I have this monitor since yesterday. People all over the Internet keep recommending Eizo monitors when it comes to reducing eye strain, and Eizo's website has many eye strain related articles. So I thought it's time to give Eizo a try.
First impression: it's not good for my eyes. My left eye hurts all the time and when I looked in the mirror, it was red (between nose and pupil). I have this sort of symptom when using Firefox or other programs/apps that somehow are different, allegedly using temporal dithering or whatever kind of special video mode. So I looked up the monitor in displaydb.com and found it has only 6 bit + FRC. This is especially sad since Eizo on their website advertises 6 bit + FRC as inferior in several articles and also in their specs it says "8 bit". Disappointing. I didn't know that nor did I know of the database website that before buying.
While using this monitor I found a method to quickly reveal FRC: Move the mouse cursor slowly and follow it with your eyes. In the area surrounding the cursor you will suddenly spot a chesslike pattern which you won't normally notice.
I measured the display flicker with my oscilloscope and found the following:
- No PWM at brightness 56 and above
- 18 kHz PWM at brightness 5 up to 55
- 3-15 kHz PWM at brightness 1 to 4, slowly increasing
Most people and reviews tell you Eizo monitors use PWM at brightness 19 and below, so this is unexpectedly different.
So far though it seems the 18 kHz is not contributing to my eye strain.
The monitor has an ambient light sensor and can adjust the brightness automatically. The minimum brightness is extraordinarily low. Eizo claims it's as low as 1 cd/m². However, the low brightness doesn't help with my left eye hurting all the time. I even installed LTSB 2015 to revert to a known-good hardware + OS setup, but the eye strain continued even during the setup phase, which has a very basic video mode known to be safe. I suspect it's the FRC that causes the eye strain, at least this strange part of it where only my left eye hurts (as long as I look at the screen). No way to find out since you can't turn FRC off in the monitor OSD.
So my early conclusion is this Eizo monitor is different from others in that the eye strain feels different and headaches won't kick in very quickly. But it's no joy to use this monitor for more than a few minutes either.
The monitor has high build quality and certainly a premium feel. The panel lighting is very uniform.
I will give it some more days and only use it at low brightness to see if it makes a difference over time. But it doesn't look good so far.