Eyestrain solved after 6 years and multiple panels - LG 32gk850g

Don't get me wrong I am glad when anyone can feel better...but WHY? This is the thing I can never find out. I see people saying a particular thing worked but we never learn WHY. Until we find the root cause/s it doesn't really make me feel good about anything.

I have never seen a reproducable solution across a major category and rather it's specific things in specific scenarios. Did VA solve this or is it VA in combination with some other settings, or even just THAT particular VA panel. Its always just "I got lucky with this particular thing" and its like taste testing 100 things to see which one DOESN'T give you an anaphylactic shock and crossing your fingers that when you eat that "safe" thing again nothing about it or the conditions you are eating in has changed that will mess you up. I hate living this way.

Sorry for how I sound...but this is runing my last chance and I have weeks at best to solve it definitively so I am always waffling between depression/hoplessness...and anxiety. Even if I spend 700usd on this VA panel I still cannot use laptops (never found one with TRUE VA in it...just IPS variants using VA in the name, or mobile devices so it's just a more expensive CCFL situation limiting you to specific and less common stuff.

KM

I cannot think of any plausible reason the liquid crystal alignment type could cause eye strain. TN/IPS/VA are just ways of turning the crystals with current so they "twist" the light coming through the rear polarizer to let it through the front polarizer. Every LCD has this arrangement regardless of backlight type...even CCFL ones that seem to be better for many people. I have yet to find one consistent tech characteristic for my particular strain. Every possible factor...backlight/OS/panel type etc etc has at least one example that invalidates that ALWAYS being the problem (LED MOSTLY is bad) or ALWAYS being safe (with the exception of a very small CCFL sample size). And even if CCFL is ultimately always safe I still don't know why.

JTL

I had a 2011 Macbook Pro 17" anti-glare that panelook.com says was an RGB backlit display ...I sold it a couple years ago before my strain begain, but wish I still had it to see if that matters. The 15" version used a WLED display and I have gotten in front of one of those recently and it triggers me. The panels aren't even made anymore and the device had a fatal GPU flaw anyway so even picking one up on eBay for the stupid prices listed is a dead end. It does seem like if blue light was my problem the UVEX glasses would have solved it...but they didn't matter.

JTL

The only 17" 1920x1200 anti-glare LVDS panels listed on panelook with LED backlighting were these Samsungs with RGB leds...the rest are CCFL and the 2011 had LED backlighting according to the specs and would have had to due to thinness anyway. If you select glossy as a finish option then you get some WLED versions...but for antiglare its CCFL or RGB LED. Perhaps some are missing from the site but panelook.com lists historical, out of production displays and has always been complete in my experience.

http://www.panelook.com/modelsearch.php?op=advancedsearch&order=panel_id&inch_low=1700&inch_high=1700&resolution_pixels=8190&signal_type_category=90&surface_glare=AG

JTL

I trust panelook before laptopscreen.com. They don't seem very competent in my experience and send the wrong stuff to people constantly. According to panelook the LTN170CT10-G01 was only available in matte.

If there is something magical about actual VA panels per the OP it would be great to know what. I've not been able to find a laptop with a true VA panel...just AHVA and other IPS variants with the confusing names. I've never used a VA so have no clue if it would help but there are so many other variables to account for as well and it doesn't help with portable devices anyway so is just a more expensive vesion of the CCFL special needs game.

hpst

Multiple people have claimed a VA panel worked for them. This LG one now and someone mentioned a Benq VA panel the other day that solved their eye strain while working on a computer.

A 4k 65" LED backlit VA panel Sony Bravia from 2015 with an android 5.0 based smart OS is the only LED backlit TV (or monitor) I've ever been able to use as well.

From this anecdotal evidence it would seem at the very least VA may be some help as to figuring SOME of this out and having something new we can use. CCFL is a dying tech after all, new ones get used and used ones break or get thrown out every day. There are some overly expensive professional CCFL monitors still being made for people who need the best colour accuracy possible because CCFL leads to better gamut or something IIRC.

Having something to use is better than having nothing to use regardless.

f3likx I'm curious to hear if anyone has a true VA panel which doesn't work for them so far.

I have tried several BenQs, all with a VA panel (maybe not all "true VA"), and only one of them is truly usable - under the right conditions: OS, software, graphics card, external devices...
The other ones, under the same conditions, are not usable for me. Well one of them is: EW2440L at zero brightness in a dark room, but I still get some eye strain over the course of a few hours.
The usable monitor is EW2740L. It has an AMVA panel. Another device of the very same model does not work for me, which makes things even harder to understand. I still suspect the type of backlight is responsible for the eye strain. But no proof.

In the meantime, it seems monitor manufacturers have gone great lengths to put advanced image processing into their monitors, more and more replacing good old "stupid" firmwares. So on a modern monitor we might soon never know if the type of firmware being used might be an additional eye strain factor. Like it may be the case with smart TVs.

On the other hand, iPhones have an IPS screen, and some of them are usable while others are not. Display lottery. Maybe backlight lottery.

KM

Thanks for sending me into even deeper depression man

I was thinking about ordering a cheaper VA panel if those seemed universally ok, but as you said and I always come back to after thinking on it, there are too many other variables to account for and every time I have seen someone say "this worked" it doesn't work for me and I am out more money I cannot afford on return and restocking etc. And everytime I THINK I have a breakthrough it's either false hope or not reproducable on the SAME hardware. For all I know CCFL isn't even safe for me...I've only used a couple recently.

f3likx It's interesting that old VA panels didn't work for you, KM

Actually the monitor is the oldest of them all so it probably has the oldest panel. I tried it because it was one of the first officially "flicker-free" monitors. Before I did not even bother anymore to try any monitor since I used to get strain and headaches with all of them, including CCFL types, knowing they all flickered. So I believed the reason for my problems was flicker. My oldest TFT is a 19" with true 8 bit PVA panel. It was not easy to look at. Back then I noticed for the first time that by using the gamma or brightness slider in my 3dfx Voodoo 3's graphics card driver tab it would lead to immediate software eye strain. On top of the other symptoms. I quickly learned not to do that anymore. The monitor had a pivot function, meaning you could rotate it by 90 degrees. To make that mode any useful, you had to rotate the screen's content, too via the graphic cars driver: immediate software eye strain.
I later replaced the 3dfx with an ATI, and even then the gamma and brightness sliders were toxic. I guess today rarely anybody uses them anymore. Not sure if they still add additional eye strain. But this shows that the software problem in particular exists a lot longer and is not exclusive to LED-backlit monitors - they did not even exist back then. Some of us luckily do not seem to be affected by software, but if you are, you can imagine it gets a lot harder to identify a display that works for you. The wrong software setting would keep you from recognizing an otherwise usable display.