Hi folks. Ever since I found out I suffer from eye strain, I have been reading/researching about it on the net. To find a solution for our eye strain issue, we need to know the cause of it. Here is what I found so far:
For people with normal vision, the cause of eye strain are mainly:
A. Looking at screen that is too bright
B. Looking at the screen too long without break
These are what I call normal cause-and-effect. For majority of people, this is the main cause of their eye strain. But for small minority of the population, like most people here in this forum, in addition to the above, we also suffer eye strain from other factors, such as:
- Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) flickering
- Graphics Driver
- Temporal Dithering
- Blurry Font/Anti-aliasing
- Blue light
- Other?
To further complicate matters, people may suffer from multiple causes of eye strain (and may not even realize it).
Take me for example. I first discovered that I have eye strain problem 4 years ago when I switched my laptop from a CCFL based display to an LED-based display (which later I found has PWM). On my old CCFL laptop, I can use it for hours without a problem. On my (then) new LED-based laptop, I get eye strain within minutes of using it. Lucky I found a workaround solution that allows me to use a laptop with PWM without giving me eye strain. So for a long time, I thought my only source of eye strain is PWM.
Then 2 years later, I upgraded the intel graphics driver, and my laptop which I have been able to use for years, suddenly causes eye strain to me. I switched back to my old graphics driver, then the eye strain gone. So I know for certain that (intel) graphics driver also caused eye strain to me.
So for me, I suffer from #1 and #2.
I guess I was lucky because each cause of eye strain happened to me one at a time, so I was able to detect and pinpoint the cause each time. So if I were to buy a smartphone or tablet, I would check for PWM first. But even is there are no PWM, there is still a possibility that the graphics driver can cause me eye strain. At least I know what to look out for, and what to avoid. But different people may have different (combinations of) causes of eye strain.
For someone who gets eye strain when looking at LED-based display but do not know the exact cause, then hopefully this thread will help to identify and test which of the above 6 factors cause eye strain to them. Let's share what we know about the factors that can cause eye strain to us, things like:
What it is?
How to detect it?
How to solve it?
The last part is the most important part - what solution works (or doesn't work for you).