Found a cure (for one machine at least)
Edward I really hope it works for you, I am literally astounded how much better it is. The weird thing is, at least at the visual detection level I have with my eyes, when I look at the screen without and with the correct ICC profile, the screen look identical. But one gives me immediate severe eye strain and the other doesn't.
Just curious, if color matters, will it help by making the monitor black and white? In nvidia control panel, you can do that by setting digital vibrance to zero.
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Jerry I can't say. I don't know what behavior the ICC profile is changing on the monitor. I suspect it won't since I set my monitor to 256 colors when it had the incorrect ICC profile and still got eye strain.
Also "Grayscale" is not the same as black and white, there's a LOT of sub pixel shading, gradient shading, and dithering going on with all those grays. A pure black and white duotone display wouldn't be very usable.
Based on my visual inspection, the ICC profile doesn't seem to actually change any colors. It looks identical to me. It seems to be telling the monitor to operate differently in order to display those colors. Just a hypothetical here, but if your monitor was capable of producing CMYK colors, and you had an RGB color profile, in order to show yellow, you need to use a software side subtractive coloring process with Red and Green. The correct ICC profile could tell the monitor "Just display yellow. You have the hardware to do that".
In both cases you would see yellow, but it is being generated 2 entirely different ways, and maybe we are sensitive to one of those ways. This is all just me hypothesizing, but maybe there's something to it
As an aside, just to keep following this theory, I checked the color profile of my Lenovo laptop that gives me zero eye strain. Correct ICC profile installed. I checked my sons Samsung laptop which causes me eye strain. No ICC profile installed. Hmmmm
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degen The driver download is a ZIP file. I unzipped it and found the file "EW2440L.icm". That is probably the color profile.
If you want to try it, I'd have a look at the lagom.nl gray-scale test. It was totally messed up after I installed the color profile Windows Update offers. The update made a pretty smooth scale turn into lines and bands.
http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/gradient.php
Edit: Might just be a Firefox-specific behavior and not a bad color profile.
This had never occurred to me.
I'm going to trial it on my laptop (ThinkPad E550)
It uses a HD 5500 as well - we'll see how it goes.
Unfortunately, I don't know how to find a icc profile for a laptop screen, but Linux Mint Cinnamon seems to have a few of available profiles to trial..?
Harrison http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/Drivers/DriversDetails?driverId=MHXHM
Download the exe, it's just a self extracting zip file, and that will unzip the icc profile.
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Hey. I just came up with another theory. What if ensete is right and the colore profile is the root of our problems? This will also explain why I get those eyestrain with an old trusted monitor and an new computer/or a newer driver.
I've attached a screenshot where you can find those color profiles icc. It's in german, however I'm pretty sure that the most of you won't have any problems to find this option too.
So what if I've never installed the "right" color profile of one of my old trusted monitors. Moreover I didn't care cause I've never get any problems with my old monitors and my old notebook. So the theory is that I didn't get any problems cause the color profile is not harming me. However an other pc uses a different color profile (from a different driver) -> eyestrain. So Maybe some of you can try out to extract their old trusted color profile and use it with a new pc or new driver version. I don't know if this is even possible. But worth a try.
Edit: In this attachment I've installed the right monitor driver for the DELL U2415 at my workplace. Let's see if this makes any difference.