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Comment by b_b | Hacker News Reader

For many of us whose use of these blue-light emitting computer and phone screens is necessary, what can we do about it?

Use f.lux or an equivalent (most OS have their own implementation by now) that filters out the blue light at software/rendering level, it's not perfect but you do instantly feel the comfort it brings to your eyes. Been using f.lux for over 10 years and it also helps alot with going to sleep at night. When it's off your eyes/brain thinks that they are in daytime / broad daylight, when it's on I fall asleep 2 or 3 times faster than without.

The benefit of software such as f.lux and Gnome Nightlight is that they turn themselves on at night and off in the morning. It seems like the OP wants to remove blue light at all times, in which case should be handled through your monitor settings. A software solution would be unnecessary.

The biggest problem I have with it is that everything looks so much worse that I just wind up turning it off all the time.

Is this so seriously a threat to vision that it's worth it? I don't have the sleeping issues with screens some people seem to report, so I wasn't really willing to commit to it over that.

> The biggest problem I have with it is that everything looks so much worse that I just wind up turning it off all the time.

Change the settings. What you should do is take a sheet of paper and put it next to your screen. Then match your screen's white to the sheet. It's only a bit less blue. There's no need to set everything dark orange.

Okay, but that's a trade-off, you're still getting a fair amount of blue light through in that case. How much less blue light do you want? What's optimal for minimizing eye damage if that's a significant risk?

You don't want to eliminate all blue from your life. Decreasing it is good enough. What's the point of making your computer screen red if the minute you step outside in the sun you lose any benefit?

Make sure you change it to the "Slow: Natural Timing" transition speed so the shift is gradual. The faster speeds (which I believe are default) are jarring and too easy to notice.

Also Alt + page up/down to adjust brightness without affecting colorshift.

You can wear glasses that filter blue light.

The article mentions wearing them outside, but they work inside as well.

I wear them, and they provide other benefits for me as well (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16529054#16531413)

So I used to have glasses with a blue blocker filter on them - I absolutely hated every second of wearing them. Literally everything appeared yellow through them - my screens, sheets of paper, even snow looked like it had been peed on - awful. I mean, it's certainly not surprising - they did block blue light after all. But I wore them for 3 months and then marched back to the optician to have them replaced with normal lenses. And the optician has promised that the effect would be very subtle and hardly noticeable in daily use - well, maybe I'm particularly sensitive to it, but the effect was very noticeable to me.

My new eyeglasses have a coating that reflect blue light. They absolutely do NOT shift the color spectrum. You can't tell the coating is there. Perhaps it's newer or different tech. Look into it.

I just don't understand how that could possibly work - it doesn't matter if the glasses absorb or reflect blue light - as long as it doesn't reach your eyes, anything that is normally white will look yellow, as you're not seeing the blue component. You can't filter/reflect blue light and still see it.

Colour perception is not that simple. The visual cortex compensates. It's the same sort of compensation that means that you see the same colours for objects under artificial lighting and in sunlight, even though spectral analysis will show them not to be.

Yup. I don't know how else to explain it. Trust me, I'm very sensitive to color temperature changes. I have 4 pair of eyeglasses I rotate through every day. Only 2 of them have the latest anti-blue coating. You simply cannot see it. I don't know what product it is, but a good example description from Zeiss:

https://www.zeiss.com/vision-care/en_us/products/coating-col...

Are you talking about the coating opticians are pushing for "computer glasses" now in the US?

I have that, and while it is subtle, I definitely can tell it is there. It doesn't ruin general color perception, unlike many obviously yellow/brown lenses. But, it definitely alters the world to have a slight yellow tinge, a bit like you can get from the haze caused by a distant dust storm or wild fire.

It doesn't bother me, but I am aware of it. I actually prefer brown sunglasses and photochromatics because what is marketed as "gray" often looks sickly purple to me.

Judging by the relative light intensities of daylight and computer screen light, I would say it will be sufficient to close your eyes for 6 minutes when you are outside on a sunny day to offset 10 hours of computer use.

Maybe dark adaptation can change that, but I haven't found anything about that upon quick unprofessional examination of [0].

[0]: http://twin.sci-hub.tw/6979/4112e16f7195f7f33cd3e861c6345df0...

I've been wondering if GB-R LED backlit displays help? I haven't seen any reviews which compare the LED spectrum vs a standard white (blue)LED backlit display, but it might be something of interest.

Examples of a GB-R LED backlit display include the NEC PA302W, so they aren't common.

Well at least a start is to use software like f.lux that reduces the blue levels on the screen. There are also over screen filters and yellow tinted glasses that can filter the blue light.

It sounds like one should use it permanently, and not just at night. But the real problem is the spectral composition of the synthetic white light on screens. Now I want fluorescent backlights back.

Is there any reason to think that narrowband blue is worse than broadband blue? It makes for poor CRI when used as a light source but if the display blue is near the peak sensitivity frequency for blue it should result in slightly less total power being delivered to the eye than an equivalent blackbody spectrum white light.

Maybe total power isn't what matters and peak sensitivity is also where peak damage is.

Android has a blue light filter, I haven't turned it off yet.

I turned it on recently, mostly just to experiment and see how annoying the difference would be. It was subtle enough that I just left the filter on.

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