Eye strain. Some things to share and maybe get some ideas

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Good time of the day, community,

This will be a long post…

Wanted to speak on the topic of eye strain when it comes to modern hardware. The topic isn’t new, and I do believe I had brought up this question in the past, but now I want to share some things that I have actually stumbled upon and maybe find some people, who either faced these likes of scenarios or have an idea how to proceed with this.

Some background. As being a child of the 90s, I’ve had no issues with those “back in the days” CRT tv screens. Could sit in front of one for 8-12 hours (if parents weren’t home ofc) and be completely fine. Later were the first PC monitors (even the cheap clearly bad ones) - absolutely the same thing and zero negative reaction from the body.

When I went to the university, my parents gave me money to buy my own first PC. At that point the initial TN has passed and IPS/VA monitors became available, so I went for one. The reaction didn’t leave to wait long - the feeling could be described in two fashions:

  1. The veins around the eyes and up to the top of the head started to swell, get numb and start to twitch.
  2. You decided to wear eye glasses, made out of bricks. In addition to it - a brick hat.

It took me a few tries to find a monitor, which wouldn’t end up the same… And in 2012 I finally got one. Fun thing - this is my main monitor to this day. I’ve tried several gaming/office monitors, and all of them were returned to retailer…

But one funny thing here - I have been working in IT for 10+ years, and, before the pandemic, I also had to go to office and work from there. And I worked quite well with the given cheap as hell monitor I was provided. At my first job, I even had… 2-4 monitors sitting in front of me. And I do not recall ever facing the issue.

Some time ago I decided to give it another go and bought a 4K Samsung QLED TV. I went for an older and a bit cheaper series, which didn’t have a direct backlight (had been looking at that screen for an hour at the retailer, and it seemed fine). It arrived home, and I was happy as hell (beside cinema’s, the only screen, from which I could watch movies, was a 1080p VA 27" monitor with 15% brightness… after “15” even that monitor started to bring up my issues).

And “wouldn’t you know it?!” - after a day or two I started to feel that same good old problem. I was disappointed as hell, but decided to keep the tv and experiment with it until I find the roots of the problem (and eye doctors say that there are no reasons for my eyes to behave the way that I described… even after numerous exams. I do wear glasses, but that’s a “children can be quite mean” story for another day).

So I decided to give it a rest and leave the tv alone for a few days.

Here starts the FUN PART (finally?).
I have the tv in front of my bed. AND I have a LED lamp (with 3000K color temperature) on the left side of the bed.

I decided to watch something (was too tired to turn on the PC), on the tv. Had the lamp turned on (being a background light, located behind me from the left side). After 20 minutes I realized something fascinating - only the RIGHT portion of my head (you can clearly draw the line from top to bottom in the nose section) was stiff/numb/in pain.

This was a big HUH for me. It’s been a week since I’ve started experimenting in this direction. I’ve tried different angles and different lightbulbs (all led though… didn’t come prepared for this case scenario). And all continue to reproduce this issue. Even if I try having a second light on the other side and balance it, I still end up with my head hurting.

First I thought that maybe the screen is too bright, so I decided to lower it. Strangely, it got worse. Second thing I tried was reducing the color intensity from the screen calibrations (the low blue light thing…). Didn’t notice anything different.

After which I decided to return the screen settings to stock (with stock brightness, which at the start felt overwhelming), and completely turn off the light. Funny story - I watched a full movie. After this I went farther - no additional light sources and turn on the “auto brightness mode”, which is brighter than it was before - nothing, my eyes reacted very well.

From that point I started to recall all the cases from work/university, and recalled one thing - lighting. All rooms had that “school pale luminescent tube” lighting. Before I thought that maybe those cheap monitors were the thing and had something special in them, but now my guess is that my issue is with the lighting itself (and how eyes react to certain light wave types).

Still thinking of maybe getting a led strip and attach it to the back of the tv for that Phillips’ “ambient light” thing, but don’t think that’s the way to go. It seems to be that every “additional” non-natural light (I can watch the tv at day quite well after returning the stock settings), somehow triggers the problem.

Will be glad to hear some suggestions and ideas. Thanks in advance.

P.S. one additional minor thing to add - G-Sync. In origin, when I was trying those monitors, I had G-Sync enabled by default (and my 2080Ti did a good job at keeping the framerate at it’s best). At my previous attempt, sitting in front of Samsung’s G7 monitor, at finding the root cause, at some point I turned G-Sync off. It was a huge difference maker. It became MUCH better. After that I even tried it on one of my previous monitors I’ve tried (and gave to my parents since I failed to return it to the retailer) - and it showed the same result. I even wanted to give that monitor a try, but didn’t like how poor was the white in comparison to my 2012 monitor, so left it be.

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Okay im sure i will miss obvious details you saod already or make silly suggestions but…

Have you tried any high refresh rate monitors and running them at high refresh all the time.
Just thinking because you said the led bulb did it too that it is tied to the 50/60hz strobing.

All guesses, bult older CRTs didnt have the hard full picture refreshing and strobing we have now. But fast blurred together scans.

The only point i will say is if you try it out, get a genuinely high refresh rate monitor and not one the tries to trick with a 60hz picture but 120hz back lighting. Or other tricks they made up to fake it.

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With few exceptions, most LED bulbs sold today are pushed to their limits. While being capable of extremely long life and reasonably smooth output, they push them to the brink as to use as few components as possible. Not only does this lower their lifespan, but the lack of filtering on the power supply causes flickering to be worse, which may or may not be obviously visible. For most people it is good enough at first glance and they buy the cheapest one. Unfortunately the most expensive one probably has different color or wireless connectivity as the difference, while using the same garbage power input.

Before I go any further, you might want to try an incandescent bulb. Trying more LED’s at this point seems like you will have to further contort yourself to find the difference, and again the power supply issue will likely persist. If you do buy LED strips, I would get ones that work with 12V and hook it up to a battery or linear power supply to see if it makes a difference vs using what is likely a garbage tier switch mode power supply (SMPS) that they tend to come with.

I don’t have the eye strain issue, but I have messed around with LED’s a bit. Increasing the filtering helped quite a lot. In my case I had a cheap PWM solar charge controller causing the lights to flicker. I added an LC filter by ripping an inductor and capacitors from old electronics and it made a huge difference. Then it dawned on me that pulses still making their way through were causing the light output to drop on occasion, perhaps from 100% to 70%. If I used a resistor to get it down to around 70% then there would be little to no dropout as it was already there.

This of course means losing 30% of the light output, with the benefits being more stable light and massively reducing heat, thus massively increasing lifespan. Add in more bulbs to make up for the loss of light output and you have a system that works the way it is supposed to. While using a resistor is less efficient, there is a giant jump in efficiency by not pushing the LED’s to their limit, and a SMPS would just add in more noise, just at a higher frequency. I think a lot of the efficiency numbers will be dependent on individual cases, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the losses caused by using a large resistor could get within single digit percentage of a SMPS for specific cases, without any of the flickering issues, and possibly no more complex or costly to build than a decent SMPS.

And that’s just for the room lighting and backlighting. LED screens will still have this same issue. You would have to at minimum redo the power delivery, if not change out the entire lighting system. With all of the people who have problems with this, you would figure a small business would crop up and convert screens for people. I doubt any big businesses would bother until someone else proved it was financially viable, at which point they would finally relent and provide this as an option for select models.

tl;dr - Try an incandescent bulb and hope they make more options for TV’s in the future.

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I think the problem with this bulb is two fold:

  1. the color temperature is waaay too low so, if your walls are white, you’re gonna get your eyes flooded with blue light
  2. if it’s a cheaper bulb is PWM dimmed and your eyes might be sensible to PWM dimming. I’m too, so much so, that I wouldn’t be able to be in a room with poor LED bulbs or flourescent lights.

So I think you need to get good quality bulbs with high CRI at 6500K, keep the screen you’re using dimmed and use the reading mode, if available, on your screen. I’m finding the LG reader mode on their display amazing for working with it each day for 8 to 10 hours a day.

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I see where you’re going. Yes, I today had a conversation with a friend, who knows physics quite well, and we are now testing the theory of the led’s “lightbulb” glow-and-fade interfering with the tv’s, which results into my eyes overloading.

I have tried 144Hz gaming monitors, but the results are “inconclusive” because the first time I had g-sync enabled (which, as silly as it would seem, turned down the refresh rate to minimum when I was using desktop apps).

After which there was the case where I tried turning down the brightness, which, if one of the article I’ve read was true, makes the monitor’s/tv’s backlight trigger less frequently (and this was the thing I caught to be a problem even with the tv).

Yes, that’s the thing - nowadays “monitor panels” are a show of turn-off turn-on.

Believe this to be the actual root of the problem, which you can find on many forums with people complaining about symptoms similar to mine.

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I do believe this to also have a huge impact on the situation. Trash and trash with ribbons, wifi and rgb. I will be looking the regular “spring” lightbulbs to see where that will take me.

incandescent bulb

Yes, I do believe this to be the case. Will be testing this theory in the next few days (need to find one).

This was my idea in the beginning. But after speaking to a friend, who understand this more than I do, we came to a conclusion that it will most likely make the situation even worse.

That’s the thing. It would seem that one can end up spending a lot of effort and money, and still end up with eye strain (which, for me, progresses into a rapid headache, which lasts a few hours). Not sure if it’s worth the investment if the “incandescent bulb” will solve the problem.

This is really the part which I find entertaining - I think that this would really end up being a huge profit and would even make a manufacturer quite wealthy and popular. But until the “overall profits” say “it’s fine, it’s fine” I doubt someone will work in this direction.

At some point I even had a brief idea of trying to do this with the tv’s (and a monitor’s) backlight system, but, sadly, my skills with actually modifying the hardware are quite limited and would end up in a disaster at some point :slight_smile:

I believe that “too long; didn’t read” in a situation where a person read the whole thing I wrote, and tried to give some advice/help would be very rude :slight_smile:

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Could be the case, but for what I have tried in the past, PWM certified monitors didn’t provide any difference. I would even say that the garbage monitors, which I used at the university, early jobs etc. would laugh about the whole “qc and human eye safe” considerations.

I believe I tried several of those, and at least one of them was 6000K. Didn’t produce a difference.

For this specific “attempt” it’s more a tv in the usual way and it’s used for media only. Plus when I tried lowering the brightness, I faced the case where “it got worse”(in terms of headaches). But I do realize that you mean “good lightbulb/light” + “reading mode” on the tv/monitor screen. Will try this as well.

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Well, in that case you’re not really susceptible to flickering but it’s good somehow (?). All the new monitors are flicker free though. To find some with PWM backlight dimming you need to go waaay back in time.

Well that’s out of the way than.

Too dimm of a screen makes it hard to read, especially in standard calibrated modes that come with the display. Experienced first hand with my LG 38GN950. Windows blue filter + RGB at around 15 brightness is garbage. But, reading mode, lowers the contrast and makes some weird adjustments that look like medium black stabilizer level so much so that even at 0 brightness I can read perfectly fine without straining my eyes.
Most displays do things this way but, if not, try to play with contrast and black stabilizer to make the whole screen easier to read at all brightness levels.

Adding to this: during the day try to match the brightness of your screen to the overall brightness of the room you’re in. If it’s too bright or too dark behind it’s gonna hurt over the long time. During the day have a soft light beind the display (either a lamp far away or a little LED strip on the back of the monitor that reflects on the wall behind it) to even out the brightness difference between the screen and the surrounding envinronment.
Last but not least, I found my peace with a light bar on top of the screen. It illuminates evenly the desk I’m working at and doesn’t reflect at all on the display (duh, they’re made for it!). This is how I do it and it seems to work so far.

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Despite the fact that LG makes the majority of OLED TV’s and seems to be good at it (or is it?), a few years ago, as a “first attempt after a while”, I bought I believe also something of that series. I do believe it was 32-something-850, and I have to say that you not only eyes - it would seem that you can cook bacon just by placing it infront of the display.

I understand this, but I’m starting to rethink the whole concept of the problem. It would seem that modern displays have at least two things wrong with them (and this affects a lot of people):

  1. The fact that the screen light is actually a flash and not a constant. Some people react to this, others don’t.
  2. The backlight itself can be done in a way, that is aimed at “other things” than actually eye health.

I do remember writing to BenQ(my monitor from 2012 was made by them), and for my question of “What would you recommend for work, when you need to sit in front of a monitor on a 8-10 hour basis” I got a great answer “Please don’t sit that long. Maximum 2-3 hours”.

I’m actually starting to understand this thing now. I’ve heard a lot about “do have special lighting when working in front of a monitor”, but always ignored it.

Only now, after discovering for my self the fact that I’m literally sitting in front of a “blinking light” and not a CRT monitor with a constant light, I started to get the idea of so many rules in regards of a monitor.

For me it’s disappointing. The fact that I need to have a specialized surrounding, counting the fact that I watched TV and until 20 didn’t even have a “IPS/VA” monitor…

But yeah, now at least I feel I’m in the right direction.

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It’s hilarious when the fix to your problem, which you have been trying to figure out for 10+ years, costed me less than 1$. Successfully managed to watch a movie with a working lamp behind me.

Thank you.

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Is is possibly due to how the leds brightness is managed.

Old incandescents you just lowered the power to them and the glow less

But LEDs are an on or off and not really suited to dimming. How they do the dimming is likely by trimming back the PWM so the the led turns on for a shorter time and thanks to human persistence of vision we see the rapid pulses as dimmer.

In that case full brightness might have helped with that as the closer to full brightness an LED is the long it is on each cycle, theoretically “full brightness” is just running the led constatly never turning it off.

But when it comes to screens and local dimming there is no avoiding this. Even on high brightness local dimming will be pulsing the leds in the darker spots.

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I do believe this is the root evil of all the “flat” non-crt monitor issues, which people have been facing for quite some time now. I remember and old CRT Samsung monitor. You look at it and feel the heat on your eyes. But you can still look at it and the most of the “eye fatigue/strain/pain/headache” non-sence wasn’t even given a thought.

If I remember one article correctly, the lesser the brightness, the lesser the times the “on-off” flash occurs. And the fun part of it is the fact, that it produces more problems despite the fact that it’s supposed to be “calmer” for the eyes.

Which brings back that sack of eye and head problems, which I’m facing.

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CRTs certainly caused eye strain for me. I was fine with dark backgrounds, but light, especially paper-white documents, were (and are still) a huge problem. I was cobbling together dark mode measures in the 90’s. It seems I’m tilting at windmills a lot.

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Never had those kind of issues, can’t comment on that.

All modern IPS and VA panels are flicker free. Backlight is not strobed by default and strobing is used for motion clarity in gaming settings, not to dimm the screen. So maybe your eyes need to “rest” between one frame and the other.

Flicker free backlight are mandatory on new displays for safety regulations. A display with low enough flicker to be eye straining (not the OLED flickering that’s in the hundreds if not thousands of refreshed per second) cannot be sold.

Expected answer. They’re not a medical company and, if anything happened to you after they suggested you one of their products, you could’ve taken them to court, set a precedent, bla bla.

Well you’re not really. A CRT has it’s phosphors excited line by line. So you’re basically seeing one line at the time scanned so fast that persistance of image in the retina does the job. Maybe that’s why you like CRT, they’re off most of the time, not on.

As far as I know that has always been the case when staring at a lit object. Have you tried sitting in a dimly lit room with a brighter than the ambient light shining behind someone? After a while you’re gonna get eye strain, headaches, nausea (in some cases). But you’re not looking at a screen at all. You can try with incandescent bulbs too, same result. It’s too much contrast. And if you wear glasses and/or have lighlty coloured eyes it’s 10x worse.

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I feel your pain. But I do get a feeling that your case may be a bad pair of glasses (or absence?). I’ve had a “good doctor vs bad doctor” situation when I was getting my glasses. The first pair, made by the good doctor, are worn to this day and I wear them 24/7. But it was 2nd year of those glasses and I decided to try a different ophthalmologist, which was closer to where I live. Yeah, good “computer exam” (the first doctor was an oldschool one, and 99% of the things he did was done “in the old ways”, and rechecked and thrown against different looking tests… it took 1-2 hours). Then the glasses arrived - I wore them for 5 minutes and simply threw them into the nearest trash bin. Eye fatigue, headache and the rest of the full pack.

Well, that sounds QUITE familiar. Can’t say about CRT’s, seeming we share the same pain but somehow different reasons, but the “reading a white sheet of paper” from the majority of monitors I’ve tried is known to me as well.

But I think this is the monitor itself + possible factor of the “room”. I recently moved to a new apartment, and now behind my monitor is a window. Before it was the side wall, so I mostly set in a dark environment. But even so, 4 monitors, which I tried to replace my 2012 old one, had a really cheap and “crispy” white, making it quite obvious why “dark themes” were invented. Benq EW2740L, the monitor I spoke of (and found it to be heavily praised on one old good tech forum), makes the “white” to the eye feel like paper, even book paper. So I wouldn’t loose hope.

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I also thought this might be bad-vision related.

I’m severely near sighted so I wear contacts all the time. But a few years ago I was having issues with eye strain, and my eye doctor recommended using a pair of reading glasses while I worked. She said I was likely leaning forward subconsciously while I was working, and being that close to the screen was causing the problem. She was right; while I mostly where contacts still, if I start feeling eye strain, I throw on a pair of readers and it mostly fixes the issue.

You might see an eye doctor, OP?

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I have Rx glasses with an enhanced blue-light filter.

My eye strain has been gone ever since.

You should also try sitting near a window, so that every now and then focus on a distant object to reset your eyes. Also helps with strain.

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This “flicker free” is something, that has a lot of holes in the statement. The main question, that is usually left “outside” is “at what brightness level”.

There is a russian language website to test monitors, monteon, which has a set of tests, which allowed me to quite easily see a difference between many monitors in terms of flickering and so on. I’ve tried buying the “top notch high recommendation” monitors I could find reviews for - Samsung G7, ASUS XB271, BenQ 3203R, LG somethingsomething850. All were “flicker free”, but non of them passed the

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test at 20sh brightness level - all started to flicker like hell at one flicker test or the other (there’s a series of those). Only one’s that passed, at least from those I’ve tested, were my monitor and the tv I’ve purchased and started this holy war.

If only one could test this at home without actually relying on the label. I do understand that there are regulations and stuff, but I feel that the “test group” for this kind of product testing doesn’t have any problems with eyes…

Well, I do have an OLED phone. I was intimidated of purchasing it, thinking that I would end up with the same story, but no - currently, the only device with a screen, bough after 2012, which has zero impact on my eyes.

Honestly? I wish I could. I really believe that until a scandal will be raised with a big impact on the situation, people like me will be buying, trying to force themselves to adapt to a new monitor, and then hope to return them to the retailer (out of the 4 monitors I’ve noted earlier, only 2 I was managed to return. On the other hand, my parents have 2 700+ USD monitors now…).

I seem to forget how CRT’s worked.

But on the other hand, it’s been day 3 with the TV’s brightness returned to auto (if to compare it with my monitor, the brightness is something of “crank it to 11!!!”) and I finally can enjoy a movie without any problems.

On top of this, adding the “lightbulb” variable gave huge success - the problem, at least with the TV (I think the monitor has skeletons of its own… and it’s 60Hz). But even with the monitor I noticed a huge reduction of the problem when I tried to bring up the brightness.

Hum. I can’t recall such a case. My scenario is having an office lamp, turned upwards with the bulb emitting light at the sealing. But beside all that, I can’t say that I’ve faced such symptoms outside of the IPS/VA case. But instead of “eye strain” I had a feeling like all the veins, surrounding me eyes, started to pump up like with a pro bodybuilder during a training session (at least it felt like it).

Still have to learn much more about this though…

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I’ve seen about 3 already. Plus a set of other doctors, simply throwing the question of “what the hell is wrong with me”. Even have a MRI scan of my head. All clean. All the time I hear “I do not see anything that could cause even the slightest of what you’re speaking of”.

Oh yeah. Been there. Was trying to switch to contacts, but until I found the doctor, who said that in my particular case contacts will not be as good as glasses, I was struggling to understand what’s on the screen (hoping that it would pass away in a day or two and I could see as good as with glasses).

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I was about to go to the eye doctor to get me a “doc, put in everything you can think of” glasses. But then had this idea about the lightsource, which currently is quite promising.

Plus if I understand “eye strain” correctly, my case is a bit different - starting from the eyes and all the way to the temples, my veins start to feel like their gonna burst.