Home What is temporal dithering?
What is temporal dithering?
Temporal dithering is when pixels alternate between two nearby colors from one frame to the next, so your eye averages them into a shade the panel cannot show on its own.
How it works
A panel can only show a fixed number of levels per color. An 8 bit panel has 256 per channel, a 6 bit panel 64. To show a shade in between, the graphics system or the panel flips a pixel between the two nearest levels over several frames. Averaged over time, it looks like the missing shade. It is also called FRC, frame rate control.
Spatial dithering does the same across neighbouring pixels instead of across frames. The temporal kind means pixels keep changing even on a still image.
Who does it
Dithering can come from the computer's graphics system or from the panel itself. An app on the computer can only change what the computer sends.
Apps whose makers say they act on dithering
BetterDisplay Mac
“Help reduce visible display flickering from PWM and temporal dithering.”
Source: betterdisplay.proColorControl Windows
“Dithering: you can define the dithering mode (Temporal or Spatial) and the dithering bit depth”
Source: github.comStillcolor Mac
“Stillcolor allows you to disable GPU/DCP-generated temporal dithering from user space”
Source: github.comQuote shortened here; the maker's health wording is left out.
Windows Night light also mentions dithering, but to say Windows adds it for color management, not that it removes it.
All 15 apps side by side are in the matrix on the home page, sortable by the dithering column. The quote list is also on the dithering page.
This page explains a mechanism. It is not medical advice, and nothing here says any product fixes anything.