Apple: ‘Jelly scrolling’ effect on iPad mini 6 display is not an issue

Following the official launch of the 6th generation iPad mini in stores last week, customers worldwide have been noticing a “jelly scrolling” effect on the tablet’s display in portrait mode. “Jelly scrolling” is when half of the display is refreshing noticeably slower than the other, which results in a wobble effect when content is scrolling.

Andrew Cunningham for Ars Technica:

Apple has told us that the “jelly scroll” issue on the 6th-generation iPad mini is normal behavior for LCD screens. Because these screens do refresh line by line, there is a tiny delay between when the lines at the top of the screen and lines at the bottom are refreshed. This can cause uneven scrolling issues like the ones observed on the iPad.

We maintain that this effect is noticeable on the iPad mini in a way that it is not noticeable on other 60 Hz LCD iPads we’ve tested, like the iPad Air 4 and the latest $329 iPad. There’s also a clear dividing line down the middle of the screen in portrait mode, as observed in our testing… it’s not a problem isolated to the extreme edges of the display. The upshot is that the company doesn’t believe there is a hardware or software issue to “fix,” and that the screen apparently is the way it is.

The issue is subtle enough that we didn’t notice it when testing the mini for our review, but our review unit does indeed appear to suffer from the same problem. It’s the most noticeable when scrolling relatively slowly up and down a webpage or document—the left side of the screen seems to trail the right side by just enough that paragraphs of text appear rubbery and wobbly to an attentive eye.

MacDailyNews Take: This is simply the a result of the way sequential pixel refresh LCDs work. 60Hz LCDs tend to do it in at least one screen orientation. The larger the display, the more noticeable this effect is and, that’s right, the new iPad mini has the largest display of any iPad mini at 8.3-inches (diagonal), so users of older, smaller iPad minis are now noticing it.

Here’s a video of showing what “jelly scrolling” looks like:

https://twitter.com/backlon/status/1440681196246106123