In 2024, the trend of LCD mobile phones is gone, and the LCD will never be slaves, and the party will still lose after all?

Although I would like to shout at this time that LCD will never be a slave, I still have to recognize the fact that the mobile phones launched last year, whether they are flagship phones or thousand-yuan machines, most of them use OLED screens, and LCD can be said to be the general trend.

At this point in time, if I want to buy an LCD phone with acceptable performance, among these phones released last year, only the iQOO Z8 and the Redmi Note 12T Pro meet the conditions, and the choice can be said to be pitiful.

Other mobile phones are either too weak in performance, or the quality of the LCD screen is not good, not to mention being the main machine, even if it is used as a standby machine, it may be a bit choking, considering that the situation is stronger than people, so, the LCD party can really consider switching to the OLED camp next.

Seeing this, some friends may be curious about why it's 2024, LCD mobile phones are about to have no future, why are there still a group of people guarding LCD.

Although LCD has no advantage over OLED, it has no advantage in contrast and viewing angle, but it is good that it protects the eyes and does not burn the screen, like I am a strobe sensitive user, and when using individual OLED mobile phones, the eyes are always very easy to get tired.

So a while ago, I picked a 1TB spare phone within 2,000, and I didn't choose the Realme GT Neo5 SE and OnePlus ACE 2v with a 1.5K screen, and finally chose the Redmi Note 12 Turbo with a resolution of only 1080P, but the strobe performance is relatively eye-friendly.

If you want to see the screen flickering, it's very simple, we just need to take another mobile phone, open the camera to select the video, adjust the shutter speed, and shoot at the OLED screen to see the black stripes.

The number of black lines reflects the frequency, the more black bars represent the higher the strobe frequency (the more black bars, the better), while the thickness of the white and black lines represents the duration of the screen (the thinner the black bars, the better), and the black line color reflects how much the brightness fluctuates each time the screen flashes (the lighter the color, the better).

Of course, if this screen uses an LCD, no matter what brightness it is, it has no black bars, which means there is no flicker.

Of course, the reason why the screen has strobe is mainly related to its dimming method.

To put it simply, there are two common dimming methods for mobile phones to control the brightness of the screen, namely DC dimming and PWM dimming, the former changes the screen degree by adjusting the current size, and the latter changes the screen brightness by controlling the brightness of the screen.

As we all know, OLEDs emit light independently of each pixel.

If you use DC dimming to control the brightness, a 2K resolution screen, about 3.68 million pixels, is difficult to control, not to mention, because each pixel "physique" is different, under low voltage, the brightness of each pixel will also be different, which can easily lead to uneven screen brightness and color cast.

Seriously, the screen is bright and dark, and it looks like a rag:

There is no such problem with an LCD with an independent backlight, the voltage is bright for the large screen, and dark for the small screen, not to mention how trouble-free it is, so the vast majority of LCD mobile phones use DC dimming, while OLED mobile phones generally use PWM dimming.

Since PWM dimming is essentially a "light-dark-light-dark" process, as long as the screen flickering frequency, brightness maintenance time and brightness fluctuations are controlled, the effect of adjusting brightness can be achieved, but this leads to the inevitable flickering or strobe on the screen.

It's just that because of the visual persistence of the human eye, the screen still looks solid.

Speaking of which, when OLED mobile phones first came out, many people didn't take strobe seriously at all, and they didn't realize that something was wrong until they used it for a long time, so they gradually began to realize the harm of strobe, and Internet netizens were calling for "LCD will never be a slave" is getting higher and higher.

And the reaction of mobile phone manufacturers is also quite intriguing.

At the beginning, the manufacturer's attitude towards screen eye protection was: If you want, I will do it, in 2019, when OLED screens just became high-end mainstream, we can see that many manufacturers have put their hearts into making DC-like dimming mode for mobile phones, and we can choose whether to turn it on or not.

The reason why it is called "DC-like" is because it is actually a dimming method improved on the basis of PWM dimming, which makes the strobe black bar less and thin and light in color, making the screen more gentle when flickering, which is very close to the effect brought by DC dimming.

At that time, many manufacturers even made a "disclaimer", telling in advance that after turning on DC-like dimming/low flicker mode, the display effect of the screen may be affected at low brightness.

Fortunately, they later came up with a compromise solution, which was to let the phone continue to use DC-like dimming at high brightness, but still PWM dimming at low brightness, but at this time, it became high-frequency PWM.

For example, if you adjust the original 360Hz low-frequency PWM, which flashes 360 times in 1 second, to 1920Hz high-frequency PWM, which flashes 1920 times in 1 second, when the strobe frequency is high to a certain extent, the impact on the human eye will be reduced, and it is relatively more eye-friendly.

And in 2021, after mobile phones successively used LTPO OLED screens that can dynamically adjust the screen refresh rate, the attitude of manufacturers towards screen eye protection became: You say, I pretended not to see it, at that time, many mobile phones secretly canceled DC-like dimming.

The reason why manufacturers will change their attitude is because at that time Android flagships began to use 2K resolution screens, LTPO can adaptively adjust the screen refresh rate (1Hz-120Hz) to achieve the effect of power saving, with 2K 120Hz screen can be said to be very suitable.

And don't forget, the Snapdragon 888 and Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 at that time were also big power consumers, and if you don't use LTPO, the battery life of the phone will most likely collapse.

However, it is more difficult to do DC-like dimming on LTPO OLED screens, and it often requires the cooperation of screen suppliers.

Here's a pretty visual example.

I was very impressed at the time, in the Xiaomi 12 series, the standard version does not use the more expensive LTPO screen, and the settings provide "anti-flicker mode", and the screen will switch to DC-like mode after turning it on:

The Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro with an LTPO screen doesn't have this option, and it is 360Hz low-frequency PWM dimming regardless of brightness:

This is also the case with several models launched by other brands.

Not to mention hypocrisy, some colleagues in the editorial department even used the Xiaomi Mi 11 for three years because they couldn't wait for the eye-protecting screen!

Since last year, the attitude of manufacturers has changed 180 degrees, and almost every manufacturer has been at the press conference

When introduced to the screen, it will focus on "eye protection", and even start a variety of popular science, and the eye protection solutions adopted by each company today are also very different.

For example, the vivo X100 series and iQOO 12 series do not have any DC-like dimming, but focus on full-brightness high-frequency PWM dimming, while the Xiaomi 14 is full-brightness DC-like dimming, while the OPPO Find X7 series and OnePlus 12 series are high-frequency PWM + DC-like combinations.

The reason,On the one hand, thanks to the rise of domestic screens,These domestic mobile phone manufacturers can directly participate in the in-depth customization of the screen,It is not impossible to even launch the banknote ability to engage in joint research and development with a screen supplier,It is not a big problem to put forward some requirements in the screen development stage。

On the other hand, it is becoming more and more difficult for mobile phones to create differentiation in hardware and software, and even if there is, other manufacturers will soon follow suit.

It is foreseeable that the next new machine will be launched, and it is bound to spend more thought on eye protection, so it seems that although LCD mobile phones are gradually declining, those who stick to LCD in order to protect their eyes may have waited for the next spring~