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Comment by chadgeidel | Hacker News Reader

I feel that modern LCD monitors are too bright. Typically I have mine set at 50% brightness. Adjusting environmental/ambient light is important too if you can. I try to adjust my desk/chair orientation that overhead lights are behind my head instead of in front of me (no line-of-sight light sources other than my monitors). I also use f.Lux (http://justgetflux.com/).

I'm not sure what combination of this list of things does the most good, but I rarely get eyestrain and I look at screens for 12+ hours per day.

Not sure if this matters, but I had LASIK surgery 7 years ago and ever since my eyes have been pretty sensitive to light (night vision FTW), so this is something I've been working on for a while now.

Edit: I am 40 years old, and have been looking at screens for long hours at least 10-15 years now.

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Indeed. But I'd describe it as modern LCDs have a default brightness that it likely too bright for most uses.

Manufacturers likely set this so that the colours 'pop' when being demoed (the same reason they sell/create/display glossy monitors, because they demo well).

Taking the brightness down almost never impacts usability, but I've found can significantly affect eye strain (that 'OMG, my eyeballs are hurting' feeling).

I totally agree with this. I usually turn my monitor brightness down to the lowest setting (my work monitor has been set this way for years). I've done the A/B testing on myself and find that I will develop something like a mild headache (probably eye strain) after a day of working at the default brightness. On my old LCD monitor the brightness would reset if power got disconnected so I did the experiment several times accidentally. My current monitor (Dell U3014) remembers the setting across power resets. I have my brightness control set to zero. It looks dim at first but after a few minutes it looks completely normal and you forget about it.

>(the same reason they sell/create/display glossy monitors, because they demo well).

They create very few of them. The few they do create are because some of us want monitors that are not intentionally blurry. I am capable of controlling the lighting in my environment. I do not want my monitor to deliberately make everything fuzzy just to avoid a glare problem I don't have.

Similar here - my cube is as dark as I can get it (which really just means the lights directly overhead are off), and my monitors are at the minimum brightness setting. My screens glow, guys. I don't need to light them up externally.

Any reference on working with lights on vs off? I've seen 1 or 2 people do that in office. I've been told that lack of ambient light might cause more strain. Is there any study supporting what you've said?

Only my own anecdotal study here. It's not total darkness, because I'm in a well-windowed cube farm (along a far wall that has no windows, though), so there's still a bit of ambient light.

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