Computer eye strain

eye-strain-binarymove
eye-strain-binarymove

I don’t know about you guys but my parents were always yelling at me about sitting too close to the TV. Blah blah blah glasses, blah blah, blind, blah blah go outside and play with your friends. Ma, you know I don’t have any friends, why do you keep bringing it up? Anyway back on topic, is there truly a correct distance to sit from your screen? Well, let’s start with unpacking the claim that sitting too close to the TV is bad for your health. Well as it turns out, this widespread belief may have originated from a legitimate concern over a TV recall in the 1960s, where a certain line of defective televisions actually did emit a significant amount of x-ray radiation. That is bad for your eyes, and everything else. But, given there haven’t been any reports of this problem since then, why are people still concerned about it? Well, computer eye strain is something that you’ve probably experienced after focusing on anything for a long enough period of time. Even books or magazines. This happens because the muscles attached to your eyes tense up to help them focus.

eye-strain-binarymove

So just like any other muscle, if you tighten them up for long enough they start to ache. And there is some truth to this effect being stronger with a backlit source. If your eyes need to be constantly adjusting between the brightness of your screen and the sharply contrasting darkness of your room, you’ll experience this computer eye strain fatigue more quickly.

computer-eye-strain-2-binarymoveThere is good news though. You can slow down the effects by blinking more frequently to moisturize your eyes, glancing away from your book or monitor periodically, and by using a moderate brightness that’s not too dissimilar to the brightness of your surroundings. That and computer eye strain is easily relieved and doesn’t cause any long-term problems as far as we know. Just rest your eyes for a while by moving to a dark environment or relaxing them by not focusing on anything too intently. With that said, I still don’t recommend sitting too close to your screen. Not because it’ll hurt you, but because it’ll your viewing experience. The correct distance to sit from your screen is at least far enough where you can’t make out individual pixels that will make the image look blocky and distorted. So if you’re in the market for a new display there’s a simple way that you can figure out what size you should buy. For a 1080p display figure out how far you’ll be eye-strain-3-binarymovesitting from the screen and divide the distance by about 1.6 to get the size of the largest TV or monitor you should purchase. You may even wanna get something slightly smaller to be on the safe side with respects to image quality, but there’s no reason to get something much smaller than the formula recommends. 4K-displays-the-pixels-binarymoveAs for 4K displays, the pixels are much smaller, so you can get away with buying a larger screen. Especially as that will make it easier to see details that the higher resolution makes possible. So for 4K your display size should be about the same as your viewing distance, or just slightly smaller. And that’s it, once you’ve done some simple math, purchased the right display, oh and maybe installed some BIAS lighting which we covered here behind the display to improve contrast and reduce computer eye strain even further, you’re all set to sit on your butt and stare at binarymove.com for as long as you want.