It is. It's manageable however. I just wish I knew the cause. The only thing that was been suggested that I haven't tried is ICC profile. Even with all my complaining this is my best setup and would highly reccomend it to those who are sensitive to brightness, PWM, dithering, GPU, and OS.
@Slacor It could be useful to have the ability to do a short signature to give a quick tldr of posters sensitives and best setup. What do you think?
degen The ultimate root cause is a brain issue. Your brain (and my brain, and most people who post here's brains) are receiving an input from our eye down the optical nerve to the visual; processing center of the brain, where it is being misinterpreted. That misinterpretation is causing nuerons to fire, which in your case (and in most of our cases) causing a muscle response in the muscles around our eyes. It's not a well studied phenomenon in the realm of eco lighting or screen displays (there's a LOT of money in pushing CFL and LED lighting in particular). The closest well studied phenomenon that is related is epilepsy.
That's why there's no real "cure" for this condition. You just try to find a workaround and stick with it as long as you can
degen Now I bought the EW2740L. It's at least as good as the EW2440L, if not better because I use them at 0% brightness but 50% contrast and so I have a picture with rich colors. Out of 3 EW2740L monitors I bought I had to send the 3rd one back, because I think it's not as good as the others both in terms of eye strain and also technically (hissing noise when active). The others are good, I have them for 2-3 weeks now. It's really hard to buy them in new untouched condition. All of them were sold as "new", but one could clearly see that 2 of them had been opened and repaired (probably by authorized service stations). I looked into the "service menu" of all devices (hold Power + 2nd button from the right) and they all claimed to have the same panel, same scaler, same firmware, and a reset "Monitor On Time". Manufactured May 2015.
So if there's anyone else who not only suffers from PWM but also from monitors' light intensity, those monitor series, but maybe preferrably the EW2740L, is a clear recommendation. It's a shame BenQ don't build such low brightness monitors anymore.
Hey, God bless you all here I am one of you guys as well having the same eye problems with basically almost every single computer monitors/phones I've tried giving me trouble
Just want to ask a few questions...
Is it this one that you guys are talking about that is working well?
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FYKX0DA/ref=twister_B00WO1H93Y?_encoding=UTF8&th=1another question:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MS09LQX/ref=ox_sc_act_title_3?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER^ that is the monitor I've been looking at to buy but I was wondering why no one else has mentioned it here. It has auto-brightness adjustments and it's PWM free as well. Is it no good?
<div data-s9e-mediaembed="amazon" style="display:inline-block;width:100%;max-width:120px"><div style="overflow:hidden;position:relative;padding-bottom:200%"><iframe allowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" style="border:0;height:100%;left:0;position:absolute;width:100%" src="//rcm-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=FFFFFF&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&p=8&l=as1&f=ifr&asins=B00FYKX0DA&o=1&t=_"></iframe></div></div>Try this again
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FYKX0DA
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MS09LQX
ctsai89 Yeah those are they, EW2440L and EW2740L. But wow, $459 for the 27" model is very expensive. That's not a fair price. It's like $200 too much.
I don't know about the other monitor, but "no PWM" or auto brightness doesn't mean the monitor will automatically be usable for you. I found this which I don't like, but I don't know if the FRC is active all the time: "8-bit colour plus 2-bit FRC dithering" (https://pcmonitors.info/benq/benq-pd3200u-and-pd3200q-uhd-and-wqhd-designer-monitors/)
JTL Yea it's discontinued and the EW2750ZL and now the EW2755ZL are the replacements. They don't go as dim unfortunately.
The GW2760HS is a pretty old model now but is still in production and appears to have undergone more than one panel revision, although it is still advertised as Flicker-free.
Summary from this thread:
If 24" is enough for you the EW2440L is an excellent choice. It is no longer in production but there is still stock around for a reasonable price. It goes super dim which is great for those of us who can't look at bright LEDs.
If you need/want 27" the EW2740L is the best choice for the light sensitive. It goes very dim like the EW2440L. As you saw above it's been out of production for a while and could be hard to get a fresh model. Next up would be the EW2750ZL and the EW2755ZL (newer and slighlty better PQ than the EW2750ZL). They are not as dim as the EW2740L but not as bright as the GW2760HS. Finally the GW2760HS still has most of the things we like in BenQ VA monitors. It has VA panel, native 8-bit, PWM-free, decent PQ (but washes out at low brightness), but it's very bright at even its lowest brightness setting.
ctsai89 Those programs don't change the brightness of the backlight. They change the colours that display is being asked to output.
The problem with that approach is if you put a screen to 0 brightness and then use a program to change the colours it will result in a very washed out picture where it's hard to see any detail at all in darker scenes.
For Windows I found a program that will change the colours in a colour temperature neutral way. The only time I use it is with my plasma where changing the colours the display is being asked to output decreases the brightness of the picture in a uniform way since there is no backlight. I guess that could work with OLED as well.
Regarding auto-brightness: I think it can be very good and worth a try. I actually had an iMac for 5 years and didn't really have a problem with it (unless I manually turned up the brightness then the white parts become very unpleasant to look at) until I bought a mac pro and kept using it connected to each other which then disabled the auto-brightness on there. My iPhone 7 is also a huge problem for me but after I turned the white points down and set it to night shift and brightness = 0 I am not doing so bad again. I can actually stare at it up to 10 min as opposed to 30 seconds before I changed the settings. So after the mac pro/imac, I switched to a cheap Samsung monitor and my eyes got way worse from there on even with brightness set to 0. I'm on asusMX279h now and it's not so bad until I start playing blizzard games where the parts of the map that aren't explored yet are completely dark and hard to see.
So should I get the BenQ with auto brightness adjustments just to try it out for all your sakes? or no? lol should I just go with the one you guys say works?
ctsai89 Auto brightness is a nice feature, but probably nothing more. If you have a monitor that you set up manually the way you like but can't look at it, what would auto brightness change? I'm not saying you shouldn't buy and try that monitor, but you probably shouldn't do it just because of auto brightness.