I'm truly stumped at what it could be and it's frustrating that I can't do a simple thing as watching the TV. I know when buying a mobile it's definitely contrast ratio as I've bought and sold so many. I was convinced it was pwm flicker but had some TV's and mobiles that are pwm flicker free and because of the contrast I had to sell them. I have an Xbox one X and I turn off the hdr support as the color pallette is too garish for my liking. Could it be resolution? I have 4k TV and 1080p upscaled seems to pull at my eye balls more. Is 4k too much detail for our eyes? This all sounds ridiculous but I'm losing my mind.
What works for you, what do you use now without problems?
DiscoDave Maybe you know this, but maybe not: first you need to make sure the device you connect is usable for you. I don't know about the Xbox One. A few of us agree upon the PS3 is a usable console (for most games at least).
The chain "device - display", and in the case of PCs, "OS - driver - GPU - display" must be perfect at every link.
If you have a device you have trouble with on a known-good display, chances are it will be unusable for you no matter which LCD you try.
I think I'm fine with the Xbox as been using it on my old Samsung eh5300 with no issues and my Sony has a cheap 32" bush TV and it's very comfortable to look at and play on with his Xbox one. Is your Sony xg800 comfortable to view or do you have issues?
https://pcmonitors.info/articles/factors-influencing-pc-monitor-viewing-comfort/
This is an interesting article that explains many of the factors contributing to eye strain. Contrast is mentioned and also pwm. I just used my android phone camera at shutter speed 1/4000 to find out my TV has flicker unless it's 100% backlight. So now I'm setting it at 100% and see how my eyes cope. My TV is only about 300cdm anyway so hopefully is still watchable tonight when it's night time.....fingers crossed 
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I think the most important factor is not using too much brightness for a given environment. My eyes were bothering me as daytime changed to nighttime while my brightness level still was the same. Once I switched to a night mode with brightness at 3, I've been much better. The lower your ambient lighting, the lower you need to make your screen brightness.
Of course all screens may not dim the backlight equally well, with some invisibly flickering more than others as brightness is turned way down.
a year later
I saw a couple of Xeon's in this thread. Has anyone tried Xeon vs other Intel CPUs. Do they help make it more comfortable?
TV update for me……I sold my hisense 7120 as it still wasn't 100% comfortable and thought I'd give the LG oleds a go. My eyes don't agree with 120hz and LG had just released the A1 which was a 60hz panel. My worry was that the contrast is infinite but thought I can boost the gamma and lower the contrast if needed. After many hours/days of adjusting I have settled on the following setting and I will now see how it goes over the next few days.
I changed gamma to 1.9, used film maker mode which turns off most artificial settings and turned off all motion settings like soe etc. The colour temp defaults at cold 20 and after going backwards and forwards with warm settings I just feel that cool 20 agrees with me so kept it. Sharpness down to zero as artificial sharpening causes strain. After viewing this set up for days there was something still not right. When I viewed pictures with small items such as a crowd or football players it felt fuzzy and felt it "pulled" at my eyeballs and I would start to feel pain at sides of my eyes. I then continued to play with the settings much to my wife's annoyence. I then went into the fine tune option and turned down the luminance on every colour (red, blue, green, cyan, magenta and yellow)to as low as I could (happened to be -30).
I now find the image is much clearer, smaller items aren't fuzzy anymore and the image feels "flatter" which may sound boring but I find it comfortable so far. It's early days and will give it a few days and report back.
If anyone as the LG A1 oled then I can list my detailed settings if anyone wants to try it.
I also still use my Honor 20 mobile phone and find it amazingly comfortable as it PWM free and contrast ratio of less than 1000:1
Hope helps anyone.
Yeah …had this mobile for about 2 years now with no issues. I've had problems with many mobiles and find that as long as the contrast ratio is under 1000:1 and no pwm then I'm good. I use notebookcheck website for every phone review as they measure pwm and contrast ratio.
DAVEGEO When I viewed pictures with small items such as a crowd or football players it felt fuzzy and felt it "pulled" at my eyeballs and I would start to feel pain at sides of my eyes
Sounds like a binocular vision deficiency. Pain in the side of your head around the temples is your brain trying to physically move your eyeball forward or backward to change where it is focusing. The "Pulling" you feel are the muscles attached to your eye (The superior, medial, and lateral rectus muscles) doing the same.
Your brain is falsely intepreting your vision as unbalanced, and so is trying to compensate by moving your eye back and forth to regain balance, just like a camera lens on a digital camera moves in and out when trying to focus.
22 days later
This site doesn't work for me any more. Too much animation.
I've tried a number of computer monitors and conventional tablet screens. At best, I have to set the brightness and contrast to the minimum. I often have to tweak other settings to get far enough below the minimum. I often get visual distortions anyway, as well as reflections from any other light. At worst, I can try that, but it still gives me a migraine.
I've also tried e-ink devices with much better luck. It may take some tweaking, and choosing e-ink friendly apps, but it can be much better for reading. But I can't find a way to stop the blinking cursors in Android, so it isn't much good for me for note-taking, editing, or writing.
I've also tried using my tablet for screen mirroring, but it's too small to be very helpful. There are larger 13.3" and 25.3" devices, but they are much much more expensive.
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Ananiujitha At best, I have to set the brightness and contrast to the minimum.
That may be spectrum-related. I suffer from the same problem, plus I can't use any LED bulbs. What helped me is a quantum dot TV. My AMOLED smartphone is similarly usable. I'm just talking about the brightness issue here, not about flicker or temporal dithering, which IMO are separate issues. If you want to be able to look at a display at regular brightness, you may need to look for RGB spectrum which is characteristic for AMOLED and quantum dot displays (which have a violet backlight; note that unfortunately some quantum dot manufacturers use a White LED).
Stay away from White LED and the brightness problem in particular may be solved.
You can use tools like Stylus and Script monkey and modify any webpage you want to eliminate offending aspects. My CSS file for Stylus is MASSIVE 
2 months later
4 months later
Gurm Finally found another person with a Dell XPS 13 9350 2015 laptop.
The display is INSANELY comfortable right?! I just use windows night-light at around 45% to reduce the blue light, and that is one of the BEST MOST COMFORTABLE looking displays I've ever seen.
It looks so flat, non-imposing, and is so gentle on the eyes.
How would you compare the Dell XPS 13 9350 display to the CCFL Dell monitors that you have?
Are the CCFL monitors equally and as comfortable as the DELL?
7 months later
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I have two workstation in different locations and on two I had problems such as you describe. And on both of them the problem was solved by changing the BIOS version of the motherboard.
I have a theory that this is due to poor compatibility of devices from different generations. For example, you have a 2018 motherboard and you put a 2022 video card into it. I think there must be desynchronization issues here.
In my case, it was too fresh a bios that was not compatible with old cards, so I had to roll back. It's on the first workstation.
The second one had to update the bios to the latest version. And after that my new 3070 worked fine. No eye pain, no graininess in pictures, no bad color reproduction.
UPD: Sorry forgot to mention that this was an answer in this thread https://ledstrain.org/d/1688-rtx-a4000-causes-eyestrain-with-true-10-bit-monitor/32, I just copy/paste.
CepheiHR8938 Not sure how much I can help, but for research purposes could you list the motherboards, BIOS versions and GPUs in use?
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JTL I'm sorry, maybe I expressed myself incorrectly. I just shared this solution to the problem in the hope that it will help someone.
On one station i have the following configuration:
- motherboard: MSI B450 Tomahawk
- cards: Gigabyte GT 730/Palit GTX 1060 (both of them had problem with new bios)
Originally, it was installed first bios version and I had no problem with this configuration. But I decided to update bios to speed up my RAM (there is problem with old bios version) and after that I faced with eye pain. I began to look for a problem and tried a lot of things. In the end, nothing but returning to the old BIOS did not help. I tried all versions of the BIOS but only the very first one worked correctly.
Second one station:
motherboard: Gigabyte Z370 HD3P
Palit 3070 gaming pro/Palit GTX 1060
I bought a new video card (3070) and inserted it instead of the old one (1060). Immediately felt a deterioration in the screen image and eye pain. Manipulations with drivers did not help. After I got the experience of manipulating the BIOS in the previous workstation I decided to play around with this here. And surprise, the latest version of the motherboard BIOS solved the problem.One more recommendation, It's better to let Windows install its own driver for the current graphics card. After that, you can update the drivers but do not select the clean install option. And of course you need to use Display Driver Uninstaller. If Windows does not want to install its own drivers, try run some application that requires hardware acceleration for example a browser.
5 days later
What I use:
- Windows 10 Home, Ubuntu 22.04, Manjaro 21.3, latest updates.
- Asus Prime H410M-A, the latest bios.
- Intel i5-10400F (without integrated GPU)
- PNY Nvidia Quadro T600 with mini displayport to VGA adapter and mini displayport to hdmi adapter.
- Two monitors: very old AG Neovo F-417 on VGA and ViewSonic VP2458 on hdmi. No problems with F-417 at all. ViewSonic has adjusted settings to make it bearable: brightness 0, contrast 45, color range Full (the same setting in Nvidia settings), color temp Warm and low gamma 1.8, no blue light reduction (it's a marketing trick).
- Latest Nvidia drivers 517.40. Without Nvidia Experience. Linux also uses Nvidia proprietary drivers.
- Mini display port to VGA adapter StarTech MDP2VGA2.
- Mini display port to HDMI adapter Assmann GmbH.
Eye problems are less pronounced on Windows than on Ubuntu. On Ubuntu I usually switch to VGA for both monitors or work just with F-417. For some reason, Ubuntu causes no problems with this monitor and this setup. Manjaro is the most comfortable with ViewSonic on hdmi connection.