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Lightboost and Monitor Life

Posted: 03 Jan 2014, 11:06
by zachska87
Does the strobing in any way affect the life expectancy of my monitor? I am going to be honest...LightBoost is so freaking awesome I am struggling with it not coming with any major downsides (I was able to adjust the colors in NVIDIA control panel enough for me to not consider the color dampening a downside).

Re: Lightboost and Monitor Life

Posted: 03 Jan 2014, 14:53
by Chief Blur Buster
zachska87 wrote:Does the strobing in any way affect the life expectancy of my monitor? I am going to be honest...LightBoost is so freaking awesome I am struggling with it not coming with any major downsides (I was able to adjust the colors in NVIDIA control panel enough for me to not consider the color dampening a downside).
Motion blur reduction strobing actually would, on average, lengthen the life expectancy of most monitors.

LED's can safely be cycled millions of times per second -- they're used in optical fiber communications to transmit 0's and 1's. Strobing only cycles barely above a hundred times a second. Even simple PWM dimming is more aggressive on LED's.

Many strobed monitors don't use an overvoltage boost to brighten the strobes to compensate for the dark periods between strobes. However, for those that does, the life expectancy might be reduced somewhat. However, people have been using LightBoost 24/7 on some VG248QE's (which use overvoltage boost) for a full year nonstop, and they haven't suffered any brightness degradation, so the rest period between flashes is probably outweighing the overvoltage boosts.

Motion blur eliminating strobe backlights can cause eyestrain for some people who are flicker sensitive. However, motion blur also creates eyestrain too. It's a matter of which is the worse poison -- does your eyes become more tired with or without strobing?

For those people who don't like excessively bright monitors, the loss of brightness is not a minus. And not everyone is sensitive to the color difference between different LCD panels (e.g. TN versus IPS). Finally, if you're not flicker sensitive, that eliminates the last remaining major "catch". The remaining catch is how much GPU you can afford, because strobing mainly looks good at framerate==stroberate (or thereabouts). And if you can play games at framerate==stroberate (triple-digit framerates), you won't get annoyed by the amplified visibility of microstutters/tearing that super-clear motion can bring. Then there's really no drawback -- you'll be happy with strobe backlights such as LightBoost, ULMB, Turbo240, or BENQ Blur Reduction. (The latter three actually has better quality than LightBoost, too!).

That said, some people are picky -- e.g. better color quality -- which is understandable. (EIZO FG2421 with Turbo240 comes highly recommended as the solution to having good quality during strobing).

Re: Lightboost and Monitor Life

Posted: 03 Jan 2014, 17:12
by zachska87
Thank you so much for the informed reply! I am already using LightBoost and LOVE it, I just wondered about long term effects on my monitor. It seemed to cause a bit more eye strain at first but I think I'm getting used to it and it doesn't bother me near as much anymore. Extremely excited to check out ULMB soon!!!!

Re: Lightboost and Monitor Life

Posted: 03 Jan 2014, 17:39
by Chief Blur Buster
zachska87 wrote:Thank you so much for the informed reply! I am already using LightBoost and LOVE it, I just wondered about long term effects on my monitor. It seemed to cause a bit more eye strain at first but I think I'm getting used to it and it doesn't bother me near as much anymore. Extremely excited to check out ULMB soon!!!!
Make sure your ambient light is well-adjusted (e.g. make sure your monitor isn't the brightest thing in your vision field) and your viewing distance reasonable (no closer than about one-screen-width away). This helps a lot for borderline flicker sensitivity cases.

CRT and plasma display can flicker noticeably more than these strobe backlights do, as most strobed gaming monitors are strobing at triple-digit Hz, rather than only 60Hz. Billions endured old-fashioned CRTs at lower flickerates for a long time.

I have many reports of reduced eyestrain so it's quite human-dependant which (the motion blur problem or the flicker problem) is the lesser evil.

Re: Lightboost and Monitor Life

Posted: 03 Jan 2014, 18:10
by Akoni
this is good to know before i go blind...or crazy lol

thanks!

Re: Lightboost and Monitor Life

Posted: 04 Jan 2014, 18:04
by nimbulan
I've been wondering about this topic as well. I tried Lightboost briefly and found it to be extremely bright even at the lowest setting (much brighter than non-Lightboost) which tells me that the monitor is using significant overvolting. So as an additional question, would the Lightboost brightness setting have any effect on the LED lifetime? I know it changes the strobe length, but does it affect the voltage as well?

Re: Lightboost and Monitor Life

Posted: 05 Jan 2014, 03:01
by Chief Blur Buster
nimbulan wrote:I've been wondering about this topic as well. I tried Lightboost briefly and found it to be extremely bright even at the lowest setting (much brighter than non-Lightboost) which tells me that the monitor is using significant overvolting.
This is very monitor specific.
On some of my LightBoost monitors, even LightBoost=100% is roughly equal to non-LighBoost brightness=30% setting.
Some monitors don't use any overvolting at all during LightBoost mode.