This document was published in 1997. I know it's anecdotal, but I've always felt that staring at a cathode ray tube was decidedly more fatiguing than staring at a flat panel. Is it just me or is there some sense to this?
As far as I know, cause 4) has the most impact, dust particles were literally fired at your eyes, and for this reason 20 years ago it was relatively easy to see people with grounded filters mounted to their CRTs (you used to attach the ground wire to the ground contact of the RS232 or parallel port of the PC)
> As far as I know, cause 4) has the most impact, dust particles were literally fired at your eyes, and for this reason 20 years ago it was relatively easy to see people with grounded filters mounted to their CRTs (you used to attach the ground wire to the ground contact of the RS232 or parallel port of the PC)
I've always wondered whether this actually worked, since I had the impression that the grounding was BS and all those filters did was reduce glare.
[[At least, the only times I've had a migraine in the last three or four years were when I was setting up a new system and forgot to frob the monitor to 75hz (I don't understand why it doesn't just automatically detect this stuff. But there we go...)]]
- Most CRTs, generally, could operate at 75Hz on the low end and upwards towards/beyond 120Hz on the high end if set in the system settings
- Most flat panels default, and may be capped, to 60Hz (unfortunately including the one I'm on now) and only in recent history do they have relatively expensive options boasting 120Hz
[1] At least not in the sense of CRTs. Most do perform temporal dithering of colors by alternating between nearby shades.
I'm working on a .kext to fix the latter, but it's hard work and we still have a long ways to go.
LCD monitors with PWM-dimmed backlights can have the same problem, but they usually run at higher frequency. I still run non-PWM monitors for my daily work, though.
Flat panel monitors may only have a 60 Hz refresh rate on average, but each lit pixel is illuminated 100% of the time. The refresh rate dictates how long each pixel takes to change to a different color and affects the smoothness of motion and video, but a static image on a flat panel display should have no flicker at all.
(Assume for a moment that the flat panel's backlight has no inherent flicker; some flourescent backlighting suffers from this, but it's unrelated to the display's refresh rate. I'm also glossing over some of the finer technical details in both kinds of tech.)
FYI: persistence of vision was debunked back in 1912[1], 1976[2], and again in 1993[3]. It's still taught in film classes, and they justify this by claiming that it's "disputed". It's not disputed, it's downright incorrect. Please stop referring to it, as this only confounds the idea, and helps it with false validity.
[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/34413805_Experiment...
[2]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/268400050_The_Myth_...
[3]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20687993?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...
The annoying thing about CRTs was the amount of space they took up.
My eyes feel increasingly worse, even though resolution and perceived clarity seems to be better. I put that down to age.
I didn't really like the brightness of my first flat panel monitors, and expected improvements with my led back-lit laptop (thinkpad), but I've never really enjoyed looking at that either.
So to me it's all a bit uncomfortable. E-ink on the other hand, I love.