro this year.

Also as i ve written many times on this topic i overall prefer LCD screens. It’s more white/blue-ish and text feels more sharp to me.

But kudos to Samsung for those new pros screens. They are as bright as LCDs!
 
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happy orchard said:
From slo-mo videos I've watched and cursory readings online, it seems we're good from 80-100%. I've played within the range and not noticed much difference in flickering, battery use, or annoyance to my eyes. As long as I have my RWP to 90%, I'm good.
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I leave it at 100%. Anything different and it impacts me.
I tried everything on the iphone 14 pro: reduce motion, deactivate promotion, true tone, brightness, rwp, day mode. It could feel a bit better but nausea never went away. So much so that it hindered my training (bike ride), that was the last straw and decided to return it.
 
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It seems like I’ve missed a lot by not being in this thread for the past few days. Kudos on the progress. We’re still awaiting final PWM measurements.

The good news - iPhone 14 Pro Max has been a massive improvement from past generations, even better than iPhone 13 Mini which shares a similar 480Hz rate. I couldn’t even watch videos on iPhone 13 Pro or check the weather for that matter without getting a headache.

I spent the day in the city on Saturday and found iPhone 14 Pro Max to be a comfortable travel companion, which I couldn’t say of any past OLED iPhone.

The most notable issues come when trying to read news late at night, or focusing on a particular UI element like an emoji—which are common complaints I’ve heard from users on iPhone X that weren’t PWM-sensitive.

Frankly this is also better than my 14” MacBook Pro, which has a 14,880Hz PWM rate so evidently the frequency isn’t the most important part.

It’s also not headache-free, but again a 2-4/10 on the iPhone X eye strain scale isn’t quite as bad. I’m anxiously waiting to see if iPhone 14 Pro or iPhone 14 has a doubled rate, since that could be an OLED iPhone I’d finally be able to keep. :cool:
 
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I’ve also been having issues with the 14” MBP, eye strain, motion sickness and even light brain fog. I’m currently using the 11” iPad Pro 3rd Gen via side car to run Logic… the MBP is now a Mac Mini lol… and stuck with my iPhone 8 Plus which is still much more comfortable on the eyes than any Apple OLED I’ve tried. Overall the 11” iPad Pro is the ONLY Apple device that I get zero issues with.
 
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The 14pro just arrived today, what a beautiful phone! super nice color (space black) and great feel in the hand.
I gave it to my girlfriend to setup to 60hz en disable auto-brightness and tru-tone. We also disabled face-id to minimize the risk factors that potentially cause issues.

And after 15 min of usage at first it felt great. No eyestrain yet but after 15-20 min the usual symptoms came in. Nausia, tension temple pain and after that the headache in the front part of the head. Also a little difficult to focus, a weird feeling when looking at static objects.

I will try it some more but the first results are not so good...
 
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Tangential question:

Do you have other sensitivities? Food, light, sound, scent, taste, touch (think I got all the senses there), proprioceptive, seasonal, empathetic…

For example, I’m sensitive to all those things listed to different degrees, including an anaphylactic reaction to caffeine.

Just wondering if we’re the canaries in the coal mine for techie stuff or for more?
 
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Chrispy said:
I had some time to briefly play around with an iPhone 14 today (thanks to my very patient friend, haha) so I took advantage of the opportunity and grabbed some video of it next to the 14 Pro and XR. I recorded at various shutter speeds ranging from 1/200 to 1/2,000 with interesting results. Both 14 and 14 Pro clearly have PWM as we already knew, but it does show they are different in how they handle it. I also included a brief clip of the 14 vs 14 Pro in slow motion and it confirms what others found. No PWM registers in 240 fps slow motion video on the 14 Pro.

It's clear why everyone is having a different response to the two phones. I personally found the 14 to be MUCH easier on my eyes compared to the 14 Pro. No focusing issues or any immediate eye strain was registered with the regular 14 but my time with it was brief. The 14 Pro is just so clearly rough on my eyes that I can tell right away. Looking at the flicker that is very clearly there on the standard 14, perhaps it's just at a frequency I'm less sensitive to. Anyways, enough rambling. Here's the video:

Click to expand...
The goal of course is for them all to look like iPhone XR with no flickering at all. That would be the solution to this, which apparently isn’t as simple as it sounds if Apple is still using PWM on its OLED displays. I’m slightly worried that the larger OLED display on Apple Watch Ultra will take a step back and have similar PWM issues that the Apple Watch hasn’t ever had.

I do find that it isn’t quite as much of an issue when using iPhone 14 Pro Max in sporadic bursts, but headaches pop up more when using it over longer periods. Even the 1000nits-2000nits brightness setting causes PWM sensitivity, as Apple typically keeps the rate consistent even at new extremes of the brightness range.
 
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happy orchard said:
Tangential question:

Do you have other sensitivities? Food, light, sound, scent, taste, touch (think I got all the senses there), proprioceptive, seasonal, empathetic…

For example, I’m sensitive to all those things listed to different degrees, including an anaphylactic reaction to caffeine.

Just wondering if we’re the canaries in the coal mine for techie stuff or for more?
Click to expand...
Back when this started, I had heard of it being blamed on sensitivity being caused for epileptic users—which I’m not epileptic, or have any other sensitivity to flickering lights.

Some users can also be sensitive to PWM flickering on headlights, and less commonly LED bulbs. But even at a concert with plenty of lights and large displays I don’t get any headaches whatsoever.

My only sensitivity is to PWM flickering on displays, and for some reason only Apple’s displays out of all the products I’ve used. My Pioneer plasma is a gem with incredible picture quality that even stands up to today’s OLED’s, and causes no PWM issues.
 
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Apologies for the long post...

Update:

Day three of testing the vanilla iPhone 14. I am still in limbo about it. I feel like it's easier for me to tolerate them the 14 Pro, though I'm going by memory.
But I’ve had so much screen time this weekend going back-and-forth between the 14 and 11 and doing normal computer work that my eyes feel kind of shot.

Even when I go back to my 11 there’s things that now that I am used to the dynamic sharpness of the OLED bother me about the LCD. The 11s text can be soft and fuzzy.

I have the usual things adjusted, attention awareness off, enabling reduce motion, and reducing white point a bit. Those all help, but the occasional nausea and eye fatigue remain. So much better than previous OLED but they are there occasionally. That’s the thing, I will have times where I’m using the 14 and everything feels good. Then out of the blue I’ll just have periods of not feeling so great. Then again, I almost never look at my phone screen this much, I am in “testing mode”

I still have a bit more time to see how it develops.

Seems like some of us are still evaluating the 14 and 14 pro.



By the way, as an aside, regarding eSIM transfer. With both the 14 Pro and 14 I had no problems switching from my 11 to the newer phones. Trying to switch back to the 11 is a little nightmare. Even though the 11 technically accepts eSIM’s, it just seems too old to have that side-by-side transfer go through. So if I send my 14 back I’m gonna have to go back to the physical Sim with Verizon. FYI. I wish it was easier to get an international model of the 14.
 
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happy orchard said:
Do you have other sensitivities? Food, light, sound, scent, taste, touch (think I got all the senses there), proprioceptive, seasonal, empathetic…
Click to expand...
I've always been sensitive to light. As a kid, I had so many pairs of sunglasses because my dad got them free from vendors at work. I was always walking around with some kind of brand logo on my face because, even on cloudy days, my eyes would get watery from the bright outdoor light. Even today whenever I'm outdoors, I'm always in shades. I can also easily detect flickering where other people don't if the frequency isn't high enough. The rest of my senses are pretty laid back and accommodating I would like to think, haha. Except sound. Sometimes sounds really annoy me depending on the day.
 
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God, the more I use this lovely little 13 mini the more I feel like its OLED is stabbing my eyes when scrolling. I can’t wait for my SE to finally get here and to finally be rid of it, for good. And to rejoin you all in LCD Heaven 🖥️💞
 
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