I know back in the day, CRT monitors were pretty harsh on the eyes and it was fairly fashionable to have a screen that hung over your CRT monitor.
But these days with LCD's and coatings they add to monitors, is it really necessary to ware these silly amber tinted eyeware?
I can game perfectly well for hours, by giving my eyes a good rest staring out the window every map change, as well as having decent lighting in the room.
I get the feeling this is another magical bottle of snake oil that the gaming industry is selling.
I just laugh when I see people paying a fortune for gaming ones when they're just safety glasses that you can pick up in hardware shops for next to nothing.
I own a pair of glasses with yellow lenses which I use playing airsoft on overcast days and they do help slightly but for sitting playing video games? Nah. It's much easier to just adjust the monitor settings.
To be fair, it isn't the glasses that are wrong, it's everything else. Poor choice of facial hair, non-optimal expression for photographs and a rather silly haircut. I'll be buying some Gunnars because I can legitimately say that they do dramatically reduce eyestrain caused by backlit panels. The lighting solution used by most computer display manufacturers creates light of such intensity in the upper blue and violet spectrum that it causes unnecessary eye strain. Wearing amber tinted glasses helps by absorbing and acting as a filter for most of this light so that it doesn't hurt your eyes. If you have marathon gaming sessions or you work at a computer for literally the entire day, then a pair of Gunnars may be what you need to keep your eyes in optimal shape. The fact that these come with an option of tinted prescription lenses is also a plus.
I have a little first hand knowledge, I bought Gunnar Crystaline glasses, and I used them for maybe a week. They were cool and i felt like a real hipster but they just couldn't become a habit to put on. First of all, glasses get dirty, dusty, specked or whatever, and why would you bother looking through dirty glass when you can just use your regular vision. There was still glare off the lenses even.
Also, while wearing glasses it may just be me, but I am a headphone user. Any type of glass used with headphones are extremely uncomfortable to me. Like right now my prescription glasses are slightly uncomfortable. Contacts FTW.
So no. Paid $100 to have a glasses case sit on my desk.
That company makes many of their frame styles with what they call Crystal lenses, which are designed for graphic designers who require high color accuracy. They are made using Gunnars high quality polycarbonate and have very high quality anti-reflective coatings added. They also have a focal adjustment to them that aids in reducing eye strain when looking at a display for extended periods of time.
I do, in fact, wear corrective lenses. I intend to get a pair of their crystal lenses for the primary reason that I cannot afford two sets of them and I do not look good with dark amber-yellow glasses. The thing about the color distortion though: if you are okay with the appearance of them on your face, your brain will filter the color out within a half hour so that you will begin adjusting your color perception based on what you already know colors to be. It's about like using a smartphone's touch to adjust white balance. You think of things that you know to be white and your brain will begin to remove the yellow tinge that is on everything until whites appear white. The other colors come along for the ride. I can say from experience that you will actually forget that you have them on.
They do make prescription lenses for their glasses, with the same coatings and everything. Even their non-prescription lenses have a focal adjustment. If your eyesight isn't actually the same for both eyes, this will cause eye strain. The intention of these glasses is to become your primary pair of glasses, hence why they offer the crystalline lens option for so many of their frames with the prescription option.
I got a pair a couple generations ago when Best Buy was clearing them out for something like $20. I don't think I'd pay full price for them, but they did help quite a bit, and I used them extensively for a while. I think most of the strain reduction came from the color filtering, though. These days, I use f.lux, and it has a similar filtering effect without skewing my sense of color so much (since it's calibrated to match the ambient lighting). Also, getting a new scrip on my old-ass glasses helped a lot (I'm far sighted).
I recently got a pair for xmas and I've noticed a difference. Right when you put them on I noticed in excel with black on white was easier on the eyes and slightly better for reading. I would say putting them on for a few seconds you might not notice much but after a few hours working on the PC and taking them off I notice a bigger difference. Being subjective though, this might be due to the screen just being brighter and my eyes are getting used to it.
The amber portion is nice, but i feel F.lux can achieve this to a similar level during the night time hours. It's not 100% the same but it brings the monitor closer to the amber tint benefit. F.lux is free so I would highly recommend setting it up with a nice warm 10pm time. F.lux will put the screen on full brightness during the day so you might have to keep adjusting it to retain the nighttime setting.
The biggest eye strain however isn't the color so much as it is the glare from digital screens. If you get an anti-reflective coating on your glasses, you'll see the biggest benefit that these gamer glasses have to offer.
If you have eye strain maybe they are worth a try, if you don’t why spend money to fix a problem you don’t have. I do use them and I do like them. I wouldn't have bought them myself, but when family is trying to figure out what I want for xmas I just said I was looking at them. lo and behold I got them.
They do the same thing that f.lux does, except flux does it to your screen and Gunnars you put on your face.. and f.lux is free.
I suffer from severe eyestrain/headaches due to too much blue in the LED monitors that I am surrounded by all day long. f.lux, which changes the temperature of your monitors (same thing for Gunnars, except you're wearing the temperature change) has completely relieved me of my eye strain and I don't need to take pain killers everyday anymore. So, if you experience severe eye strain, I recommend getting f.lux because it's free and it works.
