Can someone explain why it would be worse to look at a cell phone in the dark? It's emitting the same blue light (or less, if the display gets dimmer) as it is in a bright environment. Why is that light more harmful in a dark environment?
It is this principle that camera apertures are based on.
Now if you have your pupil wide open in a completely dark environment and put a 100% brightness screen at ~10cm of your eyes, what do you expect will happen ? Our eyes are made for nature, that means day and night, now we have technology that is akin to a handheld sun and you use this at night at 10cm of your face, our eyes are simply not equipped to handle this.
Indoors, I use about 30% brightness. As the day gets dimmer, that slides down to about 25%. If I'm reading something in bed, I start at about 10% and as my eyes adapt, go down to 1%. When I'm finding it hard to keep my eyes open, I take that as my signal to go to sleep. Am I ridiculously unusual?
You aren't unusual for trying to prevent your eyes from being harmed. If you were, an article which helps inform on the topic of eye care would not be popular.
I absolutely notice a blue refraction from car headlights when driving at night. I keep thinking I'm seeing a police light from somewhere. It's fine, just interesting. Well, after looking at a few lens coating websites, and realizing my lenses reflect blue light back at me if I have a light source to reflect, they're obviously blocking blue light -- cool!
I've never been much for f.lux style color shifting, I HATE the obviously inaccurate colors. I also wonder if we'll find that some of these technologies don't work nearly as well as a blue filter, and that perhaps the light just LOOKS less blue.
But I'm sure glad to have glasses that now block some blue light. Also, it validates my desire to keep the blinds open at work; I have LOTS of light coming into my cubicle area. Sometimes it's even a bit annoying but keeping my pupils small should help.
I never work in a perfectly dark room. My office is next to a window, both at home, and at work. The lights are on. Plus, all of these things help keep my pupils small which apparently helps prevent the blue light harm to begin with.
Why is it that you prefer the incorrect colors without flux to the incorrect colors with flux?
Sounds like you prefer cool color temperature which is no more correct than warm color temperature.
Colors appear to change dramatically under different lighting conditions, but we accept these changes as normal given context. Changing the white balance on your screen is no different. It's not inaccurate, it's just rendered as if in different lighting conditions.
We have the ability to adapt to different color temperatures and perceive the relative output, but we're still missing information when shifted from the full spectrum daylight we evolved with.
Consider a recorded rock song: if we gradually apply a low pass filter of increasing strength, the high frequencies will be cut. We'll still be able to hear and recognize the cymbals, for example, but the stronger the filter, the less accurate the output.
Just because we can recognize relative colors under different lighting conditions, it doesn't mean that they're still accurate when we remove information.
That is a really interesting distinction! Blue is a color derived by social consensus, but it is also a particular wavelength of photons. I'm curious about what's there if we dive in and examine what specific wavelengths of light (numerically) cause damage, and what is the overlap with what we typically consider the color blue. I'm sure it's not one to one.
I think some ultra-bright headlights are actually slightly blue.
I wonder how significant the difference is between pupil dilation while looking at a bright phone in a dark room and while looking at a bright phone in a bright room.
I personally can't have the lights off even if I'm watching a movie. Maybe because I was raised without TV, I can't sit still for more than 20 minutes watching entertainment before I feel the urge to do something productive like wasting time on the internet.
I prefer low light, not pitch black. Generally speaking I want my monitor to be the main focus. Same for TV; if I care about the viewing experience I dim the lights. I might even prefer pitch black honestly, but due to the reasons being discussed, the contrast is just too great.
> Don't you feel clumsy, sleepy and uncomfortable when everything is dark?
Nope
> How can anybody go more than 10 minutes without needing to use vision to interact with their surrounding environment?
Not sure, tbh. I imagine it has to do with not wanting to interact with the environment most of the time. Ie, what am I going to do with my banister? It's just sitting there.. why do I need to interact with it? Most of my house is the same way. If I'm doing X, rarely do I need to interact with the rest of the house or room.
Does it bother you that there are things behind your head that you can't see?
Eventually after like 6 hours in the dark and accidentally using just one eye for reading- eventually I started to see really trippy and weird visual noise in the dark areas of the room. I also noticed that if shone at the right angle- the pitch black areas of the room suddenly lit up, as though I was giving my over-exposed eye some kind of night vision, which is weird because you'd expect an oversaturated eye to be completely blind in the darkness.
Now this is all anecdotal, but reading screens in pitch black light has always felt bad for me. I don't understand people who insist on watching TV shows or movies in a fully pitch black room. I mean I get why school teachers and home theater enthusiasts do it- but for normal TV viewing, it just seems wrong to me.
Somewhat constricted. They're still more open that if they were in a fully lit environment, even more so in the sun.
The back camera usually has an IR blocking filter, but often the front camera does not. You can check by videoing an IR led (like from a remote control) with the front camera and seeing if you can pick up the flashing when you activate it.
To get a feel for this, point your cell phone at your desk area and take a picture (without HDR enabled). If you can't take a picture without over– or under–exposing the screen or the wall, then your setup is putting strain on the eyes.
Your camera's cell phone barely manages to hold approximately eight stops of latitude. Blowing out that pathetic dynamic range has no grounding in relation to any notion of "eye strain".
That's precisely what makes it a decent tool for detecting lighting imbalance. Just because our eyes mask the issue with high perceptual dynamic doesn't mean it's not straining them.
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vitocassis...
It's not the easiest mode to find, but works.
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/pro-tip-dim-your-ios-sc...
From what i heard this is also why sunglasses that don't block UV light are worse than not having sunglasses at all.