2 years ago around this time I had a severe headache after working with a colleague who had an LED monitor (which I cannot tolerate even for short periods of time). I thought my career might be finished if I couldn't work deskside with anybody, but a friend of mine suggested I use Skype for Business's "Present Desktop" functionality, and a headset connected to my phone, to remote into their PC if I need to work with somebody. Such a simple solution, and it's given me a 2 year extension. Total and complete avoidance of these displays can work!
Although, there's one shared workstation we use that cannot be remoted-into for some reason, as it's on some KVM switch with inputs that only more recent LEDs possess. I have avoided this station like the plague for as long as it has been around, but last night, it was unavoidable, and I was forced to use it for a brief period to try to solve an issue when everyone else in the office was gone.
It's the Dell P1913. It give me instant eye pain looking at it, and I believe it's the backlight. After a full day's work on my trusty Dell U2410 CCFL (which does not give me this issue unless I increase the brightness past 0%), I was forced to use this P1913 (known bad) and I was dreading it. However, I reduced the brightness on the P1913 to 0, set the color temperature on the OSD to "Warm", and... put on a pair of polarized sunclips. This was the first time I tried these sunclips looking at an LED.
The reason I never tried them on my U2410 was that its polarization was on the horizontal plane. Putting on polarized glasses caused the screen to go completely black, lol. The P1913 has its polarization at a 45 degree angle for some reason, meaning I can keep the monitor (and my head) horizontal and still see it.
I did a test against this monitor with its default OSD settings (50% brightness, standard color display, etc) the previous week by looking at it for under 1 minute, and I had a terrible headache for 3 hours afterwards. That's how sensitive I am. I was not looking forward to having to spend potentially minutes or even dozens of minutes on this demon monitor from hell!
However... I spent a good 30 minutes troubleshooting something on it last night and... it wasn't that terrible! I have no good explanation for this. Was it the brightness reduction to 0%? The color temperature change to Warm? Or the polarized sun clips? Or a combination of any of these, or all at once? I'm not sure, but I'm excited that I can still spend at least short amounts of time on this "bad" monitor now without suffering from a bad migraine (I call them "eyegrains") for hours or days in the limited free time I get in my personal life outside of work, all because a bloody LED was unavoidable that day.
I thought I've tried an LED at 0% brightness before and my eyes/brain still considered it "too bright". It's possible the 0% brightness in combination with the sunglasses darkened it enough that my eyes/brain were able to tolerate it long enough to do what I had to do.
Hopefully that offers some hints to at least somebody! Hopefully our collective minds can all work together to solve this vexing issue!