HI All Im just getting back into trading fulltime. I gave my old trusted Sony 17 in crt monitors away and replaced them with widescreen LCDs. The eyestrain is overwhelming. The suggested resolution on these monitors is 1440 x 900. I prefer the 800 x 600 of the crts. Ive tried turning down the brightness, contrast and color all the way down and its still painful. It feels just like staring at a flashlight. I use a Matrox Parhelia video card. I was wondering if it could be the widescreen format? I can see how this might be nice for watching movies or playing games but for actually reading might be detrimental. I was browsing the internet and came across some monitor filters by 3m has anyone used them? There is also some glasses on the web especially made to reduce light and glare. Anyone use these? thanks
Strange, LCDs have been a godsend to my eyes vs the CRTs of yore. Try adjusting the brightness. Although I keep mine on full, many prefer much lower brightness settings.
Remember how some folks used to get headaches from CRT because they were especially sensitive to flicker? LCD has the inverse problem - the way the image is held on the screen for a long time can cause eyestrain for a small percentage of people. It's not as weird as it sounds at first - there is nothing in the natural world that looks like an LCD! Could also be a lack of ambient light - LCDs can be 5x the brightness of an older CRT.
Interesting...anyone else use those Gunnar shades? I wish I could try em on to see how they work but apparently, they have no retailers in or around Chicago
I have the eyestrain problem too. My eye doc said that 70% of people's eyes focus behind the screen, 20% focus in front of the screen, and 10% actually focus on the screen. If you have astigmatism like me, that really wreaks havoc on your eyes. I use glasses with the anti-glare and it really helps a lot.
Have you tried changing the colors in your charts? There's another recent thread around with several suggestions - I think they said 'eggshell' was the best for the eyes. Because I can't handle the white (or black) backgrounds, most of my charts are either green or a blue/gray. In addition, all LCDs are not created equal. I recently replaced one of my older units with a Viewsonic, although the description called it something other than a TN, it definitely is one - complete with the poor angle-viewing (especially vertically). In addition, even turned to the lowest setting, the brightness hurts my eyes on anything with a white background. R
Try changing your refresh rate to around 70, 72, 75hz. Most people can't tell the difference on an LCD .... but if you do it will fix the flicker (too high it will start to look blurry). http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000558.htm
Nor should they. It doesn't matter what you set the refresh rate to in the software, the LCD's hardware converts it to 60Hz for display. That link is likely old and referencing CRT monitors.
LCDs don't flicker or have a defined refresh rate for the entire screen. Each pixel is static and can be updated individually. CRTs have to refresh the entire screen all the time.