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Yes, you’re going off course there. Panel type can potentially make a difference, but panel manufacturer won’t. The backlight is a far more important thing to focus on. As are some of the suggestions in my previous post.
hey guys, im new here. im so confused with all those therms that are nowadays that i need some advice. i remember when LCD appeared for the first time, and people were replacing their CRT monitor by LCD. only thing i know was response time but be low or i will get some ghostery in the image. few years later i searched about LCD and plasma tvs. plasma was cleary better to me, cause it has more colors, 600hz and its not artificial as lcds and leds. so here i am looking for a gaming monitor now in 2017.
i used in the past years, LG, Lenovo(in notebook), HP(in noteboo), samsung, panasonic. now when i search about gaming monitors everyone praise asus and benq, that was 2 monitors that i never have. all those therms, TN Panels, IPS. led, backlight led, oled, all that is so confusing to me. my eyes get dry quick, i have to use collyrium twice a day. my get red with some red veins. i play videogames and use pc for more than 20 years, so that kinda ruined my eyes i think. or they are just sensible to some kinda of colors.i want to know, that does it matter for me(a gamer) with sensible eyes when i search for a monitor to play competitive games, single player games, watch movies, and use it for above 11 hours per day?
i want a 24 size monitor thats is available to buy or import to brazil.whats better for eyes, 1ms or 144hz? ips or tn panel? what about that low blue light, flicker free, pwm, god, there are so much therms that i dont know what to look for.
Hi ssssnake,
I have merged your thread with this one as there is relevant discussion and some of your questions are answered. Refer in particular to my initial post. There is also another (massive) thread on this topic.
As you can see there are many factors to consider. But everybody’s eyes are different. So what you need to do, I’m afraid, is try to find a monitor that fits as many boxes as possible for viewing comfort. And no matter how great your monitor is, there is no substitute for good viewing habbits, including sitting a sensible distance from the monitor, ensuring room lighting is appropriate, ensuring you take frequent breaks.
It would also help if you were more specific about the monitor models you’ve used and found uncomfortable.
I’ve got a complex scenario and hoping for some advice. Please bear with me on all the details.
1) I have a problem with one of my eyes. My eye is healthy but my vision doesn’t naturally converge for long distance like it should. This means that I have some difficulty adjusting to distance vision after performing close tasks like reading or computer work. It’s gotten worse over the last 10 years or so. When I have eye strain from my work as a programmer, it’s usually in the musculature around that eye. Low-quality screens, screens that use PWM or have a 60Hz refresh rate I can identify immediately because they “pull” on my eye.
2) I started to notice this in 2014. My new MacBook Air gave me headaches, but my 2012 MacBook Pro was fine. It made no sense to me, so I dismissed it for a long time, chalking the headaches up to stress, but as soon as I stopped using the Air, the headaches went away. Every laptop I’ve encountered that has been made after 2012 has caused the same problems for me. Laptops made before then feel cooler to me, and don’t “pull” on my bad eye.
3) Ultimately, however, hardware requirements being what they are with virtualization and IDEs, laptops have to be upgraded. When my 4G MacBook Pro couldn’t cut it any more, I scraped by with an 8G Thinkpad T510 for a year. The screen on the ThinkPad is terrible. It gives me pain immediately. But I connect it with a VGA cable to a BenQ EW2440L, and have no eye strain using the BenQ monitor for the display. I also become an avid redshift user, and filter out as much blue light as I can, toggling redshift off when I have to do color work.
4) At this point the 8G on the ThinkPad is beginning to be not enough. Knowing that the BenQ flicker-free display has been good to me, I went and did my research. I found this list: http://laptopmedia.com/top-laptop-pwm-ranking-rated-by-negative-impact-on-eyesight/ Dell support assures me that the Latitude E5570 does not use PWM. And indeed, when it arrives I can see by looking at the screen through my smartphone camera that there are no bands moving across the screen. Just like the BenQ monitor, it doesn’t have PWM.
5) I start to use the Latitude. My eyes hurt. “No problem,” I think, “I’ve got the hardware I need now. I’ll just plug it into the BenQ and work that way. I can deal with it to occasionally not be plugged into the monitor if I have to work out of my home office on occasion.” I plug into the BenQ and 20 minutes later have a raging headache in both eyes. It’s almost as though there’s some additional combined effect that is making the BenQ display even worse than the Latitude. What could cause that?
6) I unplugged from the BenQ for the evening. I run linux, and I’ve been using xrandr to bump up the refresh rate on the Latitude, and 200Hz feels much, **much** better on my eyes than 60Hz (yes, the Windows install hurts my eyes just as much or more, since I’ve made several adjustments to fonts and font smoothing on this partition). But it’s still driving me crazy that this PWM-free screen didn’t solve my problems. What else can I try, with the BenQ and the Latitude? What other settings should I be tweaking or verifying? Or do I need to send this laptop back and look for a different profession? Between refresh rate, PWM, blue light, what is it that’s triggering my eye so much?Grateful for any advice.
As this thread which I’ve merged yours with demonstrates, there are many factors which can contribute to eye strain or fatigue on monitors. Everybody’s eyes are different and as you’ve identified this is a complex issue that may not have one single cause.
Given what you’ve described, it actually sounds like it has nothing to do with PWM. It could instead be something to do with motion sensitivity, which would make sense if you find increasing the refresh rate of your laptop screen helps and also why you would find the BenQ particularly troublesome. It is a relatively slow 60Hz VA model. You might it beneficial to explore other panel types and perhaps those with a higher refresh rate as well.
@ PCM2, thanks for your response. What’s really got me confused is that the BenQ was really helpful with both the MacBook Air and the Thinkpad T510. I could plug the ThinkPad into it and use it without pain. I assumed that that would be a fallback for me if this new laptop monitor couldn’t be used for long periods of time. Does anyone have any ideas about configuration settings on the BenQ or the laptop that might be causing this effect, making the monitor less comfortable?
In that case, it’s probable that the laptop that you’re finding problematic is using a Limited Range RGB signal whereas the others are using a Full Range RGB signal. There is more information on that in this article. However; it is written from the perspective of Nvidia and AMD desktop GPUs. Your laptop would either have a mobile GPU, which are more restrictive in their settings, or an Intel based solution. I’d advise using CRU (see the note at the top of the article) to try and set a custom resolution and see if that improves things.
@ PCM2: Your post dated 5-5-2017 was a godsend. I read the article to which you supplied a link, and there I found the answer to my problems with my Samsung C32F391 monitor. The NVIDIA control panel has a setting, which I had never noticed (I often fail to scroll down screens, especially if it doesn’t look like there is anything more). It changes the gamut range from 16 to 235 to 0 to 255. I changed it to display the full gamut, and all my troubles disappeared.
Strange thing is, it made no noticeable change in a screen shot (before and after) but it made a HUGE difference in photos of the screen taken before and after. The “washed out” appearance was gone. Everything looks natural now. The background color of most apps is now a faint pink, which is OK by me (I think I have the red cranked up a bit too high on the monitor, but I like the rendering of photographs, so I may just leave it alone). I still have black crush, but not quite as bad as before. On Lagon’s black test, the top row is almost invisible, but careful inspection shows there are faint gray squares. The first one is so pale it is difficult to see at all, but it is there. The other four on that row are visible but faint. The second row is strong.
I can still easily see the slider on the Spotify screen, which was always almost impossible to find with the Sharp HDTV monitor which must have had a terrible case of black crush.
Whites (like paper in Word or other document apps) are strong and appear at least close to D65. If I hold bright white inkjet paper (96% brightness) in front of a white on the monitor, it looks slightly cream-colored in comparison, which tells me it is warmer—as it should be, since the light source is a strong D50 commercial LED light.
Do you think I should do any more tweaking with this setup?
Ah yes, correcting the colour signal is crucially important and can make an absolutely massive difference. I’m really glad this has been the case for you! I did actually mention this passively in one of my earlier replies to you (https://forum.pcmonitors.info/topic/are-va-panels-my-only-bet-if-im-particular-about-my-blacks-and-contrast/page/2/#post-42835) with respect to asking whether you could see an ‘output dynamic range’ option. But I got sidetracked and completely forgot to follow up with that. If I had, I would’ve specifically directed you to that article so I’m really glad you found it.
It’s normal for some of the inital squares in the Black Level test of Lagom to blend in well if the monitor is properly configured for ‘2.2’ gamma (the common target for general desktop usage). But with VA models you will typically find some of the other squares on the first row less distinct than you might like as well. ‘Black crush’, exactly as you say, which can be confirmed if those same squares appear much more visible if viewed from a slight angle. It sounds as if things are set up in a much more satisfactory way for you now, with the corrected colour signal, so I wouldn’t deem any further tweaking necessary. The next step might be calibration with a colorimeter, if you desire, but that is not essential by any means for your purposes.
This new Samsung CH711 monitor sounds enticing. BTW, the MSRP is not $519 as reported by at least one poster; whoever it was must be a sucker for merchandising gimmicks. It is $520 ($519.99). Were they going to spend that extra penny all in one place? But this animal has quantum dot technology, just like my Samsung SUHD TV, which has fabulous color. I think it also has HDR, although they don’t call it that (they call it “Mega” dynamic contrast ratio). With 2560 by 1440 pixels, it should do better at displaying text than a 1080 monitor. The icons, etc., would have 75% of the lineal dimensions of those on a 1080 monitor, and I could probably live with that. I think I’ll wait until the price settles down a bit; the monitors are scheduled to begin delivery in June. If past history is any guide, the online price should run around $390 to $400 before many moons have elapsed. I’m a sucker for new technology, and I can afford it—so why not?
Why not indeed. Although just a note, the monitor doesn’t support ‘HDR’ nor does it claim to. Proper HDR is very different to Dynamic Contrast. The former requires the display to simultaneously display very dark and very light content with high contrast levels (i.e. requires a special backlight array) whereas the latter is achieved over a passage of time. A monitor brightens the entire backlight for brighter content and darkens it for predominantly darker content but doesn’t account for the intricate variations at different sections of the image. It’s a crucial difference – you’ll see our comments about Dynamic Contrast in any of our reviews of monitors that feature it. That’s most monitors these days.
PCM2: Looks like I guessed wrong (wasn’t the first time; won’t be the last time either!). I find this lack a bit strange. Is it your opinion that HDR is not useful in a computer monitor? If it is useful—and it certainly sounds to me like it would be—then why are they not incorporating it in this new monitor series while still going to the trouble of using the Quantum Dot technology? Most of their SUHD TVs have this feature. (Mine does not have Quantum Dot but something they call “Active Crystal Color” technology. The picture is stunning.) If they made these TVs in a size small enough to use as a computer monitor, I might go that way. But they don’t. Anyway, the resolution is too high. 2560 by 1440 is as high as I want to go in a 32-inch monitor.
If they made 34-inch monitors, 2560 by 1440 would give me icons that were about 80 percent the size of what I have now (lineal; 64 percent in area). That would be ideal. Maybe I’ll just wait for them to do something like that. things seem to be swinging in the direction of bigger is better.
And if you think it is useful in computer monitors, I will also wait for true HDR in monitors before upgrading again. I can’t believe they left that out of the CH711.
There was a thread dedicated to HDR and its implementation on PC monitors. In short, proper implementation requires a complex and expensive backlight design, hence why it isn’t more widely adopted. ‘Quantum Dot’ on the other hand, at least in its current form, simply replaces the phospors of an existing LED backlight design. It’s much simpler and cheaper and serves primarily to enhance colour gamut – https://pcmonitors.info/articles/the-evolution-of-led-backlights/.
So yes, HDR is a ‘game-changer’ if done properly. But it won’t be for quite some time, with the exception of a few rather high-end screens. The capabilities of screens that can provide a proper HDR experience are in themselves very exciting. But again this isn’t something that’s going to compete with the likes of the CH711 in terms of price for several years I’d exepct.
PCM2: What is the difference between a “member” and a “participant”?
I think ‘participant’ is simply what ‘member’ was referred to on an older version of the forum software.
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