Non-PWM Sufferer - Narrowed Down to Blue-Light Sensitivity or Overuse
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OF course it depends on the person in question, but my opinion is that people are putting too much faith in the flicker free / non dithering solutions. While I totally get that may be a solution for some, I'm pretty sure the main driver for most of the problems is the blueish led light.
I too have a little bit of astigmatism, and as much as I try, for how long I try the end result is the same: although I do see slightly better, they give me nausea, even if I insist on using them several weeks in a row. I have problems with any kinds of glasses, even with standard sunglasses -- they give me nausea and eye strain. I'm light sensitive in general, as I suspect a lot of people that here complain about led lights must be. It's just that computer displays are so much aggressive in the eyes than general light.
I for some reason don't like kindles, I think that the font is not very clear and that gives me headaches but I remain unsure. On a similar note, I had trouble with Ubuntu's font until I shut anti aliasing off.
__528491__ Do I recognize you from Reddit?
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__528491__ Dithering, PWM, subpixel rendering.. I think many focus on these things because they're under our control, and while eliminating issues with them may not solve the problem, sometimes it can make enough of a difference to save someone's career.
Fancy lens tints are certainly evolving quickly. There is some hope there.
As for glasses, I also can not stand any lenses that have a cylindrical correction (for astigmatism). I can use reading glasses (spherical correction) without discomfort and they helped me a lot. Corrections for minor astigmatism are really just to make things "sharp" and everything looks better while using it, but it doesn't really improve legibility a whole lot.
I again want to stress that for some LED sufferers out there, PWM may not be your enemy. Several PWM-free monitors are rolling out in our offices, and they kill my eyes/brain within minutes or even seconds. I've been writing down some of the model numbers that have this effect on me:
- Dell P1913
- Dell U2413
- Dell U2713H
I want to point out that there is nothing inherently wrong with these monitors, as people are using them 8 hours a day, every day, without complaining. The problem is obviously a sensitivity or "allergy" of some sort of the way the monitor displays the picture, but I have not been able to find out the actual cause or solution.
I was working with a colleague that had the Dell U2413 yesterday, and I can feel my eyes cramping very early on. For most of the day I had to work with them. By the end of the day, my head was splitting so bad I could barely think, nor even write a comprehensive email (spelling mistakes, word replacements, etc). The rest of the night, and even trying to sleep was pretty rough, and even the next day without any new exposure, I still sort of feel a sort of "camera flash afterimage" seemingly superimposed over everything.
What worries me is halfway through the day yesterday, I tried to mitigate the effects by putting on a pair of yellow-tinted "BluTech Lenses" unfortunately it looks like it was a false sense of security. A couple of weeks ago I saw a neuro-ophthalmologist that I could tell didn't know what was causing my issue, but did suggest (by advice of some of his industry associates) that the FL-41 tint (rose-colored) has helped some migraine sufferers with similar issues.
I knew something unusual was up when I built a $3,300 gaming rig way back in December 2011 with a brand new Samsung SyncMaster S24A850DW 24" LED monitor. It made me feel like hell within 5 minutes. It sat for a year collecting dust as I reverted back to my old computer and monitor. After a year, I sold the monitor for a filesale, and bought a Dell U2410.
I somehow have the feeling this wretched issue will end my IT career, one way or another. That's a scary thought, as one does not simply change careers overnight, and it was a 13-year-long investment...
MagnuM Some of this rings a bell
https://ledstrain.org/d/4-dell-u2414h-monitor
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JTL Yes, one of my not-so-throwaway accounts has this very same nick.
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Sorry for the original post above, it was written in my cell phone while at an airport, so I was not perfectly clear at all at some points.
MagnuM Hello. I definitely feel your pain. I'm also a Software Engineer and I share the same fears as you. Regarding a career switch, there would be no advantage at all -- most jobs nowadays will require you to sit your ass in the office in front of a computer anyway so unless you decide to be a lumberjack or get some sort of blue collar work there is not that much to do.
Plus, I totally agree with you. PWM or not, I will feel exactly the same discomfort with a laptop display. But I also believe there are people that are actually sensitive to that.
I'm pretty sure this kind of .. discomfort we feel is not binary. There are manifold degrees and most people either don't have it or have it in small doses. Doses so small they don't even notice or care about. As it stands, that is bad for us, because we sure are a minority. But as the economies develop, we'll get more and more people working in white collar jobs requiring them to sit their asses more often and for longer periods than before. More people will develop these kinds of symptoms, and I'm pretty sure that in the next couple of years, with the introduction of LED lightning pretty much everywhere, a critical threshold of sufferers will be attained which will force further, real investigation into this topic.
Anyway, I bought a 2nd hand HP Pavilion dv6 from 2011 and this is so much softer in my eyes 
. But it's interesting, because now I notice that it gives me a very mild headache to use it. I'm pretty sure this was already like this in the past, but as I was not so much aware of the problems of lightning I didn't notice. I also feel a strange sensation in the throat, as if I was having acid reflux. I know I have suffered with this problem for most of my live, but at the time I also had no idea it could be related to my laptop's screen.
PS: I think this forum is a very interesting development in our saga to improve our situations, but I wonder if we couldn't have some way of registering our symptoms / discoveries in a more straightforward way? Having to go through all these posts is counterproductive. It looks like several of us are Software Engineers, so maybe we could think of something else that could complement this forum? I would like to have some way to have different people register all their findings with tags or something, and then we could create some sort of visual graph where we could see it all.
__528491__ I had a HP pavilion DV6 many years ago.
Be warned, it overheats easily and I had a GPU failure in 6 months and HP support just replaced the battery when I sent it in for repair.
http://www.laptopscreen.com/English/model/HP-Compaq/PAVILION~DV6-6128CA/
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JTL I had one too in the past. It always overheated (this one does too) and one day it simply died. I will buy one of those ventilation pads to help to keep it cool. Hopefully as I only use the laptop to work (no gaming) I won't have too much trouble for the upcoming months or years. This is so much better in the eyes that my other, more recent LED laptop. If only there was a way of having some company keeping producing this kind of screens...
__528491__ It "might' be possible to transplant the screen onto another laptop.
JTL From what I've read, it should be complicated because recent LED screens are way thinner than these CCFL old ones (and because the circuitry is different, also). This CCFL screen display is really thicker than my newer LED one.
__528491__ I thought the DV6 was LED, which should be standard LVDS if I recall.
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JTL They state it's LED, but if it's LED it's not a blue LED. It's for sure something quite different to what's being sold nowadays on stores. I always thought this was CCFL?
__528491__ Same.
Don't think a laptop that cheap would use anything other than blue LED. RGB LED displays cost thousands of dollars.