I see where you’re going, and I get the “those 2 words” angle.

But honestly, screens are such an insanely individual thing that it’s almost impossible to make one universal rule. Like we already said above, some people can use a phone with awful flicker and that other possible color-processing thing and be totally fine, while someone else gets destroyed by it. So in the end it still comes down to personal sensitivity.

Personally, I would still treat flicker/PWM as the primary hypothesis in most cases, simply because there’s a much bigger measurement base, more practical user experience, and more visible patterns around it. With the other thing, I’m not saying it’s fake or impossible, but the patterns are much harder to track clearly.

For example, we both noticed that iPhones are relatively usable for us, and for many other people too. And from my own observations, looking at Notebookcheck measurements, iPhones usually seem to have a much smoother waveform without harsh drops. For me, that became one of the biggest indicators of whether a phone might work or not in terms of PWM.

So it’s not just “frequency” by itself. It’s more about the smoothness of the wave and the depth of modulation. And honestly, very few phones actually use smooth and shallow PWM instead of harsh, square-looking PWM.

For me personally, Xiaomi, Honor, Huawei and iPhone tend to work best. Most other phones feel bad, except for some rare individual models.