Monitors and eye sight

[JCMax]

Has anyone ever noticed a difference between monitors and their affect on eye-sight? Specifically I am referring to eye strain and long term affects on preserving vision.

I got an Asus VG245 several years back because for it's price and it was rated high for eye health according to a review. I liked it more than a curved Samsung I got before.

IPS panel and high refresh rate makes a difference I hear. Not to mention getting one with a big screen.
What do you guys think?

Do any of you think that getting one with a curve also helps?

[Muirium]

Hmm…!

Just like every other aspect of ergonomics, I strongly expect that the correct answer is “what suits you best”, rather than some idealistic one size fits all metric, when one size clearly does not.

I have a bit better than 20/20 vision, so maybe you should borrow my clothes?

[JCMax]

Hmm…!

Just like every other aspect of ergonomics, I strongly expect that the correct answer is “what suits you best”, rather than some idealistic one size fits all metric, when one size clearly does not.

I have a bit better than 20/20 vision, so maybe you should borrow my clothes?

Hmmmm....I don't know if that would work!

What setup do you use? How does it suit your needs? Does the monitor you use makes a difference?

[Muirium]

13 inch M1 MacBook Air these days, mostly, at max scaled resolution (Retina display), effective 1680 pixels wide; preferably at a good bit more than an arm’s reach distance. If I need it on my lap it’ll do; but I don’t prefer it. I only ever use phones closer than that. When I go oldschool desktop I hook it up to a 24 inch 4K which I usually run at the Mac’s maximum setting of 3000 effective pixels wide. (Same res they drive the 30 inch 6K.) Again quite a lot further than an arm’s reach. Closer and my eyes complain about the focussing as I switch to different objects around me, and my upper back slowly but surely remembers those bike crashes from years and years ago. I used to do standing desk in the aftermath. It worked, but puts me too close.

Both of these are IPS panels, 60hz no curve. Curve would drive me nuts. I fidget too much to stay perfectly centre, and it’d kill me every time I discovered I’d moved off!

But like my weird ass jeans with short legs and bulky thighs, this is not advice for anyone but myself! We’re all a little different. Some of us a lot!

[Findecanor]

There are generally two things I find straining: 1) Cheap gaming monitors for PCs have too low resolution to be worthwhile. Anything less than 100 PPI should be criminal. 2) A lot of people adjust their monitors too bright/low contrast so that colours get washed out.

As you get older, at some point you may need to use reading glasses or keep the monitor at a farther distance to read comfortably on it.

I'm thinking of getting a curved ultra-wide monitor, but not something more curved than 1800R though. (1800R => curve radius = 1800 mm)

[Muirium]

Pixel density is the most significant metric of any display. It always has been, really, but in the past there was such little range that people knew what you meant when you said you ran games at 17 inch while they had a 21 inch desktop publishing setup. That simple relationship—bigger screen == higher resolution—has broken down in recent years. A lot of stuff just isn’t suited to your chosen use. It’s annoying whenever having conversations about it which instinctively (we’re humans) boil down to single metrics, containing the old assumption. Nope. Not any more.

Being a Mac user, I want everything at 2× Retina. So for me 200 PPI is perfect and 180 or so will do. Below that, no thanks. I’d really rather not.


https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays2/

[Findecanor]

Yeah, for Mac I think you'll definitely want a Retina display only because of macOS' font rendering: fonts are not hinted, so text will look blurry on non-Retina displays.
(I am also not sure if macOS does subpixel rendering these days.)

[Muirium]

From what I gather, MacOS assumes Retina in a big way now and if you run it at 1× you are in for a wonderful time! My little desktop 4K display has been Retina all along, so I’m unfamiliar with it low res on modern operating systems. Only the couple of old PowerPC Macs I still have are back at 100 PPI. And that SE/30, if I ever re-capped it to even show a picture.

[hellothere]

Anecdotal Breakdown:

* If you have a 5+ year old monitor, it's probably really blurry. Life's too short to waste it in front of a terrible monitor. Waste it in front of a GOOD monitor.
* The difference between 30hz (hertz) and 60hz is extreme. The more hertz, the more fluid the movement is.
* The alleged best monitor size for 1080p is 24" (" means inch), the best for 2K is 27", the best for 4K is 32".
* Blue-light blocking might be a thing.
* Light in your room/dungeon/whatever -- I don't judge -- might be a thing.
* Reflective coating on your monitor or the lack thereof could be a thing.
* If your glasses are scratched, get them replaced. (Non-anecdotal. My eye doctor told me that scratches make a huge difference.)

As I'm 1500 years old and the Highlander, I have recently had to decrease the resolution on my MacBook and attached monitors because I can't read the tiny text anymore. Windows 10 and Linux allow me to increase the size of fonts without decreasing the resolution, but my Mac doesn't. If someone does know how to do this, shoot me a PM or post here.

You definitely should go through the various wizards and such to get the brightness and contrast right. I haven't done that in years and I may be hurting myself. I used to know someone that had a plug-in monitor calibration tool. That'd be great to use if you can find one.

[JCMax]

I am a Windows 10/11 user right now who is hoping to make the switch to Linux (probably Pop OS!) or FreeBSD after I finish my Desktop build (hopefully soon ).

I am looking at LG 27" Class Ultrafine 5K IPS LED Monitor. It might be kind of pricey but I am willing to spend a little extra if it will pay off for my eyesight.

Anecdotal Breakdown:

* If you have a 5+ year old monitor, it's probably really blurry. Life's too short to waste it in front of a terrible monitor. Waste it in front of a GOOD monitor.
* The difference between 30hz (hertz) and 60hz is extreme. The more hertz, the more fluid the movement is.
* The alleged best monitor size for 1080p is 24" (" means inch), the best for 2K is 27", the best for 4K is 32".
* Blue-light blocking might be a thing.
* Light in your room/dungeon/whatever -- I don't judge -- might be a thing.
* Reflective coating on your monitor or the lack thereof could be a thing.
* If your glasses are scratched, get them replaced. (Non-anecdotal. My eye doctor told me that scratches make a huge difference.)

You definitely should go through the various wizards and such to get the brightness and contrast right. I haven't done that in years and I may be hurting myself. I used to know someone that had a plug-in monitor calibration tool. That'd be great to use if you can find one.

Thanks for the list, the first bullet is an especially important one !
By wizard are you talking about a third party piece of hardware?

Being a Mac user, I want everything at 2× Retina. So for me 200 PPI is perfect and 180 or so will do. Below that, no thanks. I’d really rather not.

https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays2/

I glanced through the article and studied the chart but I am not sure why the non-retina is good and green before 120 and then gets bad and red? I would have thought it wouldn't build towards the bad zone the higher the PPI went.

What I'm trying to ask is why is 120 to 200 the "bad zone" on the chart?

[JCMax]

P.S. How is PPI affected by Ultrawides?

[Muirium]

What I'm trying to ask is why is 120 to 200 the "bad zone" on the chart?

The article is specifically about the Mac. The way Apple handles high density displays (which is all of their displays) is by drawing everything at a 2×2 resolution. Their name for this is Retina Display. Here's the two minutes Steve Jobs spent introducing it, on the iPhone 4, back in 2010:

Wikipedia's got two pictures which say it all. Here's a pre-Retina iPhone 3GS:



And here's a Retina iPhone 4:



Quite a profound difference. See the little extra bits on the left corner of the leg of the digit 7? And look at the line in the % sign too. Those are subpixel rendering in action, as mentioned by Fin. It's a crafty way of squeezing a little higher effective resolution out of blocky displays, but as you can see it's nowhere near as good as real physical pixels.

So, higher PPI is good, great. But how to support it in software? Apple's way is to double the scale of everything, across all apps, seamlessly. Text is automatically rendered at twice the size it was before, and graphics are drawn double sized too. All pixel assets like textures and cursors in third party apps should be remade in 2× resolution, but old-style assets are upscaled where necessary at the cost of outdated apps looking blurry. Retina came to the Mac in 2012 so all third party software on the platform has long since updated to support it. The result is that users just never have to think about it… Unless they go looking for a third party desktop display! Which is exactly what that article is about.

Now about that "bad zone" on the chart. It's what lies between comfortable 2×2 Retina density and the crummy old 1×1 native blocky pixels as seen above. In my view, and Apple's frankly, only the displays near or above 200 PPI are really any good. But if you just want something big and cheap, you can go oldschool blocky and put up with the iPhone 3 experience. The pain of being between the zones is you're too low resolution to get a sensible physical size of either 1×1 or 2×2 scaled resolution. You'd be forced to choose between much too big (but smooth) and much too small.

But this is just the Mac. I hear Windows allows non-integer scaling values, but that individual software must support it and so the experience is more complex than what I'm used to on the Mac and iOS.

P.S. How is PPI affected by Ultrawides?

Pythagoras. Calculate the hypotenuse of their resolution and divide it by their diagonal size in inches. Same as all (rectangular) displays.

[hellothere]

> By wizard are you talking about a third party piece of hardware?
Windows 10 wizard: https://www.groovypost.com/howto/calibr ... windows-10
Mac wizard: https://www.hellotech.com/guide/for/how ... onitor-mac *
Different distros of Linux have different wizards.

You can also get free calibration software. Here's a list of a few free ones.

Here's one of the hardware calibration devices.
---
* No, I'm not connected in any way to this company or website. Really. Believe me.

[Findecanor]

* The alleged best monitor size for 1080p is 24" (" means inch), the best for 2K is 27", the best for 4K is 32".

1920×1080 in 24" is only 91.8 PPI, which is much too low, IMHO, unless you use your monitor at a distance, for whatever reason. A 1080p monitor should otherwise not be bigger than 22" (100 PPI).

"2K" is a cinema standard and is not relevant, but I suspect what you actually meant was 2560×1440, in which case I'd concur. That would have 110 PPI — which I think is the sweet spot if you have a Windows or Linux PC.

P.S. How is PPI affected by Ultrawides?

The dominant "ultrawide" format is 3440×1440 pixels, 21:9 aspect ratio, 34" at around 110 PPI.
It is like a 2560×1440 27" monitor that grew sideways, and got curved.

But beware that there are ultrawide "for gaming" monitors that are only 2560×1080 at an abysmal 82 PPI.
Almost all ultrawide are also curved, more or less. Gaming monitors tend to have more curvature overall. I have also seen a couple flat ultrawides, BTW.

[hellothere]

"2K" is a cinema standard and is not relevant, but I suspect what you actually meant was 2560×1440, in which case I'd concur. That would have 110 PPI — which I think is the sweet spot if you have a Windows or Linux PC.

2K is what they're marketed as and I own two, so it's definitely relevant -- but, yes, that's the proper resolution.

Speaking of ultrawides, I've heard that Macs have difficulty with some of them. I didn't look into them very heavily in my last monitor search, but it's definitely something to check.

The reason why I didn't look heavily into ultrawides is because I've used a three monitor setup for years and I really don't want to take the time to get used to it. I'm comfortable with what I have. Ultrawide for viewing movies would be nice. I should look into ultrawide TVs.

[Muirium]

2K is good marketing. Sounds like 4K but with all the retro charm of y2k in the background. Even more millenarian would be to superscript the ² for no good reason besides looking kewl and giving fanbois something to to throw back at the critics. “So, actually, this is not the ‘2K’ of which you speak, Luddite. Perhaps learn how ² type?”

[Jadelyann]

I don't think that curved display would help reducing eye strain. I had the same issue with my monitor as I was having a eye strain on a daily basis. I swapped it for this one. Since then, eye strain reduced considerably.

I also use a yellow filter software to further reduce the effects of blue light.

[Muirium]

My 4K Dell cost less than that, in 2015!

[JCMax]

I don't think that curved display would help reducing eye strain. I had the same issue with my monitor as I was having a eye strain on a daily basis. I swapped it for this one. Since then, eye strain reduced considerably.

I also use a yellow filter software to further reduce the effects of blue light.

Have you ever noticed if it seems to improve your eyesight? Or if your eyesight was deteriorating, it helped stop it?

My 4K Dell cost less than that, in 2015!

So it is basically a Dell monitor with Retina equivalent tech? I'll have to check out what the PPI is on the newer ones they've got.

[Muirium]

Ha! You're right to expect there would be more choice today than there was 5, 6, 7 years ago, but you would in fact be wrong. Dell never did make any more high density displays. Even my Retina for cheapskates model—the Dell P2415Q—was eventually discontinued. Here's the Retina state of play from just a few months ago, before Apple's (still pricey) 5K Studio Display came along. It was bleak! Still is, if you want to spend µ money instead of four figures just for a monitor!

I kinda like the Apple Studio Display. It's just a 2015 panel though (same as the P3 colour gamut 5K iMac and every 27 incher since), and the good height-adjustable stand costs £400 extra: about the same price as my whole Dell 4K! I'd be seriously tempted by that screen if it cost £900 all in, instead of £1900.

Maybe in a few years when they go 120 Hz OLED. More likely that than a price cut!

[JCMax]

Ha! You're right to expect there would be more choice today than there was 5, 6, 7 years ago, but you would in fact be wrong. Dell never did make any more high density displays. Even my Retina for cheapskates model—the Dell P2415Q—was eventually discontinued. Here's the Retina state of play from just a few months ago, before Apple's (still pricey) 5K Studio Display came along. It was bleak! Still is, if you want to spend µ money instead of four figures just for a monitor!

I kinda like the Apple Studio Display. It's just a 2015 panel though (same as the P3 colour gamut 5K iMac and every 27 incher since), and the good height-adjustable stand costs £400 extra: about the same price as my whole Dell 4K! I'd be seriously tempted by that screen if it cost £900 all in, instead of £1900.

Maybe in a few years when they go 120 Hz OLED. More likely that than a price cut!

...
You'd think manufacturers would make more...sigh. Thanks for the list though. The LG 24" 4K UHD IPS LED Computer Monitor is at the top of my list now. At least it is for a work monitor.

What about panels and refresh rate? I've heard IPS panels have better contrast, and refresh rates at 120 Hz or above are what you need to reduce eye strain.

And while I'm on the subject, eye care technology? Like what Asus and LG sometimes market? Is any of that good or is it all just hype or does any of that make a differene?

[hellothere]

Why the Retina 6K is Worth It. If you haven't seen images in native 10 bit HDR, you're missing out. Just like you're missing out if you haven't seen 60 fps (or better) video.

If you do professional photography or design work that includes working with images, $5000 is a bit of a bargain.

I'll mention again that using 60 or higher hertz rate monitors significantly lessen my eye strain.

[hellothere]

Sorry. https://www.vssmonitoring.com/va-vs-ips. Summary: depends on what you're going to use the panel for.

[Muirium]

Apple’s $6K display (pixels and dollars, you do want a stand right? ) is 60 Hz. No more. And has worse backlighting than the iPad now let alone the MacBook Pro. Bad buy.

The backside of the thing does look damn fine though, I’ll give them that.

[Yasu0]

A damn fine backside does tend to make up for other issues.

[JCMax]

DAMN! It seems like when I think I've found a winner something sucks.

Found a monitor that's over 180 PPI? Great!
Oh, wait...It only has 60Hz refresh rate.

[Muirium]

The pixel density thing only really overrides all else when you use a Mac. You’re a PC guy, right? Get something ~100 PPI but with all the other stuff you want. It’ll be fine. Windows (and therefore Linux surely) expect low res. Going higher will probably just be a pain in the arse, usability wise.

[JCMax]

I am basically a Windows/Linux guy. So yeah, PC.

What about curved monitors? Is the PPI you need still calculated the same way?

So the Windows/Linux camp use lower resolution, which is why it's ok to go with the lower PPI around 100? That goes back to the difference between Retina vs non-Retina displays?

[Muirium]

Windows / Linux people need to answer this, because all I know myself is the Mac. I’ve heard no one runs at Retina / 200 PPI on PC because it’s just not supported well by the OS and apps. But I have no experience of it myself.

Certainly, 100 PPI is always going to look jagged and blurry compared to 200. But as you’ve seen, most of the desktop world is just fine with it, leaving a small market for high pixel density monitors, with not much model choice.

Phones, meanwhile, are extremely high pixel density, not only Apple’s. And high PPI smartphones sell in the hundreds of millions. So it’s not like people don’t notice or want them! When software isn’t blocking progress, higher PPI wins.

[Guppy]

Possibly off-topic but I had a very specific question with this as well.
My eyesight has essentially hit the wall. If I sit in front of my 4K TV, text on the corners of the TV is blurry. The optimum reading distance for me is probably less than arm's length. Broadly lit days I seem to be able to see in fair detail but anything less than that is blur city.
I've been told that my computer monitor for the last 25 years of my life probably had nothing to do with this in the past by an eyedoctor, but I wonder about that because almost everyone in my family has vision like a hawk and I'm the one that drives with glasses. What resolution/PPI should I be looking at to retain what little eyesight I have left assuming the two actually are related?