I have a different problem with LCDs. I still think they're too bright. With a CRT you could set everything to white on black and you had almost no light coming out of the screen. Also brightness meant brightness and you could turn it way down for when working in dim light or darkness.
Of course i'm talking about text work here.
Maybe when OLED monitors become affordable we'll go back to monitors that aren't basically a lamp shining into your eyes all day. At least the oled on my phone looks like it doesn't put out light where it shouldn't.
For gaming, i'm not latency sensitive, but then i don't play twitch shooters any more. I'm more the kind that buys mid-low range video cards and turns on the fps limiter where it's available.
I’d recommend adding bias lighting to your monitor. It won’t make the monitor less bright, but it’ll light up the wall behind your monitor so there’s less of a contrast between the wall and your monitor, which reduces eye strain.
I tried that but looked like too much effort. Instead, I never turn off the room lights any more when using monitors. Seems good enough since oled is coming.
In the age of video conferences, this will also improve your appearance a lot. Soft, indirect light coming from behind the camera… you just build your own softbox.
Yeah I have no idea why the lowest levels on monitors are so bright. Are there models that can go really low without the PWM flicker effect kicking in (that's another problem I have with monitors, I can notice the damn cheap PWM backlight)?
Laptop (and phone) displays don't seem to have this problem, the brightness goes really low...
I’ve always wished the Macbook’s lowest brightness setting was subdivided two or more times. It’s still too bright when I feel like reading in my dark room perhaps on the way to sleep. I have to use an app called Shady to cover the screen in a dimming overlay.
Interestingly, on my early 2015 13" MacBook Pro, the very lowest brightness setting seems to have no change in brightness on those last three subdivisions. Once I get down to one full "block" of brightness, option-shift-F1 moves the slider down in quarter-block increments but the screen gets no (perceptibly) dimmer until it shuts off entirely. All the other brightness settings have perceptible changes in brightness at every subdivision level.
Unfortunately it doesn't reduce the dimmest level on my MBP. The bottom 4 subdivisions look identical. Like level 0.25, 0.50, 0.75 and 1.00 are all the same brightness, only 1.25+ starts to get brighter.
The lowest level is still too bright at night. That's unfortunate.
However it does reduce the dimmest level of the keyboard illumination!
That's great. I always found the keyboard too bright at its lowest level at night, but some illumination at night would be helpful for obvious reasons. Now I can enjoy 3 subdivisions lower - thank you :-)
Most better monitors and everything targeted at office use does not use PWM for backlight brightness control.
LCDs have poor blacks because they're a filter put in front of a lamp, so to render black, they have to try and block as much light as possible, but our visual perception is logarithmic and adaptive, making them look quite bad. The workaround is to add bias light behind the monitor; it quite literally provides a bias for the eye to keep it inside a certain adaption range, which reduces the perceived poorness of dark tones. (It also is more ergonomic.).
Yes, there are a bunch of monitors now that do not use PWM for brightness control. And since PWM became known as a problem PWM rate is tested in professional benchmarks. So you definitely can get monitors that do not have that flicker, where the minimal brightness will also not be too high.
I am still waiting for a decent size e-ink screen (22"+) without backlight which should be enough for low-FPS stuff like backend coding, slack, terminal and text content web pages. Existing solutions are still too small - Dasung and Onyx Boox are 13.3" with HDMI.
How about a display that had a large e-ink screen plus a small LCD of maybe 2-4 lines at the bottom?
Go old school for editing. Use something like TECO or ed or Rob Pike, David Tilbrook, Hugh Redelmeier and Tom Duff's Unix version of QED [1].
The small LCD is for seeing the command you are currently typing and a little command history.
With those editors you entered editing commands but did not see the results until you asked for them. You'd tell the editor to show you the current line plus say 10 lines before and after. Then you'd give it commands to edit the current line, such as telling it to change the text "float" to "double", or telling it to insert a new line before the current line, and so on. When you had done enough changes that you needed to refresh your notion of the current state of the file, you'd ask it to show you again.
Even the older generation, slower e-ink screens would be fast enough for that kind of work.
Maybe instead of putting the small LCD display at the bottom of the e-ink screen, make it a separate unit that can attach to the e-ink screen or attach to the top of your keyboard or stand alone somewhere if you prefer.
Also programmers tend to type pretty fast after getting some experience. It's disconcerting enough when code completion slows down the editor, not sure i could stand a screen that can only refresh every full line.
It is only color coding one may miss, although it is going to change with faster color eink panels. There is a still a lot of other ways to mark syntax: font, borders, underlines, cursive, grascale tones, background inversion.
I suspect that people leaving LCDs at their eye-burning default brightness (looks great in a store demo competing against the lighting and other monitors, but not at all for long-term work) is at least part of the reason for all the excessively low-contrast websites.
Nocturne would let you invert your entire screen, then shift it to monochrome (ideally red). Obviously useless for gaming or color work, but I’ve not run across anything since that’s so great for late night text work across the whole OS.
I've never seen Nocturne but on Windows 10 inverted colors+night shift works well (IIRC has an option for grayscale, too). On Linux you can achieve the same effect with xca+redshift (not sure about grayscale).
According to this youtube video [0], LG's OLED TVs work well as a monitors, at least the 48 inch one. Can't vouch for the quality of that channel though, and it is a sponsored video.
Regarding size for programming, I use a 40 inch monitor and wouldn't mind additional width.
I would usually agree with them - but I finally feel like I have just about enough height with my 40 incher. Not that having more would be harmful, but I'm worried that the webcam on top would start to look weird if it was higher.
VA panels have by far the blackest blacks of any LCD technology. Viewing angles and uniformity aren't as good as IPS, but they're the best option if you care about contrast.
An OLED HDR1000 10-bit display can go from 0 to 1000 peak nit brightness with 10 bits per channel of color differences. Is that not good enough for you? It’s better than we’ve had for a long time with our 5 or 8 bit monitors that peak at like 250 nit.
Of course i'm talking about text work here.
Maybe when OLED monitors become affordable we'll go back to monitors that aren't basically a lamp shining into your eyes all day. At least the oled on my phone looks like it doesn't put out light where it shouldn't.
For gaming, i'm not latency sensitive, but then i don't play twitch shooters any more. I'm more the kind that buys mid-low range video cards and turns on the fps limiter where it's available.