Advice please regarding eye-strain.

[Farflame]

In the past, when using CRT's, I noticed that eye-strain was much worse when running at 60hz. Increasing my monitor to 100hz fixed the problem completely and I went for years with no eye-strain. Then LCD's arrived which were locked at 60hz, but they promised that it made no difference to eye-strain. Well, within a day of using LCD's, my eye-strain when using the PC has been really bad again, but I have no solution to it, since my monitor is fixed to 60hz.

I assumed that I was stuck with it until a friend told me that he has one at 144hz. I realise that other factors can contribute to eye-strain and I've read so many articles on the subject, that it's hard to know what's true. Does anyone have any experience with this and did increasing to 144hz help?

I bought my monitor specifically to reduce eye-strain. It has auto-brightness (which I really like), low blue-light and good ergonomics, but my eye strain is terrible, especially when playing games like BF1 or when scrolling through text (I have to literally close my eyes sometimes when mouse-wheeling through text).

Is there a good monitor with auto-bright, low-blue and 144hz or more that people would recommend, specifically to combat eye-strain?

[Q83Ia7ta]

flicker free is tech what you need. many monitors have it now. google deeper.

[RealNC]

It might also be the motion blur. 60FPS on LCD is quite bad in that regard. 60Hz on CRT might flicker, but 60FPS motion looks very clear. On LCDs it doesn't flicker, but 60FPS motion is very blurry.

I would recommend a high refresh rate monitor. Running the desktop at 120Hz is rather nice and scrolling text is very clear (if your browser supports 120FPS; Google Chrome does on Windows.)

For games, you need the GPU power to go with it in order to play modern games in 120FPS.

[Farflame]

Thanks, I do have a good PC, with a Geforce 1060, so I think it can handle it. I'll look into flicker-free and a high refresh rate.

[Haste]

Yes. Flicker free + high refresh rate are your best bet to combat eye strain. There are other possible factors, but these are the principal ones.

An excellent article about the flicker due to Pulse width modulation can be found here: http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/articles/pu ... lation.htm

Non-exhaustive list of PWM-free monitors here: http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/articles/fl ... tabase.htm

Test to help determine if your current monitor has PWM dimming: http://www.testufo.com/#test=blurtrail



As for the high refresh rate it will help with how blurry moving objects appear on the screen when you track them with your stare.

Your current monitor has an image persistence of 16.6 milliseconds. Your CRT only had probably around 2ms of image persistence!
In other words the moving objects appear 8 times blurrier than on your CRT! This can cause eye strain.

By going with a 144hz monitor, you cut image persistence to 6.9 ms. Which is a significant improvement over 16.6ms.

[Tigranz]

Hi,

I have a question about the PWM dimming test. I have put the briteness 100 and got one thick line on the monitor when it is set to 16 "pixels per rate". But when I change the "pixels per rate" parameter from 1 to 16 incrementally I see the line is pulsating when I pass over 3/5/7/9 "pixels per rate". Can you please explain what does it mean. I have tested different computers and some show that effect some doesn`t.

Sorry for my English!

[Sparky]

On a tangential note, I took a look at the blur trail test on my CRT and when I focused on my stationary cursor in the middle of the screen I was able to notice that my eye's persistence is significantly higher at the center of my vision than at the edge. Basically, I saw vertical lines as the test line moved across the screen, but I saw more of them at once in the center of my vision than at the edge.

[spacediver]

On a tangential note, I took a look at the blur trail test on my CRT and when I focused on my stationary cursor in the middle of the screen I was able to notice that my eye's persistence is significantly higher at the center of my vision than at the edge. Basically, I saw vertical lines as the test line moved across the screen, but I saw more of them at once in the center of my vision than at the edge.

This is consistent with studies that have found higher flicker fusion thresholds in periphery vs. fovea (meaning you need to flash a stimulus very fast in order for the brain to perceive it as a constant stimulus).

The part of the retina that is responsible for peripheral vision has a higher proportion of rods:cones than in the fovea, and I believe that rods primarily feed into the magnocellular processing cells. These cells respond very rapidly and their response decays fast upon stimulus offset, and can thus encode information at a high temporal resolution, which explains the high flicker fusion thresholds found in periphery.

In the fovea, there are more cones, feeding into the parvocellular system. These is a high resolution channel, but comparitively slow, and has higher persistence.

There could be some other explanation for your observation, however.

[Haste]

Here is a little illustration of how the stroboscopic stepping looks like for me on that test when I focus my stare in the middle. (at 16 pixels per frame)

[flood]

@op
sorry if you've already done so, but have you tried during down the brightness? like way down, such that the monitor is as bright as a piece of paper next to it. also stuff like sitting further away, being in a well-lit area...
these are just the obvious things of which I know.

This is consistent with studies that have found higher flicker fusion thresholds in periphery vs. fovea (meaning you need to flash a stimulus very fast in order for the brain to perceive it as a constant stimulus).

The part of the retina that is responsible for peripheral vision has a higher proportion of rods:cones than in the fovea, and I believe that rods primarily feed into the magnocellular processing cells. These cells respond very rapidly and their response decays fast upon stimulus offset, and can thus encode information at a high temporal resolution, which explains the high flicker fusion thresholds found in periphery.

In the fovea, there are more cones, feeding into the parvocellular system. These is a high resolution channel, but comparitively slow, and has higher persistence.

There could be some other explanation for your observation, however.

one observation which seemingly contradicts these:
in the dark, when you move a bright object together with a darker object, the darker object appears to lag behind. i noticed this for like a phone screen vs. the charger's plug