This f.lux stuff is really starting to cross the uncanny valley from well-intentioned concern to junk science conspiracy theory.
First of all, the idea that you "can't see" the differences in the light emitted by OLED vs. LCD is just absurd. It's called white balance, it's well understood, and any person with at least one functioning eye is going to pick out most OLED screens as having a blue/green tint to them.
To correct for this, the iPhone X was the first generation of Apple phone to adopt "True Tone", which matches the white balance of both OLED and LCD screens to that of the ambient environment. How convenient that they took the time to conjure up some bespoke metrics, but somehow didn't get around to mentioning this headlining feature of the iPhone X that has quite a lot of relevancy to the subject area. I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that it stomps all over the point they're trying to make.
As to "Night Shift" not making enough of a difference at the default setting... yeah, you know that you can change default settings? Indeed, with one finger swipe, I can spray tan my phone screen so hard it gets elected president. Turns out I don't need f.lux after all!
No, the “white balance” isn’t sufficient. Spectral power distribution is what might as well be an infinite dimensional space, whereas trichromatic vision is (in a simplified model anyway) 3-dimensional.
You can see the difference between lights if you look through a diffraction grating, though.
There are light sources with very dramatically different spectral power distributions which appear to have the same color if you look directly at the light. These can have substantially different impact on circadian rhythms, brightness adaptation, etc.
Spikier light spectra have an additional problem for color reproduction (unrelated to sleep) which is that they amplify differences in color vision between different observers; everyone’s vision is just slightly different, and if you use very spiky spectra for primaries, the result is that all of the color relationships (say of some photograph) end up looking at least slightly wrong for most people (where “wrong” here means different from what the creator of the image intended). The new phones are just getting toward a spectrum which is spiky enough where our simple models of color reproduction start breaking down; the next-generation gamuts specified for film etc. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rec._2020) are beyond that point.
Personally I wish there was less of a rush toward the largest possible color gamut. In marketing and lay understanding larger color gamuts are strictly superior, but (like with many engineering decisions) there are actually serious tradeoffs involved.
This is really interesting. So far I've been looking for the widest gamut monitors as possible, but I guess it's not that simple.
So is there any way to have a wide gamut without getting different results for different people? I can only think of adding more primaries. Or maybe using some "flourescent" material to try and shift the primaries to match a specific viewer?
First of all, the idea that you "can't see" the differences in the light emitted by OLED vs. LCD is just absurd. It's called white balance, it's well understood, and any person with at least one functioning eye is going to pick out most OLED screens as having a blue/green tint to them.
To correct for this, the iPhone X was the first generation of Apple phone to adopt "True Tone", which matches the white balance of both OLED and LCD screens to that of the ambient environment. How convenient that they took the time to conjure up some bespoke metrics, but somehow didn't get around to mentioning this headlining feature of the iPhone X that has quite a lot of relevancy to the subject area. I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that it stomps all over the point they're trying to make.
As to "Night Shift" not making enough of a difference at the default setting... yeah, you know that you can change default settings? Indeed, with one finger swipe, I can spray tan my phone screen so hard it gets elected president. Turns out I don't need f.lux after all!