Non-PWM Sufferer - Narrowed Down to Blue-Light Sensitivity or Overuse

JTL Yes, one of my not-so-throwaway accounts has this very same nick.

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.

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...

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?