Microprocessing
Is Your Phone Giving You a Headache? OLED Screens Might Be to Blame
An increasingly common kind of display has a slight flickering effect that causes some people grief, but there are basic fixes
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If you buy a new phone today, there’s a good chance you’ll wind up with an OLED screen. They’re used in the newest iPhones (excluding the XR; more on that in a minute), the LG G8, and even more modestly priced models from companies like Motorola. They offer plenty of advantages to LCD screens like those seen in older iPhone models — crisper, clearer black levels and thinner displays among them. But some users complain of one significant drawback: headaches.
In part because the technology is so new, research and data on the topic are scarce. But it certainly is possible that an OLED screen would make some people miserable because of one practically invisible quirk: at certain brightness levels, an OLED flickers.
OLED is short for “organic light-emitting diode.” While LCD screens use a single underlying panel of LED light as its source of illumination, OLED screens are composed of many pixel-like LEDs. I think of OLED screens as really technologically advanced Lite-Brites: the image is made up of countless little pins of light, each one producing its own color. An LCD screen, meanwhile, would be more like a light box, with the illumination source lying beneath a colored image.
Having many different sources of light on a screen, rather than a single backlight that illuminates the entire thing, means that when the screen is at full brightness, there’s better contrast and — crucially — black sections of the image are, well, blacker.
“Because LCD screens have to filter out light to produce dark areas, they aren’t 100% effective at it,” says Daniel O’Keeffe, a writer at the technology review website RTings.com. “Which means if you’re watching in a dark room, the blacks won’t be completely black… whereas with OLED screens, they can turn off all the individual pixels or colors.”
Think about how irritated fans were by the last fight against the white walkers in Game of Thrones’ “The Long Night.” The screen was dark nearly the entire…
