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Comment by loceng | Hacker News Reader

If anything there's individual anecdotal evidence - people able to compare for themselves how their eyes feel using an eink screen vs. backlit; "better for eyes" I believe isn't meant in relation to physical effects (which may exist) but primarily for psychological/biological impact - including sleep patterns, etc.

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Yes there is lots of research: https://www.nvisioncenters.com/education/screen-time-and-you... and https://www.uabmedicine.org/-/eye-health-in-the-digital-age-...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24386252 (from 2013) talks about LCD vs E-ink, and determines backlit LCD induces eyestrain (as measured by blinks per second and self reported visual fatigue) at a higher level, and that the E-ink Paperwhite has a profile similar to paper.

My eyes used to hurt from staring at my screen. It got a lot better after turning down the brightness to ~15%. With the same strategy I can comfortably read in bed on my iPad with the added benefit of colors and 120Hz. I recommend trying this if eink feels much better to you. Another notable side effect is you might end up going back to light themes.

Anybody who thinks a non e-ink screen is comparable even at "low" brightness should try turning the screen brightness down to lower than 15% in a completely dark room and turning the screen away - you will see that you still essentially have a torch in your hands that you are shining constantly in your eyes when reading.

I have tried every option with smartphone screens,: low brightness, night light filters, dark themes and nothing short of paper is remotely as free of strain as e-ink hardware.

Of course if you're in a completely dark room any LCD is going to be bright. But in that scenario you can't use an eink screen either. The point is if there is some light, you can probably find a brightness setting such that your LCD is emitting about as much light as an eink display will reflect, making them (at least subjectively to me) equivalent.

I can turn my eink book on with enough backlight to read it and my wife next to me in bed won't notice. Even in total darkness. I haven't managed that with my phone at any brightness

Not really, I can read a book using the light of my phone displaying a black screen at minimum brightness.

Now OLED _might_ be able to fix things, but manufacturers don't provide low brightness settings for most screens at the moment (even though anything with a LED backlight could have almost arbitrarily low brightness), so I'm not particularly optimistic.

The example from that one guy that made a fake painting by matching light levels to a white wall was pretty convincing though, so I think it can be done it just isn't for some reason.

FYI on iOS you can use the accessibility settings (via the zoom filter, with zoom turned off and darkness turned to max) to lower the brightness beyond the normal limit.

I have this setting tied to triple-clicking the sleep button, so I can activate it easily in the morning or late at night.

Thank you so much for this comment. I can’t believe I didn’t know this, I’ve been inverting my colors & sometimes wearing cheap, non-polarized sunglasses at night — no more!

I had to fiddle with the settings quite a bit to get a 1x zoom w/ the filter, though.

This is a very little-known feature. I work in accessibility and have had an iPhone since day 1. But the only reason I know about this very well-hidden trick is that an Apple employee told me!

>that one guy that made a fake painting by matching light levels to a white wall

Do you happen to have a link to this? I remember reading the original post years ago, but I didn't save it and could never find it again.

I had to search for a bit but I managed to find it: https://www.claybavor.com/blog/a-canvas-made-of-pixels

It's been referenced on HN a few times: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

That's the one, thanks!

Dark theme works for me, lowering the the brightness doesn’t.

Got OLED?

One common source of eye strain is likely due to our eyes having to adjust to the inconsistent brightness of our workspaces.

Another solution you can use instead of or in addition to this is installing backlights and more area lighting. Provide more even lighting coverage throughout the room, and don't compute or watch TV in completely dark rooms. Anecdotally this works for me at least.

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