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by oblib 2016 days ago
I bought a monitor with a "Low Blue Light" button (it's a "BENQ" brand). I didn't buy it because of that feature and had never even heard of it before.

My first reaction was thinking it was kind of ugly so initially I didn't leave it on but after a month or so I noticed my eyes were getting strained so I tried it.

It is ugly, but it makes a big difference. Now, when I turn off the Low Blue Light mode I can instantly feel the strain on my eyes. The picture is gorgeous but it's too bright and intense for work. Since I use several monitors I manually adjusted the others to reduce the blue.

The biggest downside is selecting colors for design work. The Low Blue Light screws that big time, but after comparing how different colors look on different monitors I decided not to worry about that too much because I have no control over that at all.

1 comments

Blue light has no effect on eye strain[1]. The sky has about 100x the blue light emissions than your screen. It might be a great placebo effect, or maybe it just decreases brightness of the screen.

[1] https://www.aao.org/eye-health/tips-prevention/blue-light-di...

Had you really considered what I wrote you wouldn't have missed this important bit: "when I turn off the Low Blue Light mode I can instantly feel the strain on my eyes. The picture is gorgeous but it's too bright and intense for work."

So, the feature also dims the brightness, and I did this with my other monitors too so they matched the BENQ monitor I said has this feature.

But it's more fun to be dismissive, right?

Why not just lower the brightness? Why mention blue light at all? It seems like you're just backtracking your comment.
I think this is something people commonly conflate.

These two things are true: 1. screens cause eye strain, 2. screens make it harder to sleep because of blue light. People then mistakenly interpret this as "screens cause eye strain because of blue light".

It's a bit frustrating how many blue light filters advertise themselves as reducing eye strain, exploiting this misconception.

True; blue light concerns are not related to eye strain:

https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/blue-light-ha...