You know, I was looking at our housemate Daniel’s desk the other day, and it is a bit like a museum of mid-two thousand tens technology. He has these three monitors that have somehow survived for a decade. He mentioned that one of them actually died recently and he had to swap out a capacitor just to keep it going. But it got us thinking about what happens when those old screens finally give up the ghost.
It is impressive they lasted that long, honestly. Most consumer electronics are not exactly built for a ten-year lifespan anymore. But Daniel sent us a really interesting prompt about this. He is looking at the current landscape of display technology and wondering how much has actually changed regarding eye strain. Specifically, he is curious if e-ink is ever going to hit the mainstream for monitors, and whether these modern blue light filters built into displays are actually doing anything or if it is just marketing.
I am Corn, by the way, and I am here with my brother, the man who probably knows more about display sub-pixels than is healthy for a single human being.
Herman Poppleberry, at your service. And yes, I have spent a fair amount of time staring at spectral power distribution graphs lately. It is a fascinating field because we are finally moving past the era of just making things brighter and higher resolution. We are starting to actually care about the biological impact of these light boxes we stare at for eight to twelve hours a day.
It is a massive issue. I think nearly every knowledge worker I know complains about dry eyes, headaches, or that weird blurry vision you get at five in the afternoon. So, Herman, let us start with the mainstream stuff. If someone like Daniel goes out today in twenty twenty-six to buy a standard L-C-D or O-L-E-D monitor, they are going to see a lot of stickers promising eye care and blue light reduction. Is that actually a hardware feature now, or is it just the same thing as that night shift mode on our phones?
That is a great place to start because there is a big distinction between software-level filtering and hardware-level optimization. In the old days, and by that I mean even five or six years ago, blue light filtering usually just meant a software toggle that turned the screen an aggressive shade of orange. It was basically just pulling the blue out of the R-G-B mix.
Right, which makes everything look like you are viewing the world through a glass of apple juice. It is not exactly ideal for color-accurate work or even just enjoying a movie.
Exactly. And the problem with that software approach is that you are often just crushing the blue channel, which reduces your contrast and can actually make you strain harder to read text. But modern monitors, especially the ones with certifications like T-U-V Rheinland Eye Comfort two point zero or Eyesafe two point zero, are doing something much smarter at the hardware level. They are actually shifting the peak of the blue light spectrum.
Wait, explain that. How do you shift a spectrum without changing the color?
So, the light we worry about is specifically high-energy visible light, or H-E-V. This usually peaks around four hundred fifteen to four hundred fifty-five nanometers. That is the really punchy blue that is linked to retinal stress and suppressed melatonin production. What modern hardware-level low blue light technology does is use different L-E-D phosphors to shift that peak blue emission from four hundred fifty nanometers up to about four hundred sixty or four hundred sixty-five nanometers.
So it is still blue light, but it is a less aggressive version of blue light?
Precisely. By moving the peak just a little bit further away from the ultra-violet end of the spectrum, you reduce the high-energy impact on the eye while still maintaining a relatively accurate color balance. The screen does not look orange. It looks normal, but the actual photons hitting your eye are slightly less energetic. It is a much more elegant solution than just putting a digital filter over the image.
That is interesting, but I have always wondered if blue light is the actual culprit for eye strain. I mean, we get way more blue light from standing outside in the sun for ten minutes than we do from a monitor in an hour, right?
You are hitting on the biggest misconception in the industry, Corn. You are absolutely right. The sun is a blue light monster compared to a computer screen. Most ophthalmologists will tell you that the strain we feel, what they call Computer Vision Syndrome, is not necessarily caused by the blue light itself. It is caused by three other things: flicker, glare, and what we call the accommodation reflex.
Okay, let us break those down. Flicker seems like something we solved back in the days of cathode ray tube monitors. I remember those old C-R-Ts used to have that visible pulse if the refresh rate was too low. Are modern L-C-Ds still flickering?
They are, but in a way that is invisible to the naked eye. It is called Pulse Width Modulation, or P-W-M. Most monitors control their brightness by turning the backlight on and off very rapidly. If you want fifty percent brightness, the backlight is off half the time. Your brain averages it out so it looks dim, but your pupils are actually reacting to that rapid-fire pulsing. It can lead to massive headaches and eye fatigue because your eye muscles are constantly trying to adjust to light that is technically strobing at hundreds or even thousands of hertz.
So when a monitor says it is flicker-free, what are they actually doing?
They are using direct current dimming, or D-C dimming. Instead of pulsing the light on and off, they just lower the voltage to the L-E-D-s so they actually emit less light continuously. It is much harder to engineer at low brightness levels because L-E-D-s can get finicky with color accuracy when the voltage drops, but it is significantly better for your eyes. If Daniel is looking for a new monitor, flicker-free or D-C dimming is actually way more important than blue light filtering.
That is a huge tip. I feel like the marketing always leans into the blue light thing because it sounds more scientific, but the flicker is what actually makes your brain feel like it is melting after four hours of spreadsheets. Now, what about the glare and the accommodation reflex you mentioned?
Glare is simple but overlooked. Most modern laptops have those beautiful, glossy glass screens. They look great in a dark room, but in an office with overhead lights, your eye is constantly trying to focus on two things at once: the text on the screen and the reflection of the light bulb behind you. That constant refocusing is exhausting. This is why professional monitors still use matte coatings.
And the accommodation reflex?
That is just the physical act of your eye muscles tensing to focus on something close. Human eyes were designed to look at the horizon, looking for predators or food. We are not evolved to hold a fixed focus at twenty inches for eight hours. This is why the twenty-twenty-twenty rule is so famous: every twenty minutes, look at something twenty feet away for twenty seconds. It literally lets the muscles in your eye relax.
It sounds like we are trying to fix a biological problem with hardware, which leads us to Daniel’s other question. If the problem is that we are looking at a light box that is strobing and emitting high-energy light, why aren't we all using e-ink? I love my e-reader. I can read on that thing for hours and it feels like paper. Why can't I have a thirty-two-inch e-ink monitor on my desk?
Oh, the dream of the e-ink monitor. It is the holy grail for a lot of people. To understand why it is not mainstream, we have to look at how the technology actually works. Standard monitors are transmissive. There is a light in the back shining through a liquid crystal layer directly into your face. E-ink is reflective. It is electrophoretic.
Electrophoretic. That is a mouthful.
It just means it uses electricity to move physical particles. Imagine millions of tiny micro-capsules. Inside each one, you have positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles floating in a clear fluid. When you apply a charge, the black ones move to the top and the white ones move to the bottom, or vice versa.
So it is essentially like a physical painting that you are rearranging with magnets.
Exactly! And because it is physical particles, once they are in place, they stay there. You do not need any power to maintain an image. And more importantly, you do not need a backlight. You are looking at reflected ambient light, just like a piece of paper. This completely eliminates the flicker problem and the light-shining-in-your-eyes problem.
So what is the catch? Why hasn't Daniel replaced his three old monitors with e-ink versions?
There are three massive hurdles: refresh rate, ghosting, and color. Let us talk about refresh rate first. A standard monitor refreshes sixty times a second, or even one hundred forty-four times a second for gaming. E-ink, because it has to physically move particles through a fluid, is incredibly slow. In its high-quality mode, an e-ink screen might take half a second to fully refresh.
That would make a mouse cursor feel impossible to use. It would be like trying to navigate through a thick fog.
Exactly. You would move the mouse, and then a heartbeat later, the cursor would teleport to the new location. Now, companies like Dasung and Bigme have made huge strides here. They have developed fast refresh modes where they don't fully reset the capsules. They just do a quick, partial update. You can actually watch video on some of these modern e-ink monitors now, but the trade-off is the second hurdle: ghosting.
I have seen that on my Kindle. When I turn the page, I can sometimes see a faint shadow of the previous page.
Now imagine that on a computer screen where things are moving constantly. If you scroll down a webpage, the old text leaves these gray trails everywhere. To get rid of them, the screen has to do a full-flash refresh where it turns the whole screen black and then white. Doing that every few seconds is incredibly distracting for productivity work.
And then there is the color issue. Most e-ink is still grayscale, right? I know color e-ink exists, but every time I see it, it looks a bit washed out, like a Sunday newspaper comic strip from the nineteen nineties.
That is a perfect description. Color e-ink, like the newer Spectra six technology we are seeing in twenty twenty-six, has improved saturation significantly, but it still uses color filters or complex particle stacks. Because it is reflective, the light has to pass through the filter, hit the white particle, and bounce back through the filter again. You lose a lot of brightness. For a programmer or a writer, a grayscale e-ink monitor is actually great. But for anyone doing photo editing, web design, or even just browsing the modern, colorful web, it is a tough sell.
So, is it ever going to reach maturity for the mainstream? Or is it always going to be this niche product for people with severe light sensitivity?
I think we are seeing a fork in the road. E-ink is getting better. We are seeing faster waveforms and better color, but the physics of moving particles through fluid will always be slower than moving electrons through a crystal. However, there is a middle ground that I think is more likely to go mainstream: Reflective L-C-D, or R-L-C-D.
Wait, I haven't heard much about that. Is that what it sounds like? An L-C-D that does not have a backlight?
Yes. Imagine a standard L-C-D, but instead of a light in the back, there is a mirror-like substrate. It uses the ambient light in your room to illuminate the pixels. It has the speed of a normal monitor, so no ghosting and sixty-hertz refresh rates, but it has the eye-comfort benefits of e-ink because it is not shining light at you. Companies like Hannspree have been pushing this tech lately with their Eco-friendly Paper displays.
That sounds like the best of both worlds. Why don't I have one of those?
Because they are incredibly difficult to use in low light. If your room is not perfectly lit, the screen looks very dim. And because there is a mirror in the back, the viewing angles are often terrible. But for an office environment with good lighting, R-L-C-D could be a massive game changer. We are starting to see some tablets and smaller monitors using this, and I think that is where the mainstream eye-care market might actually head.
It is funny how we have spent forty years trying to make screens brighter and more vibrant, and now we are realizing that the ultimate goal might be to make them look like a piece of paper that does nothing.
It is the cycle of technology. We optimize for one thing until we realize we have broken something else. We optimized for clarity and color, and we accidentally broke our circadian rhythms and eye health. Now we are backtracking to find a balance.
So, let us get practical for Daniel and our listeners. If you are sitting there in twenty twenty-six, staring at a monitor from twenty sixteen, and your eyes are burning, what is the hierarchy of upgrades?
First, check your lighting. This is the zero-dollar fix. Most people have their monitors too bright for their room. Your monitor should match the brightness of a white piece of paper sitting on your desk. If the screen looks like a glowing lamp, it is too bright.
That is a great tip. I definitely fall into the trap of cranking the brightness when the sun comes through the window and then forgetting to turn it down when the clouds come over.
Second, if you are buying a new monitor, look for that T-U-V Rheinland Eye Comfort certification. It is not just a sticker. It means the monitor has been tested for blue light shift, flicker-free performance, and low reflection. Most of the big players like BenQ, Dell, and Asus have specific lines dedicated to this now.
And what about the blue light glasses? Are those still a thing, or should we just stick to the monitor features?
The consensus from the American Academy of Ophthalmology is that they are mostly unnecessary if you follow good habits. Most of the strain people feel is from dry eyes because we stop blinking when we look at screens. We blink about sixty-six percent less often when we are focused on a digital display. Glasses don't fix that. Blinking and the twenty-twenty-twenty rule do.
That is such a high percentage. We literally just forget to blink because we are so absorbed in the content.
It is wild. Your eye's tear film evaporates, and that is where that burning sensation comes from. So, before you spend a thousand dollars on a specialized e-ink monitor, try a twenty-dollar bottle of preservative-free artificial tears and a sticky note on your monitor that says blink.
I love that. It is the classic Herman approach. High-tech analysis followed by low-tech advice. But let us go back to the e-ink thing for a second. If Daniel really wanted to try an e-ink monitor, what is the state of the market right now? I know companies like Dasung have been the leaders there for a while.
Dasung is still the king of the niche. They have their Paperlike series, which is a twenty-five-inch e-ink monitor. It is fascinating because they have a dedicated F-P-G-A chip inside just to handle the refresh waveforms. It is essentially a custom processor that predicts how the ink particles should move to minimize ghosting. It is the closest thing to a real monitor experience you can get on e-ink.
And the price tag? I am assuming it is not cheap.
You are looking at anywhere from eight hundred to fifteen hundred dollars for a monitor that is monochrome and has a lower resolution than a standard four-hundred-dollar Dell. That is why it hasn't gone mainstream. You have to really, really value eye comfort or have a medical necessity to justify that cost.
It feels like e-ink is in that weird spot where it is waiting for a massive manufacturing breakthrough. If someone could figure out how to print e-ink onto a substrate as cheaply as we make L-C-D panels, it would be everywhere. Imagine every bus stop, every menu board, every secondary display being e-ink.
We are seeing it in electronic shelf labels in grocery stores. That has actually driven the cost of small e-ink displays down significantly. But the large-format, high-speed displays are still a boutique product. I will say, though, keep an eye on a company called E Ink Holdings. They have been demonstrating their Gallery three technology and the newer Spectra six, which is a full-color e-ink that does not use a color filter. It uses four or even six different colored particles in every pixel.
That sounds way more complex.
It is. It takes longer to refresh because you are moving more types of particles, but the color is much more vibrant. It looks like actual print. If they can get the refresh rate of Gallery three down to even one or two seconds, it becomes a very viable option for a secondary monitor where you keep your email or your Slack window.
I can see that. I would love a small e-ink screen just for my calendar and to-do list. Something that is always on, doesn't emit light, and just sits there like a piece of paper on a stand.
Exactly. And that is a great way to reduce your overall light exposure. You don't need your primary forty-inch O-L-E-D monitor to check your calendar.
Okay, so let us talk about O-L-E-D for a second, because that is the other big trend in monitors right now. Everyone is moving to O-L-E-D for those perfect blacks and amazing contrast. But O-L-E-D is notorious for using P-W-M for dimming, right? Is O-L-E-D actually worse for eye strain?
It can be. This is the irony of the current market. The most expensive, most beautiful displays are often the ones that use the most aggressive flickering to control brightness. Because O-L-E-D pixels are organic, they are very sensitive to voltage changes. If you just lower the voltage to dim them, the colors can shift or get blotchy. So, most O-L-E-D panels use a low-frequency P-W-M.
So if you are sensitive to flicker, an O-L-E-D might actually give you more headaches than a cheap L-C-D?
Potentially, yes. However, in twenty twenty-six, we are seeing more Tandem O-L-E-D panels and high-frequency P-W-M, sometimes over three thousand hertz. At those speeds, the flicker is much less likely to cause issues for the average person. But if you are someone who gets migraines or has noticed sensitivity to fluorescent lights, you really have to do your research before buying an O-L-E-D monitor. You are trading eye comfort for visual fidelity.
It is a bit of a minefield. I think Daniel is right to be cautious. You can't just buy the most expensive thing and assume it is better for your health.
Absolutely. And this brings up a second-order effect that I think is really interesting. As our screens get better and we spend more time on them, we are seeing a massive rise in myopia, or nearsightedness, in younger generations. It is not just about the light; it is about the lack of distance viewing.
I have read about that. Some countries are actually mandating that school children spend at least two hours outside every day just to force their eyes to focus on the horizon.
It is a physical growth issue. When you spend all day looking at something twenty inches away, your eye actually elongates over time to make that focus easier, which then makes it impossible to see things far away. So, the ultimate eye-strain technology might actually be a pair of windows and a walk in the park.
It is funny how often our deep dives into technology lead us back to the conclusion that we should probably just go outside more. But since we do have to work, and Daniel does have to replace those monitors eventually, what is the verdict on the built-in blue light filtering? Is it worth paying extra for?
It is worth looking for as part of a broader eye-care package. If a monitor has a hardware-level blue light shift and it is flicker-free, that is a winning combination. But do not buy a monitor just because it has a blue light sticker if it still uses P-W-M dimming. The flicker will hurt you long before the blue light does.
That is the headline right there. Flicker is the hidden enemy. Blue light is the marketing distraction.
Exactly. And if you really want to be an early adopter, look into those R-L-C-D monitors. They are still a bit clunky, but there is something magical about using a computer screen that feels like it is made of paper and ink rather than glowing gas and electricity.
I am curious if we will see a shift in how we design software for these types of screens. If we all started using reflective displays, we would probably go back to high-contrast black text on white backgrounds, rather than the dark mode everything we see today.
Oh, definitely. Dark mode is actually terrible for e-ink and R-L-C-D because of how the particles move. We have spent the last five years making everything dark to save battery on O-L-E-D-s, but if we move back toward eye-comfort displays, we might see the return of the bright, clean interface.
It is a fascinating see-saw. I think we have covered a lot of ground here. We have debunked some of the blue light myths, we have highlighted the danger of flicker, and we have looked at the current state of the e-ink dream.
It is a good reminder that our eyes are arguably our most important interface with the world. We spend thousands of dollars on G-P-U-s and C-P-U-s, but we often neglect the two biological cameras that are actually processing all that data.
Well said. And hey, if you are listening to this on a screen right now, maybe take a second to look out the window. Follow that twenty-twenty-twenty rule. Your ciliary muscles will thank you.
And while you are giving your eyes a break, if you have found this discussion helpful, we would really appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your podcast app or on Spotify. It genuinely helps other people find the show, and we love hearing from our listeners.
Absolutely. We have been doing this for three hundred seventy-nine episodes now, and the community feedback is what keeps us going. If you want to dive deeper into any of our past topics, you can find the whole archive at myweirdprompts dot com. There is a search bar there, so you can look up anything from our early episodes to the most recent ones.
We have a contact form there too, if you want to send in a prompt like Daniel did. We are always looking for new rabbit holes to jump down.
Thanks to Daniel for the prompt, and thanks to all of you for listening. This has been My Weird Prompts. I am Corn.
And I am Herman Poppleberry. We will see you in the next one.
Stay curious, and don't forget to blink.
Seriously, blink right now.
Catch you later.
