Now here's a contrary post on VA screens that is quite interesting:
"Low constrast or not, on the VA panel I feel much less like I'm looking at the backlight than the panel itself. And even within my lower contrast setup for text, there is much more range on the VA than on IPS. For example, I have a slightly lighter active line color than the background color set up in my text editor. On IPS, I can just barely make out the active line color. On VA, the active line color is very obvious.
Real world: I swapped back in my U2515H to try it again this morning with fresh eyes. This thing is earaching my eyes..."
(Video included that no longer works)
"Right away I feel like my eyes are being assaulted. Despite this thing having a higher DPI and very noticeably sharper text (at ~ the same text size as what I used on the VA), and my eyes can't hold focus. Changing the text size doesn't matter. The color is setup warm and changing it doesn't matter. The room has good ambient lighting. Viiewing distance doesn't matter. The only notable change here is swapping monitors (VA for IPS). And what's odd is that I can't identify any problem, other than the IPS glow. This monitor has good uniformity, as good as the VA. But it has that overall silvery sheen glow to it that I see on all IPS displays, and my eyes can't deal with it. And when this monitor was released, reviewers gave it a big thumbs up. I have since learned that for the use case of working with text and eye fatigue, monitor reviewers have nothing of any real benefit to offer. Personal experience and discussion with other people (whatever the product) is much more fruitful.
The points which I constantly see when arguing the merits of IPS are color correctness and viewing angles. But for working with text, those points don't amount to anything. Working with text doesn't require best color, and with sane monitor sizes, it doesn't require best viewing angles. What does matter when working with text much more than any other aspect is eye comfort. Right now, I have two VA's (1440 and 4K) and a TN (laptop) that are much more comfortable on the eyes than three IPS displays (monitors and phone). And I have looked at many other monitors and use a number of other monitors at work."
Someone else says, "Fully agree with you. The only aspect of the monitors I've been trying in the past year that still remains problematic, is IPS glow. There's no other explanation as to why I've had such problems with all my IPS panels. Back on the 40" VA and I feel mostly fine after a few days."
He adds, "Burning eyes, in my case. It's so unnerving. When it was happening, I just couldn't get work done. Hell, I couldn't keep my eyes open properly for a while after screen exposure. It was hell - and I was getting worried that something may have actually been wrong with my eyes."
The original person I quoted followed up, saying: "I ordered a TN monitor to see how that goes. VA has been far better than IPS for eye fatigue so far, in my personal experience. I just don't like the softness of the pixels on VA for text. IPS is better in that respect, but the backlight glow seems to be an eye killer for me. And the backlight issue outweighs the benefit of sharpness. TN should be just as sharp, I would think. My low res laptop TN is sharp enough with text anti-aliasing turned off. And maybe a TN monitor won't have the glowy backlight that I see on IPS monitors."
More useful commentary from the same man:
"The main thing that I feel is aching eyeballs, like I am pushing on my eyes with my fingers. Close your eyes and put some pressure on them with your fingers until it feels uncomfortable. It very much feels like that, and it lasts until I either get some sleep or stay away from screens for some days. At the same time, my eyes will lose ability to maintain steady focus on text; my brow feels very tense; I begin to feeling lethargic; my eyes begin to feel slow moving. If the fatigue goes on for too long, it moves into strain territory, and my eye focus will begin to flutter rapidly when trying to read text; I feel physically sick. I have only experienced that degree of strain a few times, and I never want to go there again. It's horrible. A new one on me after trying VA is burning eyes, which doesn't feel like dry eyes. It feels like muscle burn after really working a muscle. So far it has been very mild along with a little of that pressure feeling on my eyes compared to much more of that pressure feeling with IPS. With IPS I have to dim the display until a solid white background starts to look grey and dirty to even be able to look at the thing for a small amount of time, and I almost always still end up with eye fatigue."
Another user in favor of VA:
"Either way, I can tell you that subjectively I'm having way less issues since I moved back to the 40" VA panel, vs the 29" IPS that was killing me."
Someone adds: "I must admit that VA are in some way more like flat surface in that eyes have at least surface to focus at, unlike IPS which seems to be more like watching transparent mosaic of colored glass. "
Here's a more recent update from one of the more prolific posters:
"It's been a couple of more weeks. Still no eye fatigue from a VA monitor. And I did end up staying with the 32UD60, despite the uniformity issue. Eye comfort is way more important to me. And after years of dealing with eye fatigue from monitors, no way I would go back to IPS or TN."
He also says:
"The lack of scaling for 4K for some gui's can be a pain here and there, but no way I would go back to a lower PPI. Text is so much better on 140 PPI than with 115. It could still be better for sure, but this is fine. In other words, this PPI is minimum for me."
