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
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…
