> If you're staring at a 500nit screen at full brightness all day, you're probably not doing your eyes any good.
I'm kinda surprised how many people set their screens to 100 % brightness (300-400 nits for most screens) on their desktop. I find that blinding and very uncomfortable. That also seems to be a reason why people complain so much about IPS bleed and glow; using the screen near full brightness in a dark room for gaming or movies. Personally I find the "0 %" setting on some screens where that's around 50 nits too bright for that (ahem LG).
It’s hard to change the brightness of desktop monitors. Bafflingly, Windows and macOS don’t support adjusting their brightness the way they do for laptops, despite the existence of DDC/CI to do just that, so you’re left using third-party software if you know about it, or interacting with the awful OSD/buttons on the screen, which you’ll hardly want to do all the time.
For Windows users, I can recommend ClickMonitorDDC[1]. While the UI is a bit cluttered, it has a neat feature:
You can display the current brightness in the notification area, hover over it with your mouse, and use the scroll-wheel to adjust it. I really like it.
I actually think I tried this one yesterday, and from memory it spammed my traybar with about 12 different icons. The UI isn't just cluttered, it's odd!
Still, it's a nice demonstration of what you can do with DDC, and just about anything is better than the crappy physical controls on monitors.
you can disable them in the settings. it gave me icons for brightness, contrast, saturation, and volume. I only care about setting brightness so I disabled the others
I remember when TV sets and monitors had dials to adjust brightness, contrast and volume. They became useless on TVs because remotes are better, but they'd still be very useful for monitors that stay all the time within reach of the user. Much better than menus.
I recently discovered MonitorControl[0], which is a Mac app that listens to your default brightness and volume keys and pushes updates to all connected monitors over DDC. Extremely happy with it.
I'll quote an HN discussion from a few weeks ago on why this isn't more prevalent.
>There is a problem with "cheap" monitors and DDC/CI: some of them use EEPROMs to store brightness settings, and this limits you to about 100,000 writes.
Worrying about this is the main reason we don't ship DDC/CI with f.lux. (I know that some more modern monitors use NAND and don't have limitations like this.)
I dunno. The OSD on Dells is pretty simple. You press the topmost button twice, up/down to adjust, lowest button to save and exit. Since my office has windows, I've been doing this two to four times a day on most days for years. Doesn't bother me too much (it's pretty quick though because I largely only use the 0-40 range, which is about 20-120 nits). On my LG it's even quicker, push the joystick back, then forward/back to change, push in or timeout to save and exit.
Some people say they'd like ambient light sensors, but I'm not sure I'd wanna use something like that. Sometimes I do find the changing brightnesses on mobile devices irritating.
Changing this directly in the OS would be a better UX, though.
That might work if you only have one display. But on more than one that gets tiresome real quick.
On linux I use ddccontrol to control the brightness on all displays at once (using a simple for loop in the terminal).
I plan to write a script for it that would allow me to bring up a dialog and enter brightness from just a shortcut, but this is good enough til that itch comes.
I'm sure there are alternatives to all operating systems.
I have a Dell U2415 which is great for this. You can create custom colour/brightness/contrast profiles and assign them to hotkeys. I have one nice bright one for dark terminals or when the sun's out, and a darker lower contrast one for when I have a bright white website or document to read and the office is a bit dimmer. It's two quick button presses to change between these presets.
I think I'd quite like something which adapted brightness and contrast to ambient light as well as the brightness and contrast of what's on screen. With mobile devices this can be a pain as you move around and in and out of shadows, but I feel it could work a lot better on a desktop display. The display could even have the light sensor on its back so it can work out what its backdrop looks like.
I haven't had a monitor in ~5 years, but the ones I owned had physical buttons for adjusting brightness/contrast/gamma/etc... Do new monitors come with no in-built controls?
I paid a significant markup for an Eizo monitor not because I care about the color accuracy and all that but for OSD where I don’t mind adjusting several times a day.
> I'm kinda surprised how many people set their screens to 100 % brightness
Not everyone knows that this impacts your eyes. Someone called me and asked if I know anything about glasses that would restrict blue light and make his eyes feel better. After telling a thing about f.lux, we ended ended up finding out that brightness was at 100%. He lowered to 50% and said: thank you, much better.
I've been staring at a screen for decades, but only fairly recently found out about the harm of blue light, and am using f.lux with the "soft light" effect.
Aside from blue light, is it bad for your eyes just because of the brightness level? Is there any kind of objective measure of how bright is "safe"? And if so, is there any way of knowing how many nits a monitor is emitting?
AIUI the problem is mostly the blue light. I can't imagine that becoming habituated to staring at a bright light is all that good either, but I don't know of any specific studies on that. It's also the kind of thing that only shows up statistically after twenty years, as a higher incidence of inability for the eye to accommodate to lower light levels etc. Nobody's going to look at a too-bright screen for a day or two and immediately notice a drastic difference.
Do you have blue eyes?. I do, and in summer i can't look at the ground without being blinded. Read somewhere that the lack of pigments lets more light through. Comes with the upside of seeing better when it is dark. I use redshift on all computers plus switch to a different colourprofile on my monitor at night. On mobile i use the nightmode all day.
I don't have blue eyes but when I was younger I can read in the dark and hate high brightness monitors. Now that my eyes are old I lost the ability to focus my eyes and need glasses and sometimes need the monitor to be brighter to help focusing.
I don't think I ever used 100% brightness on LED backlit displays. They're just too bright. Mine are currently sitting at 75%, and I had AOC monitors (with LG panels heh) that were too bright at even 50%.
Sadly, anything below 50-60% and I notice the PWM, sort of flickering, and it's really tiring - I know I'm not buying the most expensive stuff but I'd like them to use better backlight controllers.
Last time I talked with an eye doctor (some months ago) and he mentioned that the ideal brightness should match the one of the environment around. if it's darker your eyes work harder and if you are working without environment light (dark room) is bad because you blink less!
Screens that can go brighter are probably better for us, because it means we can use it in sunnier / brighter environments properly, with all the health benefits that sunlight can give us.
That's more of an argument for reflective/transflective screens. Trying to overcome both sunlight and reflections with a transmissive screen doesn't work very well, and only exacerbates the eye-health problem. Not great for battery life either. That's a lot of problems to be solved before there's even a chance that people would use their computers more outdoors, and even then the odds are slim. Maybe people should get outside away from their screens.
That's like saying that we shouldn't read books on the beach. You have to meet people where they are.
A secondary reflective screen on the outside of a laptop might be the better solution, but from what I remember reflective screens usually don't have good colors. The last TFT reflective screen I remember has been hard to find an outdoor picture of although.
> That's like saying that we shouldn't read books on the beach.
It's nothing like that. People do read books outside. They don't use laptops outside. (Statistically speaking.) "Meeting people where they are" means two very different things in those different contexts.
> reflective screens usually don't have good colors
Yes, you have to pick your tradeoffs. If you want an outdoor-viewable screen, that will probably mean some sacrifice in refresh time, resolution and/or color gamut. This is why the only place you do find reflective screens is dedicated e-book readers. Brighter transmissive screens are not a solution in this problem space, so this use case does not justify them.
I use my desktop display at 100% brightness because turning it down means its great color and contrast capabilities go to waste due to its traditionally backlit nature… it’s like downgrading my monitor to a cheaper model.
This effect isn’t nearly as strong on my phone’s OLED. With that, I can turn brightness down quite a long way and still have great color and contrast.
OLED/microLED desktop monitors can’t come soon enough.
I always used to set my monitor to 100% brightness, when I used glasses. I had an eye operation 2 years ago and from the first day I could tell that it was too bright. Normal prescription glasses have light filters that makes you not notice this type of things.
Same here. In the evenings and nights with warmwhite lighting 12% brightnes and 10% contrast, during the day usually between 25% to 33% and even during brightest direct sunshine at noon no more than 50%.
I'm kinda surprised how many people set their screens to 100 % brightness (300-400 nits for most screens) on their desktop. I find that blinding and very uncomfortable. That also seems to be a reason why people complain so much about IPS bleed and glow; using the screen near full brightness in a dark room for gaming or movies. Personally I find the "0 %" setting on some screens where that's around 50 nits too bright for that (ahem LG).