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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

I am curios how much eye damage these system can cause. The S8 gives a warning before you activate it that you should not place the phone too close to your face.

How bright is this infrared light and can it cause eye damage although we can't see it?

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Have you ever been outside? It's dimmer than that.

A nice campfire that noticeably warms your face when you look at it probably gives off a couple orders of magnitude more IR than the phone. IR can damage eyes [1], but the phone probably won't contribute significantly

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3116568/

To be fair a campfire also puts out visible light which can cause you to blink or squint which a "pure IR" light won't.

But the IR from the S8 is still extremely small and safe.

In general yes, invisible things can burn your eyes but it's probably of no concern here. The more common thing you'll run into is things like cheap DPSS green lasers that output a large amount of IR, you don't have a blink reflex for things outside of your visible range and these will cause damage on the higher end.

Anecdotally I do not notice any eye discomfort while using this n times per day. It's also not "bright" from my perspective but someone with this system would better answer the eye damage question.

It's unlikely to be dangerous (see other answers), but "eye discomfort" is a bad yardstick: the retina doesn't have nociceptors and any discomfort would only be secondary, appearing long after the damage is done. See (without being seen) the few people who manage to observe each solar eclipse with binoculars.

No, it can't. The warning is for optimal detection rates, it doesn't harm your eye.

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