What you need to know
- A Xiaomi representative confirmed that the company would only use AMOLED panels on flagship Redmi phones in the future.
- The decision was made despite the same executive being sensitive to display flicker, something AMOLED suffers from.
- Fewer companies are using LCDs despite growing concerns over negative health effects caused by display flickering.
Proponents of LCD panels have lost yet another battle today as Redmi confirms that flagship phones will only feature AMOLED panels going forward. This includes the Redmi Note and Redmi K series, but the most isn’t all that surprising considering these phones haven’t used LCD panels for several years.
What is surprising is how the news was delivered. Redmi Marketing Manager Ethan Zhang Yu posted the news on Weibo (via XiaomiTime), expressing his condolences to all the LCD fans who have been asking to make another flagship with an LCD panel for years. In the message (translated below by Microsoft Copilot), Zhang notes that he is a flicker-sensitive user and can understand these requests very well.
However, while Zhang empathizes with other flicker-sensitive users, he admits that LCD is no longer seen as a flagship phone-worthy technology. Ironically, this means that Zhang cannot use the phones Xiaomi produces under its Redmi brand.
Additionally, Zhang briefly discusses how picking a display panel for a smartphone isn’t as simple as “swapping it out” for a different one and that display panels are a deep part of a phone’s engineering.
LCD fans, or even folks that need an LCD due to PWM sensitivity, shouldn’t hope for a special version of the latest Redmi Note, according to Zhang. While OLED technology delivers better black levels, deeper contrast ratios, and significantly better-viewing angles, the display tech is prone to long-term burn-in and flickers in a way LCD technology does not. It also means that users are looking directly at LED diodes, providing a harsher form of light than LCD’s traditionally diffused back or side lighting.
This begs the question: what are flicker-sensitive users supposed to do if companies no longer offer smartphones they can physically use? Flicker sensitivity is a disability like any other and one that has become increasingly difficult to deal with as more LEDs make their way into the world.
Time for tech companies to be responsible
While LED technology like OLED, AMOLED, LCD, and even the lights in your home don’t need to strobe on and off, the fact of the matter is that many manufacturers have turned to what’s known as Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) to manage LED brightness levels.
In a nutshell, many OLED panels and some LED lights rapidly turn on and off hundreds or thousands of times per second. While human eyeballs cannot “see” this rapid flickering, human brains perceive the flickering as a source of light depending on how long the LED is kept on during this flickering cycle.
As with anything else brain-related, everyone is different, and some people experience severe pain when looking at these lights. Unfortunately, I’m one of those people.
Most people — tech journalists included — have never heard of PWM and have no idea that OLED panels flicker.
I spoke with Bill Maffucci, vice president at Kopin Corporation, about the differences between LCD and OLED display technology. More specifically, I wanted to know why OLED displays always flicker a bit, even when they don’t use pulse width modulation to control brightness. His answer was quite illuminating.
“With an LCD panel, the backlight is energized during the entire frame, and you, therefore, would not experience a change in brightness during the frame. With an OLED, the individual pixels emit light when first energized by the video signal and then decay over time until energized in the next frame. The strong dip that occurs at the end of the frame appears to be the equivalent of a CRT “vertical retrace” period when the raster resets to the top of the display.”
Part of the problem is that AMOLED and OLED technology has been pushed as a superior tech without properly explaining the potential negative health effects associated with it.
In other words, OLED displays need a constant “fresh injection” of voltage to achieve a uniform level of brightness, while LCDs are better at delivering a consistent level of brightness.
Some companies have worked to fix this problem by increasing the pulse rate to thousands of hertz, thereby reducing the number of people negatively affected. It’s not a fix-all for everyone, but it does help significantly compared to the 240hz or 480hz used on phones like the Google Pixel 8 Pro or Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra.
Only a few companies, like TCL, still offer LCD panels on their flagship devices, often angling them as more vision-friendly. For example, the TCL Tab 10 NXTPAPER tablet pictured below uses a “paper-like” matte finish to help diffuse light from the panel in a way that looks more natural to human eyes.
Part of the problem is that AMOLED and OLED technology has been pushed as a superior tech without properly explaining the potential negative health effects associated with it. Most people — tech journalists included — have never heard of PWM and have no idea that OLED panels flicker.
I found out this truth about a year ago as my headaches and symptoms of nausea increased with newer smartphones. Thankfully, since then, the smartphone and display industries have started shifting to friendlier methods of dimming. The list of best phones for PWM sensitive people is now far more respectable than even just a year ago because of heightened awareness, but progress still needs to be made.
Companies like Google, Samsung, and Apple are the worst offenders of using harsh display tech among smartphone manufacturers and continue to use low PWM rates that do not abide by research showing how harmful they can be to humans.
Companies like Motorola, Honor, OnePlus, and plenty of others have added flicker-reduction options to OLED phones and it’s just the responsible thing to do.
If companies continue to switch to OLED en masse, at least one of three things needs to happen. First, it’s imperative that companies like Samsung, Google, and Apple adopt flicker-reduction options for flicker-sensitive users. Even laptops like the Galaxybook 4 Edge have horrendously low PWM rates and feature other harsh flickering effects like temporal dithering.
If there’s no way to turn this stuff off, these companies are quite literally telling people that they don’t want their business. It’s rotten. Companies like Motorola, Honor, OnePlus, and plenty of others have added flicker-reduction options to OLED phones and it’s just the responsible thing to do.
The other two action items are far less likely and almost certainly not going to happen. One, companies could offer to support LCD panel phones for longer, enabling flicker-sensitive users to use modern devices still until a better solution comes along. Heck, offer a subscription model so that users who need it can offer monetary compensation so companies can have developers support devices long term.
Lastly—and I know this one isn’t going to happen—start informing people of the potential negative side effects of using OLED technology over other types of display technology.
It’s hard to accept OLED as the “clearly superior” technology when burn-in is still a substantial problem — look at my 2017 LG OLED TV to see this in action — and the potential to cause headaches, nausea, and other related issues is entirely possible. Every type of technology has trade-offs, and it’s important to be informed about them. It’s a shame that companies like Samsung Display don’t seem concerned with offering up the truth.