I wanted to make a post about a usable configuration for me. It's been a big struggle trying to find a monitor that doesn't result in eye strain, but finally this Sony 43" TV seems to be usable after a week of testing. Note that I am only using it as a PC monitor and not as a TV.

According to RTINGS this is one of the few TVs that is completely flicker free: https://www.rtings.com/tv/tools/table. You will need to add a column for "Flicker Free" and sort by that column. The only TVs under 48" that are flicker free according to RTINGS are all made by Sony: X85J, X80K, X85K, and X77L. The X85J and X80K are older and hard to find - I decided to test the 43" X77L (which is the newest and lowest cost option for $350) and found that it works pretty well.

My settings are:

Picture mode: Graphics

Brightness: Min

HDMI Signal Format: Enhanced. This setting is important and hard to find in the menu, it's buried under "Channels & Inputs -> External Inputs. Without this setting, I was not able to set the color format to YCbCr444 on my PC.

Turned off any image and motion processing options that I could find

For whatever reason my eyes are comfortable only with Nvidia GPUs and not with Intel or AMD GPUs. I am using a PC with RTX 3060 Ti with the latest Studio Drivers (546.01 as of today) and Windows 11 22H2. I also have Ditherig running but it shouldn't be affecting the output from Nvidia GPU. On the Nvidia control panel, I have the selected the option to "Use NVIDIA color settings" and set it to 8 bpc color depth, YCbCr444, and Limited dynamic range. I am also using "LightBulb" software to dim the output from my PC.

The TV screen is fairly glossy and I think this a big factor for my eye comfort. I have noticed that screens with matte finish tire my eyes quickly - I seem to struggle to focus on the text on those devices. I also did a quick test with Linux (Debian Bookworm) and it works fine as long as the Dithering option is turned off in Nvidia X-Server panel. Overall I am very pleased with the setup and will probably get a second TV to store as a backup.

    owmyeyes Yes, Sony LCD TVs are the only ones I can watch, the worst are Samsung ones of any kind, I can't watch any OLED panels from any brand because I get eye strain and instant nausea with them.

      I do the same with an 43" X80G (European model). However, customizing its settings to make symptoms fully disappear was difficult and is hard to describe. I did it multiple times here in this forum, so one should be able to find the procedures more or less easily if anyone is interested. Judging by rting's PWM screenshots, you may have a ripple at the minimum brightness setting. Unless you are sure you are not bothered by that ripple, you may want to use flicker measurement equipment to slightly increase the brightness unless the ripple disappears. If the backlight is too bright then, you could lower the RGB gains somewhere hidden deeper in the color settings at a minor image degradation cost. For me manual brightness 5 plus auto brightness disabled does the trick, but my model doesn't have a ripple but PWM below brightness 5. I also noticed that, for Debian Bookworm, the Ryzen 5600G APU has a usable graphics output unless you are trying to use a GPU-accelerated desktop. Anything GPU-accelerated like games and even some desktop progams and integrated development enviroments that use the GPU acceleration are, as usual, hit or miss.

      Oh and yes, I almost forgot the most important thing: never update the firmware. Do not connect the TV to the Internet or one day it might update and introduce eye strain. You can't downgrade current Sony TVs.

      I saw several other reports on this forum that Sony TVs were usable so I felt good about testing it out. I am NEVER EVER connecting this TV to the internet. An added benefit of that is better privacy since smart TVs are notoriously bad regarding data collection.

      Good point about the minimum brightness potentially flickering. I don't have a way to test it but I will play it safe and just increase the brightness to 10%, and compensate in software (LightBulb).

      I have tried multiple AMD GPUs and none of them have worked for me - Ryzen 6900, R9 280 discrete, Vega discrete, and an old Phenom X4. At this point I am just giving up on AMD.

        owmyeyes If you feel good at 0% brightness it's better to keep it that way than using color overlays, color overlays are the last resource if you can't lower the brightness with hardware, you will get more light energy radiated to your eyes even using color overlays.

          20 days later

          owmyeyes I'm seriously thinking of picking up a 43" X77L to try to overcome my eye strain hassles. Reading the RTINGS review it says you need to use "Graphics" mode to get the 4:4:4 chroma ie good quality text. Trouble is:

          The input lag on this TV is incredibly low in 'Game' mode, ensuring a smooth, responsive gaming experience. Unfortunately, the 'Graphics' Picture Mode, which is the only mode that can display text clearly from a PC, has abnormally high input lag, and it's not really useable in that mode, as cursor movements feel incredibly sluggish.

          They list ~80ms input lag, which is pretty horrendous, in either 1080p or 4K outside of game mode…!

          @owmyeyes How have you found the input lag????

          I could step up to the X85K, but it has the same input lag problem. It's also a VA panel rather than IPS, so has a BGR pixel format that is less good for text.

              There's another thing to consider (and to verify) if you are suffering from White LED brightness issues. Which means that usually you need to turn the brightness way down - often down to zero - and it still appears to hurt over time. Looking at the official specifications, the X70L does not seem to have Sony's "Triluminos" technology, the latter which is not officially documented very well but I think there's a chance that "Triluminos" means the backlight hardware is at least partially based on Quantum Dots. You can verify it in shops by purchasing a cheap portable spectroscope which you can use to look at the screen. If the spectrum looks like this one from my XG80 (note the wide gaps between colors and the 2 red lines, which in reality look very thin and sharp), then just like my XG80 it may be easier on the eyes for people sensitive to White LED brightness*. Of course, what I wrote right now is only about brightness and not about other issues like flicker.

              *For anyone not affected and wondering: this White LED sensitivity does not mean you are sensitive to other lights, too. For example I don't have any issues with bright sunlight.

              AgentX20 I could step up to the X85K, but it has the same input lag problem. It's also a VA panel rather than IPS, so has a BGR pixel format that is less good for text.

              Reading the Rtings review more closely the X85 does 4:4:4 in game and graphics mode so won’t be subject to the lag problems.

              However, as a VA panel it uses BGR pixel layout so won’t do text as well. You can fix it mostly with Cleartype settings I gather.

              So it seems we have compromises on both models…

              @owmyeyes Any thoughts on lag and picture modes with your setup (X77L)?

              EDIT: Just read in another thread that VA panels dither so that might rule out the X85K.

              • KM replied to this.

                  AgentX20 However, as a VA panel it uses BGR pixel layout so won’t do text as well. You can fix it mostly with Cleartype settings I gather.

                  That is just a Windows-specific problem. I don't use Windows anymore but I know there are (were?) free 3rd-party ClearType tuning tools that let you explicitly select "BGR" layout. What they do is choose the correct ClearType settings without having to go through those weird selection dialogs. Other operating systems offer such font layout settings out of the box.

                  My TV has BGR layout, too, and this is not a problem at all if you set the software (the OS font settings) up properly. This is not something I would ever seriously bring up as a reason not to buy a panel at all.

                  It is also new to me that each and every VA panel is supposed to use temporal dithering and/or to have a BGR pixel layout. I definitely had VA monitors with RGB layout. My BGR TV has an IPS panel. It seems there is a lot of misinformation circulating.

                    Cheers KM.

                    I have seen the apps that allow you to explicitly set BGR for Cleartype, and the right-most selection on the first Cleartype tuning tool screen is for BGR format. There was accompanying discussions about how not all apps honoured the Cleartype text rendering including Chrome/Edge and Acrobat (although I saw suggestions that was fixed). Firefox was well regarded when it came to BGR font rendering. There's also the catch that you can only set one mode for Cleartype so mixing IPS and VA screens is not a great idea.

                    The VA dithering thing was a comment I saw in the forums here, so it's not 100% verified.

                    My goal is to try to get back to a working "good" home setup, and as something I could build on to give me more security in my working setup, which of course means I'm wary about introducing unknowns. Thanks for your perspective. It's appreciated, when buying the TVs as discussed here are yet more expensive experiments. They're also quite a bit more expensive relatively here in NZ versus the US, and you cannot take stuff back to the store all that easily either.

                    22 days later

                    owmyeyes

                    Hi, I’ve got Sony KD-43X81J for about two years now. I picked this particular TV because it’s PWM-free. And it’s true, but still I get my eyes dry and red after watching for half an hour or so. I tried different settings of brightness, also tried to set all the settings you mentioned. But still no luck to make it easy on my eyes. I don’t really understand what is the reason of this. Why does it give me PWM-like symptoms (I am sensitive), while not having PWM at any brightness?

                      I bought the Sony X85K.

                      I did all the settings, trying everything we've talked about, and while it was wonderous to have all of that screen real estate and I got it looking almost bearable (as in so so close to 'good'), in the end I still got low levels of eye strain, so I took it back.

                      The underlying problem is that I cannot get a good clean setup on my PC - meaning I cannot be sure of what was being sent to the Sony TV. After foolishly updating graphics drivers a while back it seems something broke permanently in my setup and I cannot get back to my old good setup or create a new one. I suspect something low level has changed in my hardware - that not even GPU or mobo BIOS reflashing seems to be able to fix.

                      So… the battle continues.

                      Note - I didn't try the X77L display that this thread was originally about. Maybe it works better… but here in NZ there's little ability to return things to the store used. I went for the X85K as it had better latency figures.

                      Usually the colors are horrible on these tv's at least samsung q70a 4k tv used as monitors, i could not get it passed usual certification with dE errors all over the place on all settings tried. The tv's were in game mode as latency was very big otherwise.

                        smilem There seem to be quite a few problems with Chroma 4:4:4 support at 4K. Anything less than that and you'll get colour problems. The TV I tried was all good in that regard.

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