##PWM Dimming

in digital electronics, it’s hard to send 30% power but easy to send either 0% or 100% power (full off or full on). So instead, to dim a light, we can just turn a light off and on really quickly. If you turn it off 70% of the time, and turn it on 30% of the time, it’ll look like the light is at 30% brightness - if you do it quickly enough. But doing things faster is also difficult, so sometimes it’s fast enough that we can’t perceive it turning on and off, but slow enough that it still causes issues in sensitive people.

Fun fact: if you see LED lights blinking in videos, but not when looking at it in real life, that’s when the PWM dimming frequency doesn’t quite match up with the camera’s shutter speed or framerate. This is known as aliasing: when there’s a slight mismatch in frequency of two evenly-spaced patterns, and combining them results in a new pattern.

Dithering

Not sure exactly what kind of dithering they’re referring to, but I’m going to guess it’s color dithering.

If you only have white and black pieces of paper, but you want to make gray, you might cut them up and arrange them in a checkerboard pattern. If you view it from far enough away, you might perceive it as gray rather than pure black or white.

This is basically what dithering attempts to do: when you can’t mix colors, it’s a method of representing more colors than you actually are able to use by patterning them in certain ways.

Not knowledgeable enough about screens to know why fans are worried about dithering, or why Nintendo might have been considering using it in the first place though.

Something to talk about when you’re making the 900th unnecessary video about the switch 2