C. Scott Brown / Android Authority
TL;DR The Pixel 10 Pro and Pro XL displays could be better for people who are sensitive to PWM dimming.
Google is considering an upgrade to 480Hz dimming for the Pixel 10 Pro and Pro XL. The regular model, as well as the Fold, may stick to 240Hz.
The displays are also planned to be brighter by about 200 nits across the board.
Since the launch of the Pixel 9 series, Google has been revising its Pixel strategy. Instead of the Pro Pixels being larger, slightly better versions of the base Pixels as they had been in previous years, the Pro tier became a whole different class of phones. This year, that trend continues, with all evidence suggesting the baseline Pixel 10 will be closer to the A series Pixels than the Pro models.
It appears that Google will lean into this growing divide even further with its display tech, as we’ve learned that the Pixel 10 is considering a display with a higher PWM frequency — but only on the Pro models.
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DC vs PWM dimming explained Before we get to the main part of the article, a bit of background about display dimming, as it’s a complex topic. There are two main ways to do it — DC (voltage) and PWM (pulse width modulation). The two approaches have fundamental differences, which I’ve illustrated in the diagrams below (check here to see the Matlab script that created this illustration).
Kamila Wojciechowska / Android Authority
DC dimming simply lowers the voltage that’s connected to the display to lower its brightness. This has its advantages — it’s a very simple concept, generally provides decent results on LCDs and doesn’t have any “side effects” on the human perception of displays it’s used in. Unfortunately, that’s where the advantages end. The circuitry for DC dimming is more complex and pretty inefficient. Another problem is that it’s hard to create a circuit that will be able to provide a wide range of voltage to enable dimming the display down to very low levels. It also doesn’t work super well with OLEDs; due to the complicated chemistry involved, lowering voltage not only decreases the brightness, but also affects the color response in a fairly unpredictable way.
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