Manufactures make today’s monitors to be energy efficient but this is not always healthy
Use this 3 simple tests to find out if your monitor is good and healthy for your eyes

1. The Blue light Test

Blue light emitted from computer monitors causes digital eye strain, macular degeneration and sleep problems (read more)

To fix this set Iris to Sleep or Biohacker type

See the full Blue light Test

Test for Blue light

2. The PWM flicker Test

To save energy on low brightness modern monitors constantly turn ON and OFF hundred times per second (read more)

Our brain is slow and we don’t perceive this but our eyes get tired of adjusting to the different light

To fix this set your monitor Hardware brightness to the MAX and control the brightness with Iris

See the full PWM flicker Test

Test for PWM flicker

3. The Subpixel flicker Test

Behind our monitor, there are small elements called liquid crystals. These movements cause the so-called subpixel flicker (read more)

To fix this set Iris to Reading, Sleep or Biohacker type

See the full Subpixel flicker test

Test for Subpixel flicker

The post 3 Simple Ways to Test if your Monitor is Good for your Eyes and Health appeared first on 💡👨‍💻 Iris - Software for Eye protection, Health and Productivity 🛌👀.

The test below is based on a simple moving line on your screen.

You need to test your monitor at MAX hardware brightness and at MIN hardware brightness.

By hardware brightness, I mean to change the brightness from your monitor or laptop buttons.

PWM flicker test

Below you can see a white line moving really fast.

 

You can open this in your own browser TestUFO Blur Trail test.

We will use this to determine if your monitor has PWM flicker or no at both max and min brightness.

I will tell you what to look for but first a little intro on

What is PWM flicker?

PWM flicker is a cheap way that manufacturers use to control the brightness of the screen by adding some breaks without light.

Basically, on a given interval your monitor is OFF then after some milliseconds ON again.

Our brain is slow and we don’t perceive this but we get huge eye strain and eye pain from this.

This is one of the main reasons why our eyes hurt in front of the computer.

Because of this constant ON and OFF of the backlight our eyes contract all the time like this

This is why PWM flicker causes so much eye strain and is undesirable.

Most monitors flicker only when the brightness is lowered so when the hardware brightness is at 100% there is no flicker.

This is why my recommendation when you download Iris is to set your hardware brightness to the MAX and control the brightness with Iris.

Iris uses another method to control the brightness which doesn’t cause eye strain and eye pain.

What to look for?

Depending on how you see the moving line you can determine if your monitor uses PWM to control the brightness.

If your monitor doesn’t use PWM you will see a smooth moving line like this

You can test this by setting your hardware brightness to 100%.

When your hardware brightness is set to 100% your monitor doesn’t use PWM in all cases and you should see this smooth line.

Now set your hardware brightness to the minimum possible value.

If your monitor uses DC dimming instead of PWM the test line should look smooth like this

If your monitor uses PWM to control the brightness you will see multiple lines on the screen separated by some space like this

What to do if my monitor uses PWM?

1. Set your monitor Hardware brightness to 100% using your monitor buttons.

2. Use Iris to control the brightness without PWM

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In this article, I want to show you how you can test if your monitor emits blue light.

To check if your monitor emits blue light click the image below to open it in a new tab.

This will open an animation which switches from blue to black.

To check if your monitor emits both blue and green light click the image below.

This will open an animation which switches from the combination of blue and green to black.

What to observe?

Ideally, if your monitor doesn’t emit blue or blue and green light you shouldn’t see a change in the color.

You should only see black square without any change of the color or hue like this

How to block all blue light?

Most blue light filters whether they are glasses, software or physical filters will not block all blue light.

Some of the time this is intentional because they only block part of the blue light spectrum or the goal is the screen to look more normal.

When all blue light is blocked the screen will look really green or really red.

When part of the blue light is blocked the screen will look yellow or orange.

Blue light filter Glasses

If your glasses look like the image above there is a high chance that they don’t do anything to block the blue light from your screen.

To block all blue light you probably will need some glasses with a red tint

Most of the effective blue light blocking glasses look like this.

In reality, however, this will also block all blue light and all green light.

This makes it really strange for me why nobody manufactures glasses with a green tint which will block all blue and red light

This will be interesting to test but if you only need to block the blue light you need some deep yellow or a little orange tint like this

So test your glasses with the test pictures at the beginning of this article.

If you see a black square at the first image then your glasses block all blue light.

If you see a black square at the second image then your glasses block both blue and green light.

Blue light filter Software

Software solutions by default will make the screen more orange which will block part of the blue and part of the green light.

Even from my experience if a person hasn’t heard of the bad effects of blue light he will probably not like the red screen at first.

Even to this day I still don’t block all the blue light from my screen because this makes my screen a little uncomfortable.

Same is true with the glasses. If all blue light is blocked everything will look red.

So be it Iris, f.lux, Redshift or any other software for eye protection and sleep improvement they will usually use 3400K at night by default which is half of the blue light.

You may notice that at 3400K there is still blue light visible

This is still helpful and I have talked to a lot of users about what they prefer and orange screen helps with eye strain and eye pain a lot.

The goal of Iris is to be eye protection software first and sleep improvement tool second.

I believe eye problems are way worse than sleep problems because you can fix your sleep just by cutting the computer usage at night.

Blocking all blue

However, if you really want to biohack and improve your sleep you need to go to 1900K or bellow.

1900K is the first value which will block all blue light and your screen will look deep orange.

This is why in the latest versions f.lux tries to set the color temperature to 1900K by default.

They are trying to force people to learn to remove all blue light for best sleep.

While you may notice that the first versions of f.lux don’t even have this option in the sliders.

There are a couple of differences in the different blue light blocking software products.

Iris operates at % of blue light + showing the color temperature at the upper right corner.

F.lux uses color temperature + showing light sources types.

For example in f.lux Halogen means 3400K while Candle means 1900K.

Basically, if you want to remove all blue light from your screen you want to strive for 1900K or Candle.

If you have trouble with the K values see this link What are the K values?

Everything bellow starts to cut also the green light which the latest medical researchers point that also have some effect on our sleep.

Blocking all blue and green

So if you really want to improve your sleep you also need to cut all green light at basically set Iris blue light to 0%

Notice how when all blue light and all green light is blocked how the screen is deep red.

You can achieve the same thing by using Sleep or Biohacker type.

Blue light physical filters

I will not go into too many details about the filters you place on your monitor because the logic is basically the same as with the glasses.

You need a red filter to block all blue and green light.

You need a yellow filter to block all blue light.

If you look at the picture above you need the second or the third filter.

This will block all blue light or all blue and green light.

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If you learned how to improve your sleep and feel less eye strain

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If this doesn’t work use and if you want to share this image on your website later use the link below

IrisTech.co – LCD Subpixel Flicker Test

On most monitors, this test should work but in order for your eyes to see the effect more clearly, you may need a black background

In this case right click the link above and click and click Open Link in New Tab from the menu

If you don’t see any visible flicker or pulsations with the first test, set your Browser to Fullscreen mode and open the second test in a New Tab

IrisTech.co – LCD Subpixel Flicker Test with Bigger Black Background

What to watch for?

One of the eleven boxes may flicker slightly

Observe for up and down movement or a pulsation of the box

What to do about it?

If you don’t see any noticeable movement you are really lucky

If your monitor also has Blue light control and doesn’t use PWM for controlling the brightness you Iris can help you with automation of the blue light and the brightness

However, if you see movement or pulsation in one of the boxes Iris is a total must for your eye health.

There are 2 ways in Iris to fix the Subpixel flicker

Blue light to Zero

One is to set Blue light to 0%, there is preset type in Iris called Sleep type which can do this

Biohacker type should also fix the issue and will invert the colors to reduce the light emitted from the monitor even more

Making the screen Grayscale

You can also fix this problem by making the screen Grayscale

In Iris, there is Reading type which will do exactly this

It will also reduce the blue light and brightness automatically

Test again

Now if you try again with any of the methods above you should not see any flicker or pulsation in the image

Here are photos from my Iris

Sleep

Biohacker

Reading

Tell Friends

If you liked this article and you learned new things about why we feel eye pain in front of the monitors

If you want more and more people to learn about this

If you want your friends to protect themselves from the monitor harmful rays and emissions

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The post How to test my LCD monitor for Subpixel Flicker? appeared first on 💡👨‍💻 Iris - Software for Eye protection, Health and Productivity 🛌👀.