Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Topgun on August 11, 2008, 03:10:39 pm
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I am worried that my eyesight might decay from looking at a computer monitor for hours on end.
do you guys have any tips on reducing eye strain and having overall healthy eyes?
and are certain monitors better at reducing eye strain than others?
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Taqke a break once every half hour. Change depths of focus every five. REad every night (a book for ten minutes at arms length) and no masturbation....
I'd write more but i can't see the screen :eek2:
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*squints eyes* Who's that?
Umm, let's see. They did teach us some things... Oh, right. Every now and then, disattach your eyes from the monitor and gaze upon the horizon. This will relax the eye muscles. Or something.
As for monitors... well, the only thing I've heard is that LCD is better for the eyes than CRT. Dunno if there are differences between LCDs.
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and no masturbation....
:wtf:
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and no masturbation....
:wtf:
Agreed. :wtf:
We're trying to help the mon with his eyes, not with his carpal tunnel syndrome.
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We're trying to help the mon with his eyes, not with his carpal tunnel syndrome.
No one's every told you it will make you go blind??
But yeah, what they said's is what I heard. Just get up from your computer, and let your eyes look at other things. Focus on different depths, that sort of thing. Look out the damn window and see the world outside. Watch the girls walk by, etctera. . . .
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We're trying to help the mon with his eyes, not with his carpal tunnel syndrome.
No one's every told you it will make you go blind??
no...
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We're trying to help the mon with his eyes, not with his carpal tunnel syndrome.
No one's every told you it will make you go blind??
Oh, that. I've heard about it but no one's ever said it to me more or less directly. There is actually a priest somewhere around here who has said "Masturbation is alright.".
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In an effort to avoid wank-thread III.
Make sure to avoid glare at the same time make sure it's not too dark and you don't have to squint. MAke sure you're looking slightly down on your screen and its pointed slightly up to face you. Just follow DSE prinipals and you'll be fine.
Google Display Sceren Evaluationss....... :yes:
Get an eye-test too to make sure your eyes aren't getting knackered first. :cool: << avoid glasses.
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Your computer usage patterns won't really affect your eyesight over the long term, but they can certainly cause temporary discomfort.
On LCDs, turn down the brightness, especially for basic Windows programs. Practically every LCD I've seen has the brightness set way too high by default. Make sure your monitor's DPI is high enough that the text size looks comfortable to you, as you will otherwise have to run at a lower resolution than the native and everything will look like crap. Windows has options to increase the text size but they don't work in all programs. Also, avoid monitors with heavy screen door effects or excessive motion blur. VA panels seem to have the least SDE, but also the most motion blur (shouldn't be significant in Windows on modern panels though).
For CRTs, make sure your monitor is properly focused and runs at least at 85hz. Some people need over 100hz for it to look comfortable while others find 75hz okay. A lot of low end or midrange CRTs have very bad focus and shouldn't be used at all, although the best ones can be very good in this respect.
Another thing that helps for me on any kind of display is to use a high contrast Windows color scheme with light text on dark backgrounds, like the colors that HLP uses. This especially makes things much more readable in a dark or dimly lit room.
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We're trying to help the mon with his eyes, not with his carpal tunnel syndrome.
No one's every told you it will make you go blind??
(http://www.ldolphin.org/mastdeath.jpg)
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remove your eyes
replace when dead
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remove your eyes
replace when dead
My thread lock button has vanished :confused:
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Weird, the image I posted isn't showing up.
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Make sure the monitor isn't the brightest source of light in the room, or at least that it's not the only decent source of light.
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Use Neroogle...
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Use Neroogle...
Actually, Blackle seems to be better in the energy-saving respect.
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Singaporean schools teach us some eye exercise routines to help blood circulation to the eyes. I dunno if it works, but if I can find them, I'll post it up.
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Singaporean schools teach us some eye exercise routines to help blood circulation to the eyes. I dunno if it works, but if I can find them, I'll post it up.
If I introduced a tyrannosaurus rex into your class assembly, would you notice?
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Possibly a living one?
As far as I know it's a good thing to turn the PC off and walk near trees, the green color is supposed to calm people down.
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- if possible, resize your fonts to be confortable to look at
- if possible, pick a font type that is easy to read
- don't use apps with crappy cramped interfaces
- bring the screen close enough, so you can actually see everything you need to see
- experiment with the font anti-alias options to find out what is easiest to read with your hardware
- if possible, adjust the colour scheme in apps to be confortable to look at (with proper colouring you don't need that much eye effort to recognize objects on screen)
- if possible, remove all icons you don't use from any application toolbar
- for CRT, reduce contrast to get rid of the 'blooming' effect
- for CRT, don't use too low vertical refresh rate (will make it blink)
- for CRT, don't use overly high vertical refresh rate (will make it fuzzy)
- adjust the background lighting according to screen brightness
- make sure nothing bright is just behind you, reflecting from the screen
- dust off the screen
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Make sure the monitor isn't the brightest source of light in the room, or at least that it's not the only decent source of light.
This is less of a problem if you use high contrast Windows colors like I suggested earlier. I find my color scheme with green text on a black background easy to read in low lighting (maybe not in a completely dark room though).
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i can tell you now your eyes dont get fat or small, but they can change in color after a while so if it's a looks thing, to attract other women. or put to make your self look human i would suggest you take 30 minutes out after 2 hours on your monitor screens, don't look at the monitor too closely and make sure you can read what is being said, make sure your eye level is with the middle of the screen.
however i always take 30 minutes out for every 2 hours monitor usage.
i always use refresh of 60hz, even though it is slower, it hurts my eyes to go any higher.
never sit in a dark room with your monitor the only thing that is lighting the room.
i also go to great lengths to avoid trying to make out writing, for example the b5 mod in debriefing background picture makes it hard for me to see the grey writing in the box, i am trying to find a way toning down the picture or removing it to help avoidd moving my head closer the screen where i would have to squint.
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On top of what other people are saying, heres some additional advice that hasen't been said.
- If your using a CRT monitor i suggest setting to a refresh rate of 75, it should eliminate blinking. If you dont know what I mean about "Blinking" look off to the side of your monitor and look at your monitor with the corner of your eye, you should see it blink at low refresh rates.
- LCD monitors at 60 Hz dont "blink" like crt monitors however, so if you have a LCD monitor, make sure the refresh rate is set to 60.
- Depending on the monitors size, your gunna want a resolution that you can see easily. Newer CRT monitors have a 1024 x 768 resolution but older CRT monitors are typicaly 800 x 600. Those are the resolutions you should set to see things perfectly clear.
Please note before making an arguement with these facts, most CRT monitors can display a higher resolution then they actually display. You may also notice that 75 Hz isn't availble for high resolutions on CRT (or even sometimes LCDs for that matter), so you might need to lower your resolution before increasing the refresh rate.
Hope this helps :)
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Pretty much any halfway decent CRT will do at least 90khz horizontally, which allows for an 85hz refresh rate at 1280x960. Many of the smaller 17/19" LCDs can also use a 75hz setting. Increasing an LCD's refresh rate has a somewhat different effect than on a CRT and only a handful of them will actually output true 75hz, but it can sometimes make things in motion look smoother, especially the mouse pointer or scrolling text.
most CRT monitors can display a higher resolution then they actually display
:wtf:
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I am worried that my eyesight might decay from looking at a computer monitor for hours on end.
do you guys have any tips on reducing eye strain and having overall healthy eyes?
and are certain monitors better at reducing eye strain than others?
TL;DR - your eyesight does not decay from being used. There are other reasons why it's a really good idea to reduce eyestrain as much as possible.
An Interesting Topic.
Eyesight has two basic components that affect the visual perception: Optics and sensors. Optically, as long as the cornea refracts the light within acceptable limits for the lens to fine-tune the focus so that the image projected on the retina is sharp, everything is fine and you cannot really destroy this with using your eyes. Sure, prolonged periods of looking very close can stress the muscles that operate the lens, but basically the optics of eye do not suffer from looking at computers, books or whatever. With age, the ability of the lens to adjust will decline, resulting in reduced area of ability to sharpen your vision to. Since normally eye should be focused to infinity when lens is relaxed (looking far), the result is that the ability to look very close will slowly deteriorate with age. This happens to everyone to varying extent, similar to how we lose the ability to hear very high-pitched sounds.
Optically bad eyesight is usually caused by eyeballs being slightly deformed so that the retina is out of focus and the lens can't compensate - most common is the eyeballs being too long, in which case the focus is ahead of the retina when the lens is relaxed, reducing the ability to see far. Opposite case is called farsightedness and it reduces theability to focus on objects at close distances. None of these are affected in the slightest by usage of the eyes; it depends on how your eyes grow up to be. Some more complex stuff includes cylindrical
Also, eyesight can deteriorate optically by diseases like cataracts, but those do not result from looking at computer screens.
The sensory components of eyesight are the retinas, eye nerves and visual cortex that processes the image to comprehensible data. None of these are significantly affected by usage. The only thing I could think of is that static, large contrast images tend to generate short-lived afterimages, but they fade so fast that it makes no difference. Obviously staying in dark room staring at a computer screen will make your eyes more slightly more sensitive to light, at least on short term, but that's about it as far as I know. The amount of cells on the retina's yellow spot pretty much dictates the aquity of your eyesight as long as the optics are OK, either naturally or corrected by glasses/contacts.
So, none of the components that your eyesight consists of will decay due to looking at computers. However, looking at computers all day will probably have other adverse effects. Mainly that looking close all the time and also looking at much the same direction causes stress on the muscles that adjust the lens, as well as the muscles that move the eyes. And your eyes can dry, since working on computers tends to reduce blinking frequency. Not to mention things like neck or back muscles getting sore... These factors don't really affect your eyesight or visual aquity, but they will make you feel like crap, have headaches or even migraines, feel more tired than you actually are, and even making you feel like your eyesight gets worse.
Now... there's already a lot of things that have been said that can prevent and reduce eyestrain. The most important one is to have breaks when you look at something else than the screen, prefereably at a distance, and move your eyes around.
Secondly, make sure that the lighting in the room is at suitable level and uses indirect lighting as much as possible. Indirect means that the light is diffused before it gets into your eyes, either by reflecting from matt surfaces (walls) or by going through a diffuser around/below the lamp. Direct light means raw light coming from the lightbulb/tube or reflecting from computer screen or other shiny stuff in your room. Too bright lighting, and the screen will look too dark and contrast becomes more difficult to discern; basically the more contrast your monitor can offer, the brighter the lighting can be in the room before it starts to disturb. Too dark lighting, and your eyes will try to adapt to darkness and be disrupted by the bright areas on the screen; when your pupils dilate, you also lose some depth accuracy from the refraction and things can start to look more fuzzy (which is one of the reasons people see better at bright than dim lighting, just like cameras...).
Thirdly, configure your monitor so that it's good to look at. This involves both position and calibration. Position should be anything from 70 to 100 cm away from your eyes, though preferences vary. Also, the upper edge of the screen should be about level with your eyes when you're sitting comfortably. As far as screen calibration goes, it's a good rule of thumb to always use as much contrast as possible, then adjust the colours and brightness with gamma for each channels; this will allow you to us the full capacities of your monitor as far as colourspace goes, and full range of colours is usually better to look at than limiting the screen with reduced contrast. If some parts of the image are too bright, either reduce brightness or increase the lighting in your room; in most cases "too bright" is caused by the eyes being accommodated to darkness so of course it'll cause problems. Some CRT's start to develope blooming habits though, so use common sense with the adjustments... although with current trends in gaming, an auto-blooming screen might be pretty awesome. :lol:
Of course you should use as high a resolution as possible, but make sure that characters stay easily recognizeable and readable from your viewing distance. High resolution reduces the aliasing effects and makes things in general more pleasant... and with flat screens you should always, always use the native resolution of the screen because upscaling lower resolutions will often cause problems. Some screens handle it better than others.
Also, it is advisable to always use as high a vertical frequency as possible... at least when gaming. When working, just use sufficient vertical retrace frequency that the CRT monitor doesn't visibly blink when you look at it with the side of your vision... Some people claim that since human eyes can see something like 28 frames per second (which I consider bull**** of the highest degree anyway), it won't make a difference, but I beg to differ; 60Hz is well within human perception of frequency. That's because even if the yellow spot of retinas and the visual cortex is hypothetically wired to handle about 30 "frames" per a second, the cells otherwhere in the retina sense brightness instead of colour and have much higher sensitivity for motion, which is why you will often notice things like fluorescent lamps - or even traditional light bulbs occasionally - to blink due to the frequency of the alternating current if you look at them with the side of your vision. And of course anyone can usually sense the difference between 120 frames per second and 60 frames per second in games played on a CRT, even despite the limitations of the colour vision of eyes, because human visual cortex is really good at extrapolating between the "frames" that the eyes register - that's why our world looks continuous and not a slideshow. Good example is a flying tennis ball - eyes focus onto the flying ball only once or twice, then the brains fill in the trajectory and tell us that it flied from A to B and it looks continuous to us. Same with games, except that the missing frames will often be detected - try playing at 30 FPS and things will look a lot less continuous than it theoretically should be.
But I digress... and I don't think I have much more to say on the matter at hand anyway.
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*snip*
But I digress... and I don't think I have much more to say on the matter at hand anyway.
:wtf: tl;dr.
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(TOO MUCH TO READ)
Don't you think people are more likely to read a list, rather then 20 full length paragraphs?
Pretty much any halfway decent CRT will do at least 90khz horizontally, which allows for an 85hz refresh rate at 1280x960.
I wasn't aware there was such thing as a widescreen CRT?
most CRT monitors can display a higher resolution then they actually display
:wtf:
You didn't know that? Most CRT monitors are only 800 pixels wide by 600 pixels tall, newer ones are usually 1024 x 768. But like i said, this doesn't mean they can't fake a higher resolution.
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I skipped that whole post. :D
Is "getting enough sleep" a good tip? :nervous:
Colonel, in what way does masturbation increase eye strain? I was thinking that it should alleviate eye strain since you tend to feel tired after that.
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I wasn't aware there was such thing as a widescreen CRT?
1280x960 is a 4:3 resolution and is the proper one for most CRTs, not 1280x1024. There are widescreen CRTs out there anyway, like the FW900.
You didn't know that? Most CRT monitors are only 800 pixels wide by 600 pixels tall, newer ones are usually 1024 x 768. But like i said, this doesn't mean they can't fake a higher resolution.
CRTs don't use fixed pixels and can't "fake" resolutions. If you're referring to the phosphor density, most of the good 21/22" ones have anywhere between a 0.22-0.25mm diagonal pitch, which roughly corresponds to their maximum resolution of 2048x1536. You would have to go back in time a long way to find one with a dot pitch so high that it only does 800x600 properly.
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does 1996 monitors count for dot pitch? because i still use a 1996 monitor from hp, its been in use for 12 years and has not broke down even once. it's max refresh is 75hz, i haven't seen anything on the options for the highest refresh rate to be any higher then what is said.
i am looking at a TFT LCD, it is a lot less bulky, and hopefully will serve me just as long as this monitor has, on the plus side, it doesn't give off that nasty amount of radiation these old CRT's do. it should help out when it comes to playing games, watching movies and so on, i made sure its a 2ms 19" so i dont have that motion blur that could confuse your eyes a bit.
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Don't get a 2 ms, the monitors with lower response times use TN panels, which are lower quality. Monitors with 6+ ms response time are generally not TNs, so are better for general apps. This (http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=31&threadid=2049206) thread should help, pick a monitor from the multimedia section, perfectly good for gaming, as well as other applications.
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thread oo long for my eyes to focus, is their a short version? or so sort of tel-tale giveaway to tell if it's TN or others?
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Scroll down to the second post.
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thread oo long for my eyes to focus, is their a short version? or so sort of tel-tale giveaway to tell if it's TN or others?
The viewing angle is probably the best indicator, although that can occasionally be wrong. 176 indicates a VA and 178 is usually an IPS, although it could be a VA as well. Anything lower than that is always a TN. You'll typically see 160 on them.
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well i keep seeing 170/160 or 160/160 view angles for most 19" ive come across. i might 20" + for results on that 176 view angle.
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All 19" and 22" screens today are TNs. You will pretty much only find the 8-bit screens in the 24" and higher sizes now, although a handful of 20" ones are still around. Some of the 22" ones are still fairly good though, especially the ones with the refractive coating.
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i have just seen a tft monitor at 180/180 with 5ms response though it is a 24", on a site called overclockers. value own monitor, so i know this monitors exist now. its the 1st 24" i have seen with the 180/180 configuration.
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does 1996 monitors count for dot pitch? because i still use a 1996 monitor from hp, its been in use for 12 years and has not broke down even once. it's max refresh is 75hz, i haven't seen anything on the options for the highest refresh rate to be any higher then what is said.
Good god... My eyes would have bled dry by now.
Before all the displays at my workplace were replaced with LCD's, I could notice a display that was using a refresh rate below 100Hz from across the room. I just couldn't stand the flickering that appeared even at 85Hz. For same reason I can't watch old tube TV's with 60Hz refresh rate. It has to be either 100Hz or an LCD.
Funnily enough one of my friends at work didn't believe I could notice a difference between 85Hz and 100Hz, so he made a test. Passed easily. :p
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im used to 60hz, like i said, anything higher hurts my eyes. if i go for a lcd tft, i hopefully will be able to try different refresh rates.
so you got a sensitivity or a sixth sense of sorts :rolleyes:, i have also. i can hear a tv switching on it's electrical charge from the kitchen and their are 3 walls separating me from the living room it's also the same with a computer monitor, once it's on i can hear the noise both these electron throwers and i can also hear them making their respective refresh rate changes.
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im used to 60hz, like i said, anything higher hurts my eyes
How is that even possible? In other words, a stable non-flickering image hurts your eyes while flickering image does not?
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how? its like asking how is it possible to be a great swimmer and your not, and want to know how.
the answer its either by practice ,design or completely natural.
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What? That makes no sense.
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I see subtle flickering below 100hz in Windows but find 85hz fine for games, which are usually darker than screens of text. I use 120hz in Windows anyway.
And there's no way anyone could find 60hz better than 75hz, if that was the only factor involved. What might be happening is that your monitor is crappy and is becoming blurry at its maximum frequency.
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The max mine displays is 60hz.
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im used to 60hz, like i said, anything higher hurts my eyes. if i go for a lcd tft, i hopefully will be able to try different refresh rates.
so you got a sensitivity or a sixth sense of sorts :rolleyes:, i have also. i can hear a tv switching on it's electrical charge from the kitchen and their are 3 walls separating me from the living room it's also the same with a computer monitor, once it's on i can hear the noise both these electron throwers and i can also hear them making their respective refresh rate changes.
60hz on a LCD doesn't flicker like that on a CRT, because there isnt a laser that streams across the screen. With that said, its probably better for your eyes on an LCD to keep it at 60hz
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If an LCD actually supports 75hz, many things in motion can look noticeably smoother than at 60hz. The mouse pointer is a good example. However, there are very few LCDs that do 75hz properly, even when the setting is available. I only know of two, and I don't think either one is in production now.
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60hz on a LCD doesn't flicker like that on a CRT, because there isnt a laser an electron beam that streams across the screen. With that said, its probably better for your eyes on an LCD to keep it at 60hz
Fix'd.