I hope something comes of this. Going to an optometrist felt like going to a car dealership the last time I went. Blue light filtering was that worthless upswell they wanted to push on everyone. This situation reminds of Cheerios claiming to lower cholesterol[0] and I hope it similarly gets FDA scrutiny - although my amateurish interpretation of the law is that blue light blocking claims are vague enough to not run afoul of regulations.
Overall this situation is just sad because I heard it first from ads, then vision professional, and now folks I know. It seems like it’s infected our collective consciousness without any serious questions of it’s true.
I got this same feeling a few trips ago to the vet. It was like all they cared about was trying to upsell me to put my dog out and clean her teeth. The nice assistant whispered to me “I wouldn’t do any of that to my shepherd” *wink.
Inevitably I had to go back since then and the next it seemed like they cut that crap as it wasn’t like that before and hasn’t been my last 2 trips. Still leaves bad taste in your mouth because you want to do the right thing but not get ripped off.
There was a NPR episode about this (forgot the exact show, might have been planet money). Apparently a ton of vets are being bought out by private companies. Back then, vets would sell to one of the younger vets in their practice when they retire. These private companies are out competing in terms of price hence all these upsell.
everything is is bought corporatized and then because just like Gov's big corporations are not great at dealing with bespoke situations, their focus is just making money which leads to upsell methodologies and "capture and hold" subscription models...
I hate it, but I cant see a way out. I self host a lot of stuff at the moment to get away from as much as I can. but there is only so much you can do.
Anecdotally, every optometrist and ophthalmologist I met, who wasn't selling me something at the time of conversation, was pretty dismissive of the whole "blue light filtering" business.
The attempt to block blue light has been with us so long (like a decade or so), the blue-light-filtering products so well commercialized, and yet the underlying claim that blue light affects sleep remains to be inconclusive at best, which makes me doubly wary of its validity.
This. I went recently and something about my eye axis(?) or something was off a bit (which somehow most Americans have?) and mentioned how it’s causing eyestrain. There’s special lenses that correct for this that is… SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS more just for the lenses. Mind you, my glasses are usually really affordable because I have a weak prescription. I was dumbfounded when I heard the price.
That sounds, to my utterly unprofessional ass, like an astigmatism? Basically your eye is deformed slightly like a football, giving your prescription a strength, cyclical value (a cylindrical bias to the lens, as I understand it) and a rotation of that cylindrical bias for the eye.
It does require small stores to order them custom (larger stores can often grind them in-house), but $600 seems... off. Perhaps if it's a high refraction material (thinner lenses) with all the various coatings?
The nice thing is if you have your prescription, you can order glasses from anywhere (including online), your prescription is not tied to one provider.
To basically +1 the sibling comment, you likely have astigmatism. $600 is pretty high but lenses are quite a bit more expensive than standard spherical lenses.
It is incredibly common, but essentially your eye is elongated in one axis meaning that your lenses need to correct differently in each axis. It also means that despite having a low prescription, you may have focus issues across the spectrum of depth.
Yep, it does sound like astigmatism. I have it. It only got detected when i was around 30 but apparently I've had it since birth. My first pair of glasses basically eliminated any eye strain / fatigue for the first few years in spite of having more cylinder than dioptries.
However, my lenses were never more expensive than my wife's who doesn't have any (astigmatism. she does have dioptries). Only difference is they're never in stock and I have to wait a couple days.
When it’s not severe it’s hard to correct and annoying. For me, I have a hard time with night driving in the rain because of it. But I found the correction annoying in normal circumstances.
Do you mean prismatic lenses? I had awful headaches at one point and the optician added prism to my prescription, I don't think the cost changed at all (UK optician).
I believe prismatic lenses are normally used to correct muscle weakness which may cause eye strain (and double vision in severe cases). My prescription was changed back to no prism after a few years.
Edit: siblings are likely correct after reading your comment again. It's likely astigmatism which I also have. But $600 is still ridiculous.
I've had the opposite experience. Despite having a pair of "computer vision" glasses included as part of my plan, the optometrists I've been to have all pretty much dismissed tinted lenses as woo-woo. They did suggest a pair of lower-power lenses for computer use, but that was it.
I say to my optometrist that I cannot have any color filters on my glass because of work. You cannot do colour grading with random filters. No pushing nonsense bluefilter since then.
I guess I have to speak up as every one made their mind and knows how the blue-blocking glasses are useless placebo gimick made up to take your precious 20$ from you.
I developed an eye pain condition around 14 years ago in university years, my eye sight was not really degrading but I get physical tension turning into pain in the eyes if I look at the screen for about 3-4 hours. I know that I still have this condition because sometimes I forget my glasses to the office and I have to take breaks much more often than otherwise. With the glasses I can work all day, then play video games, watch movies etc without feeling anything.
One thing I want to add is that there are seems to be different types of these glasses as I bought about 10 pairs and 2 of them also didn't work for me. So when I need a new pair I just take the one I know is good and ask optician if they have exactly the same type of filter.
So if the research says there isn't enough evidence it's fine, do more researches and find out exactly what happens here, but don't go around and tell how it's all made up and not helping anyone.
I worked in a big box electronics retail store in the early 2010s. Most customers were reasonably trusting which as someone not looking to screw them over made for quite a pleasant job. Perhaps the worst type of customer, was the vaguely ‘informed’ know it all ‘nerd’. Around this time, the “don’t buy the expensive gold-plated HDMI cable” movement was in full swing, but it was also about this time that different types of HDMI cables were starting to matter for (higher-end) prosumer setups.
Trying to convince some abrasive knowitall that our $15 home brand HDMI cable is going to be the bottleneck in their setup, and that it was basically orthogonal to any ‘good plated’ BS, was almost always not worth it. Eventually I learned to just let them make their own mistakes, dooming them to slink off to Amazon or whatever when they weren’t getting the resolution or frame rate they were after and eventually happened upon the CNET article that made them see the light.
The fact that there is an objective functional difference between different types of HDMI cables, whereas the jury is still out on blue blocker glasses, is pretty much irrelevant to my point. Any ‘science says…’ rhetoric is almost always parroted by people that don’t know what they’re talking about. At the end of the day, self-described ‘informed consumers’ LOVE feeling like they’ve got The Knowledge that’s going to give them a leg up on the slimy salesperson. A fair bit of the time though, the fact that the majority of these people aren’t actually all that knowledgeable means that these pearls of wisdom get corrupted over time and end up being entirely untrue. I’ve got no doubt that plenty of Hacker News regulars are the sorts of people that were incredibly hard to work with back then.
Well, engineers are kind of the archetypal model of the "but ackshually..." guy, so I'd venture to say you're right. I used to be more bold in my pronouncements when I was younger, now I think I like to repeat stuff I've heard like "interesting, I had heard that X was a factor with this, do you know if that's true or not?" In these situations. Having some intellectual humility and actively seeking opinions of people who might be more informed goes a long way.
I didn't realize there was anyone that thought the box store $15 cables were actually good-enough?
My understanding of them was (and assume still is) they sold two classes of cable: high-spec, brand-name "gold-plated", and dogshit-quality maybe just meets minimum-spec garbage. Both were way overpriced (aka: high-margin), and this is the entire business model: sell the TV at razor-thin margin, then make all the profit on over-priced cables.
Their $15 cable should really be $2, if that. Their $150 alternative should actually be maybe $30. Elsewhere you could pay $15-20 to get a high-end cable that was somewhere between 90 and 110% the quality. This is what I told to my friends/family.
I've definitely had people try to sell me cables but I've just politely declined and can't recall anyone being pushy about it.
And you must admit the "gold plated" thing was insane for a while. At the time when toslink was the rage, you could buy gold-plated fiber-optic cables. I also remember seeing an in-store display comparing cables their high-end HDMI cable to an alternative.. which of course was maybe-24awg dogshit composite cable. It's just so sleazy.
“It works for me” does not imply “it can’t possibly be a placebo”. Both could be true.
I’m not saying the blue light thing is or isn’t real, but I see this kind of argument made all the time, and I can’t tell if people just don’t understand what the placebo effect is or if everyone just thinks they’re special and the placebo effect doesn’t apply to them or what.
Sure but how do you account for two of them not working vs other ones working? It's likely doing some effect, but it seems to be just nuanced enough.
I feel like after I got the filter on my glasses that when I lay in bed, I'm not laying there feeling unable to sleep like I would many nights before. Is it placebo? Maybe, but I totally forgot I got the filter on my glasses and realized sometime later.
When something is identified as a placebo, that is not the same as saying it can't or won't help anyone. The placebo effect is a real, measurable phenomenon. As a non-scientist I'm probably going to grossly oversimplify this, but when testing the efficacy of a drug or medical device the whole reason you need to have a control group taking a placebo (sugar pills, for example) is because the placebo will actually cause some people in that group to have a real, measurable improvement in whatever it is being measured. The only way to know if the real drug or device you're testing actually works is if the improvements experienced by the test group is better than the improvements experienced by the control group.
Additionally, I think this research/review was focused only on whether blue light filters help reduce eyestrain in the general population. So saying it had no effect here doesn't necessarily rule out the possibility that they could help in individuals with specific medical conditions that weren't controlled for or factored in here, just that in the general case they seem to have no effect.
I'm totally with you. I always had eye strain when on the PC but since wearing cheap orange glasses (with no dioptrine) I don't have it anymore. I can take of my glasses and within 5 minutes on the PC I notice the eye strain. It definitely works (for me, with certain glasses). I only use these glasses when at a screen, so basically it would make no sense at all to use it if it weren't helping (though I do like the orange effect ;)).
btw. just because some people don't have this particular eye strain problem, doesn't mean it's all a giant hoax. Come on, people.
>If the eyestrain persists, see an eye-care health professional who can perform a thorough examination of your eye health, Downie said. “Sometimes eyestrain can be actually caused by an underlying eye health or vision problem,” she said.
Idk if you have already, but could be a good idea to visit a professional for an evaluation.
My friend was having eye sight issues and a bit of strain, turns out it was a brain injury.
But if researchers say there isn't enough evidence, where will the average consumer turn to to "do more research"? That's where the shady pseudoscience advertising articles come in, who will gladly make unfounded claims with absolute confidence.
I meant that specialists should do more research on the topic. For the average consumer there is not much choice, either wait for more conclusive results or try it out themselves and see if it makes a noticeable difference in their specific condition.
Fair enough, but we should be aware that the placebo effect is real and it could easily explain what you feel.
> So if the research says there isn't enough evidence it's fine, do more researches and find out exactly what happens here, but don't go around and tell how it's all made up and not helping anyone.
people aren't doing this though... Equating "not enough evidence" with "it's false" is a straw man argument. And starting with accepting the need for more research but then chastising them for expressing skepticism is bad. The emotional appeal is also bad, we aren't causing harm by voicing our skepticism.
I'll start by saying I work in the industry and I have actually worked on making blue blocking coatings.
There are two ways these filters work.
The first and older method is to tint the lenses so that they absorb blue light. This will make the the lenses look yellow or orange. The wavelength that is normally targeted is 455nm. The more yellow or orange the lenses look the more blue light they are blocking. This tinting process works the same as it does in a normal sunglass lens (by dipping the lens in a hot water bath that has dyes dissolved in it; the dyes migrate to the porous lens material).
The second method is to put a blue reflective coating on the lenses using vacuum deposition. You can recognize these lenses because they have a strong blue reflection (not to be confused with a subtle blue reflection which can be seen in a normal anti-reflective layer). These lenses won't block as much blue light as the tinted lenses but they look nearly like normal glasses.
I suppose some manufactureres may try a hybrid approach although (both absorption and reflection). Anyway the general thing to think about is that the more "normal" the lenses appear the less blue light they will block.
I never understood their use as computer glasses because all computers and phones have low blue light modes now and these do what they say they do, and I've measured the output of screens with a spectrophotometer.
>So if the research says there isn't enough evidence it's fine, do more researches and find out exactly what happens here, but don't go around and tell how it's all made up and not helping anyone.
I think most of the backlash is against the the claims that blue light is damaging and that these filters will protect your eyes. I think in these cases the evidence has to come first.
Obviously if someone suffers from eyestrain it's great that there are products out there that you can try (on a personal scale it doesn't matter if the solution is placebo or a not yet clearly understood therapy) but this is different from saying that everyone should have these to protect their eyes from the danger of blue light. Personally I use the night mode feature on my devices but I wouldn't bother with the glasses because to me they seem redundant.
Another thing I would like to add is that I've never met anyone technical working in the industry that actually believes these filters work and everyone considers them a marketing led exercise.
> I never understood their use as computer glasses because all computers and phones have low blue light modes now and these do what they say they do, and I've measured the output of screens with a spectrophotometer.
Anecdotally, when I first had "anti-blue-light computer glasses" many years ago, nor windows nor mac os had the "night mode" feature. Run-of-the-mill monitors didn't have it, either, instead sporting an extremely blueish image. I don't know that my glasses helped with sleep, but they sure as hell made the screens more pleasant to look at.
And no, fiddling with the monitor settings didn't really help. I'm talking about your standard crappy enterprise monitors, with abysmal contrast, so that if you lowered the brightness or some such you couldn't make out anything anymore on them.
Exactly, I have some of the kind that actually have a visible yellow tint and blue reflect -- I get eyestrain after a long time, but without them on the crappy monitors at my old job I got eyestrain within one hour, and my phone was unusable at the end of the day.
I mean definitely that would be best, but it so happened that most of my daily life, career and entertainment is related with screens. At least in my case this condition is not getting worse so for now these glasses allow me to do all this in a pretty comfortable way.
Weren't blue-light glasses originally marketed as a solution to aid sleep by blocking out the sleep-disrupting effects of blue light emitted from screens in bed?
Seems like they're debunking a claim that's not actually their selling point.
> The idea behind blue-blocking lenses is to stop the light from entering the eye and throwing the circadian rhythm off; however, this has not been established with any degree of certainty in clinical studies, Miller said. [...]
Then it goes on, mentioning some research in more detail. However, the article doesn't interpret anything, or talk about why the research about lens effect provided inconsistent results, or even link to the actual research where this may be explained.
It is interesting how decisive the comments are given the ambiguity here.
Personally, I find that light reduction in general and blue light reduction in particular help me to fall asleep and she'll better. It could be placebo, but I don't care. I like to feel rested.
Honestly even if that doesn't do much for most those things are great for me, I have a migraine-adjacent visual issue which gives me photophobia and lowering the colour temperature of light in general helps with that.
That didn't sell well enough (to people who use a computer 8am-5pm), so now the sales pitch also includes eye fatigue and "improved visual performance", whatever that means.
If you've ever tried a pair of Gunnar ambers you'd know what real blue light filtering is. With them on, it's not a subtle effect. You see with an amber tint. The monitor just appears less noisy. I've worked 12 hours straight in them in the past after which I'm physically and mentally tired but my eyes aren't. Without them I can't work, which is exactly how you know they're working.
If you're a programmer just looking at text all day, they are worth every penny. If you're a designer and color perception is important to you, you're out of luck.
Not affiliated to Gunnar in any way. Just a happy customer of 6 years.
I don’t have this specific brand of glasses, but mines are yellow tinted and although it makes me see the world with a different hue, I notice that when working, my eye is way less strained with them on. I have astigmatism so maybe there’s some correlation there with the dimmed brightness.
I used green CRTs (Apple II), orange CRTs, B&W CRTs, CGA, EGA, VGA, SuperVGA CRTs at least 12hr/day since the early 80s, then I started hearing people afraid of radiation and moving to LCDs in the 90s which I also used again at least 12hr daily, and I still keep using my laptop and reading my phone. From the Apple II manuals I have always remembered the technique of focusing on objects at different distances for several minutes to rest. But I also developed my own technique of closing the eye in pain and placing my fingertips around the cornea and applying little pressure until colored spots appear in the vision, there will be more pain than the one caused by eyestrain, but after a while it will go, and when releasing the fingers the eye will feel refreshed. I have good sight after all these years.
Neither staring at monitors nor print is actually expected to actually cause worsening eyesight. The idea that nerds need glasses because they stare at small print is a myth. On the other hand poking yourself in the eye and ignoring discomfort caused by the pressure could easily see you do some local damage. I would not advise anyone to actually follow your eye care regimen.
Hey, dont do that. Thats damaging your eye. It may not affect your vision, but your eyes are super soft and squishy, you can do damage if you rub or press on them to the point of color visualizations. Yes, even the amazing deep knuckle rubbing eye scrub, is bad for you. Still happens, but yeah, dont do that.
You should go see a doctor if you have that much pain or strain. Your vision likely isnt as good as you think.
Thanks for sharing your facinating approach. By good eyesight do you mean 20/20?
How old were you when you started using computers?
Do you know of anyone else using your technique, if so what are their results?
For what it's worth, 20/20 is a woefully inadequate measurement to claim good eyesight in the context of reading or computer use. (It works well for "can walk around town" or "can drive a car".)
Vision works differently at different distances. I have "20/20 vision" (see distant objects at least as well as average), but I also am practically unable to read small print, need reading glasses to read for more than 15 minutes or to read a backlit Kindle in the dark, I sometimes get eye strain headaches if I don't wear my computer glasses, and I'm suffering from glaucoma which, if untreated, will make me blind in a way where I'll likely retain 20/20 vision for a very long time while losing peripheral vision, contrast, and ability to read for more than 15 minutes.
The eye, and the nervous system it feeds, is a complex system with various failure modes.
If you have eye strain, go see an optician. If they think you should also see an ophthalmologist, do that too. If any of your parents/their siblings/grandparents developed glaucoma, and you're 40+ years, go see an ophthalmologist and tell them who all was affected, it's hereditary.
Good question, haven't visited the optometrist since I was a child for casual checking. Just tried and I'm able to read text with light Arial font size 11 in a 15" monitor 1.4m apart, if that provides any clue. Good eyesight at night. Started using computers when about 10yo. Started feeling eye pain (quick needle in the eye kind of pain) since about 30 years ago, and use the technique since then, the pain goes for a few months, and maybe I've had 3 eyestrain crisis in those 30 years, in which I had to apply the method once or twice per day for 1 or 2 weeks then got well for months. I don't know of anyone else using it.
there was on brand of missproduced (I think TVs) which did actually had radiation issues ;=)
through the whole bad eyesight from sitting to close to a TV things was basically nonsense
they main issue which can cause strain and long term eyesight issues is from blinking to little and in turn getting to dry eyes which could lead to microscopic damage which can accumulate over the years AFIK
This is probably why your method works => you close the eye and force production of some tears .
Through eyeballs are sensitive and anything involving "spots appear in the vision" tends to be a bad idea, so I would personally refrain from doing so. Just "strongly" closing the eyes without involving your hands tend to be good enough for facilitating some tear production.
A CRT and an xray are essentially similar internally. However a properly made TV tube had plenty of lead (or other, but normally lead) to block the xrays from getting out.
In the blue light filter setting on iOS Apple already uses wording like "some people think it reduces eye strain" or some such non-committent language that makes clear people ask for this, but Apple knows it doesn't actually work.
I have found that a monitor light bar is excellent for reducing eye-strain in a dark room where the monitor is the only light source. BenQ makes the OG [1] but there are knockoffs available on Amazon that are decent.
For daytime, facing a window while using a monitor is a major source of strain. This, of course, is a common post-pandemic arrangement as Team/Zoom calls look best with natural light on your face, but it's not doing your eyes any favours. The reason being that natural light intensity changes by multiple orders of magnitude, between sunny and overcast. Since the monitor stays at a constant brightness, your eyes have to work hard to keep the monitor at a constant perceptive brightness against a widely varying background, invariably causing strain over the course of the day.
The original monitor light doesn't make the wall brighter (the Halo edition is a relatively new offering). Rather it provides a smooth intensity gradient on the work surface directly in front of and underneath the monitor. This smooth gradient is very effective at reducing eyestrain.
Unless the room lights are specifically designed for optimal lighting of the workspace, they cannot achieve the same effect. In typical homes, the room light is either a single ceiling fixture or lamps (one or more), spread throughout.
If anyone has issues with headaches or eye strain, try lowering the brightness of your device, like to the lowest you can bear. In conjunction with that, use flux or night shift or set your monitor to a warm white. No one needs to buy glasses for this. For TVs, HDR usually requires max brightness for the best colors.
This is really bad and dated advice and I would encourage everyone to not listen to it.
The lowest brightness levels often have very poor contrast levels and will cause more eye strain as your eye will have a harder time discerning what’s on screen.
Additionally at lower brightness levels you may have higher flicker on displays due to PWM.
It makes sense to work at a brightness level that is appropriate for your environment. If your screen supports ambient light detection, enable it. Ideally you don’t want your eyes to constantly be shifting between brightness levels of your screen and the world around it.
If you do have eye strain, make sure to take regular breaks and excercise your eye by focusing on things at different depths. That has been shown to help push presbyopia to later years (but nothing really prevents it)
Also HDR colors are NOT best at maximum brightness. It’s a common misconception because humans react better to brightness. It wholly depends on your display technology , but color accuracy and depth are not linearly related to brightness and often have a falloff when you get to higher brightness unless you’re using an OLED display.
In color accurate fields, monitors aren’t set to highest brightness. Colors are calibrated against a standard Nit value which may be lower than what the monitor displays. Above and below those values, your colours are often going to be wrong compared to the intended content.
Readit News
Overall this situation is just sad because I heard it first from ads, then vision professional, and now folks I know. It seems like it’s infected our collective consciousness without any serious questions of it’s true.
Edit: [0]: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/Cholesterol/story?id=7574156
Inevitably I had to go back since then and the next it seemed like they cut that crap as it wasn’t like that before and hasn’t been my last 2 trips. Still leaves bad taste in your mouth because you want to do the right thing but not get ripped off.
I hate it, but I cant see a way out. I self host a lot of stuff at the moment to get away from as much as I can. but there is only so much you can do.
It's a scam.
The attempt to block blue light has been with us so long (like a decade or so), the blue-light-filtering products so well commercialized, and yet the underlying claim that blue light affects sleep remains to be inconclusive at best, which makes me doubly wary of its validity.
It does require small stores to order them custom (larger stores can often grind them in-house), but $600 seems... off. Perhaps if it's a high refraction material (thinner lenses) with all the various coatings?
The nice thing is if you have your prescription, you can order glasses from anywhere (including online), your prescription is not tied to one provider.
It is incredibly common, but essentially your eye is elongated in one axis meaning that your lenses need to correct differently in each axis. It also means that despite having a low prescription, you may have focus issues across the spectrum of depth.
However, my lenses were never more expensive than my wife's who doesn't have any (astigmatism. she does have dioptries). Only difference is they're never in stock and I have to wait a couple days.
When it’s not severe it’s hard to correct and annoying. For me, I have a hard time with night driving in the rain because of it. But I found the correction annoying in normal circumstances.
I believe prismatic lenses are normally used to correct muscle weakness which may cause eye strain (and double vision in severe cases). My prescription was changed back to no prism after a few years.
Edit: siblings are likely correct after reading your comment again. It's likely astigmatism which I also have. But $600 is still ridiculous.
At least then you know you're not being scammed.
I developed an eye pain condition around 14 years ago in university years, my eye sight was not really degrading but I get physical tension turning into pain in the eyes if I look at the screen for about 3-4 hours. I know that I still have this condition because sometimes I forget my glasses to the office and I have to take breaks much more often than otherwise. With the glasses I can work all day, then play video games, watch movies etc without feeling anything.
One thing I want to add is that there are seems to be different types of these glasses as I bought about 10 pairs and 2 of them also didn't work for me. So when I need a new pair I just take the one I know is good and ask optician if they have exactly the same type of filter.
So if the research says there isn't enough evidence it's fine, do more researches and find out exactly what happens here, but don't go around and tell how it's all made up and not helping anyone.
Trying to convince some abrasive knowitall that our $15 home brand HDMI cable is going to be the bottleneck in their setup, and that it was basically orthogonal to any ‘good plated’ BS, was almost always not worth it. Eventually I learned to just let them make their own mistakes, dooming them to slink off to Amazon or whatever when they weren’t getting the resolution or frame rate they were after and eventually happened upon the CNET article that made them see the light.
The fact that there is an objective functional difference between different types of HDMI cables, whereas the jury is still out on blue blocker glasses, is pretty much irrelevant to my point. Any ‘science says…’ rhetoric is almost always parroted by people that don’t know what they’re talking about. At the end of the day, self-described ‘informed consumers’ LOVE feeling like they’ve got The Knowledge that’s going to give them a leg up on the slimy salesperson. A fair bit of the time though, the fact that the majority of these people aren’t actually all that knowledgeable means that these pearls of wisdom get corrupted over time and end up being entirely untrue. I’ve got no doubt that plenty of Hacker News regulars are the sorts of people that were incredibly hard to work with back then.
My understanding of them was (and assume still is) they sold two classes of cable: high-spec, brand-name "gold-plated", and dogshit-quality maybe just meets minimum-spec garbage. Both were way overpriced (aka: high-margin), and this is the entire business model: sell the TV at razor-thin margin, then make all the profit on over-priced cables.
Their $15 cable should really be $2, if that. Their $150 alternative should actually be maybe $30. Elsewhere you could pay $15-20 to get a high-end cable that was somewhere between 90 and 110% the quality. This is what I told to my friends/family.
I've definitely had people try to sell me cables but I've just politely declined and can't recall anyone being pushy about it.
And you must admit the "gold plated" thing was insane for a while. At the time when toslink was the rage, you could buy gold-plated fiber-optic cables. I also remember seeing an in-store display comparing cables their high-end HDMI cable to an alternative.. which of course was maybe-24awg dogshit composite cable. It's just so sleazy.
I’m not saying the blue light thing is or isn’t real, but I see this kind of argument made all the time, and I can’t tell if people just don’t understand what the placebo effect is or if everyone just thinks they’re special and the placebo effect doesn’t apply to them or what.
I feel like after I got the filter on my glasses that when I lay in bed, I'm not laying there feeling unable to sleep like I would many nights before. Is it placebo? Maybe, but I totally forgot I got the filter on my glasses and realized sometime later.
Additionally, I think this research/review was focused only on whether blue light filters help reduce eyestrain in the general population. So saying it had no effect here doesn't necessarily rule out the possibility that they could help in individuals with specific medical conditions that weren't controlled for or factored in here, just that in the general case they seem to have no effect.
btw. just because some people don't have this particular eye strain problem, doesn't mean it's all a giant hoax. Come on, people.
I wonder if this is what religious people tell each other about prayer ;)
Idk if you have already, but could be a good idea to visit a professional for an evaluation.
My friend was having eye sight issues and a bit of strain, turns out it was a brain injury.
> So if the research says there isn't enough evidence it's fine, do more researches and find out exactly what happens here, but don't go around and tell how it's all made up and not helping anyone.
people aren't doing this though... Equating "not enough evidence" with "it's false" is a straw man argument. And starting with accepting the need for more research but then chastising them for expressing skepticism is bad. The emotional appeal is also bad, we aren't causing harm by voicing our skepticism.
skepticism != dismissal BTW
There are two ways these filters work.
The first and older method is to tint the lenses so that they absorb blue light. This will make the the lenses look yellow or orange. The wavelength that is normally targeted is 455nm. The more yellow or orange the lenses look the more blue light they are blocking. This tinting process works the same as it does in a normal sunglass lens (by dipping the lens in a hot water bath that has dyes dissolved in it; the dyes migrate to the porous lens material).
The second method is to put a blue reflective coating on the lenses using vacuum deposition. You can recognize these lenses because they have a strong blue reflection (not to be confused with a subtle blue reflection which can be seen in a normal anti-reflective layer). These lenses won't block as much blue light as the tinted lenses but they look nearly like normal glasses.
I suppose some manufactureres may try a hybrid approach although (both absorption and reflection). Anyway the general thing to think about is that the more "normal" the lenses appear the less blue light they will block.
I never understood their use as computer glasses because all computers and phones have low blue light modes now and these do what they say they do, and I've measured the output of screens with a spectrophotometer.
>So if the research says there isn't enough evidence it's fine, do more researches and find out exactly what happens here, but don't go around and tell how it's all made up and not helping anyone.
I think most of the backlash is against the the claims that blue light is damaging and that these filters will protect your eyes. I think in these cases the evidence has to come first.
https://www.aop.org.uk/ot/industry/high-street/2017/05/26/bo...
Obviously if someone suffers from eyestrain it's great that there are products out there that you can try (on a personal scale it doesn't matter if the solution is placebo or a not yet clearly understood therapy) but this is different from saying that everyone should have these to protect their eyes from the danger of blue light. Personally I use the night mode feature on my devices but I wouldn't bother with the glasses because to me they seem redundant.
Another thing I would like to add is that I've never met anyone technical working in the industry that actually believes these filters work and everyone considers them a marketing led exercise.
Anecdotally, when I first had "anti-blue-light computer glasses" many years ago, nor windows nor mac os had the "night mode" feature. Run-of-the-mill monitors didn't have it, either, instead sporting an extremely blueish image. I don't know that my glasses helped with sleep, but they sure as hell made the screens more pleasant to look at.
And no, fiddling with the monitor settings didn't really help. I'm talking about your standard crappy enterprise monitors, with abysmal contrast, so that if you lowered the brightness or some such you couldn't make out anything anymore on them.
If something is causing some physical pain in your eyes, why wouldn't your solution be to get off the computer and give your eyes a rest?
Because life is about give and take?
Seems like they're debunking a claim that's not actually their selling point.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/blue-light-ha...
> The idea behind blue-blocking lenses is to stop the light from entering the eye and throwing the circadian rhythm off; however, this has not been established with any degree of certainty in clinical studies, Miller said. [...]
Then it goes on, mentioning some research in more detail. However, the article doesn't interpret anything, or talk about why the research about lens effect provided inconsistent results, or even link to the actual research where this may be explained.
Personally, I find that light reduction in general and blue light reduction in particular help me to fall asleep and she'll better. It could be placebo, but I don't care. I like to feel rested.
If you're a programmer just looking at text all day, they are worth every penny. If you're a designer and color perception is important to you, you're out of luck.
Not affiliated to Gunnar in any way. Just a happy customer of 6 years.
You should go see a doctor if you have that much pain or strain. Your vision likely isnt as good as you think.
Vision works differently at different distances. I have "20/20 vision" (see distant objects at least as well as average), but I also am practically unable to read small print, need reading glasses to read for more than 15 minutes or to read a backlit Kindle in the dark, I sometimes get eye strain headaches if I don't wear my computer glasses, and I'm suffering from glaucoma which, if untreated, will make me blind in a way where I'll likely retain 20/20 vision for a very long time while losing peripheral vision, contrast, and ability to read for more than 15 minutes.
The eye, and the nervous system it feeds, is a complex system with various failure modes.
If you have eye strain, go see an optician. If they think you should also see an ophthalmologist, do that too. If any of your parents/their siblings/grandparents developed glaucoma, and you're 40+ years, go see an ophthalmologist and tell them who all was affected, it's hereditary.
there was on brand of missproduced (I think TVs) which did actually had radiation issues ;=)
through the whole bad eyesight from sitting to close to a TV things was basically nonsense
they main issue which can cause strain and long term eyesight issues is from blinking to little and in turn getting to dry eyes which could lead to microscopic damage which can accumulate over the years AFIK
This is probably why your method works => you close the eye and force production of some tears .
Through eyeballs are sensitive and anything involving "spots appear in the vision" tends to be a bad idea, so I would personally refrain from doing so. Just "strongly" closing the eyes without involving your hands tend to be good enough for facilitating some tear production.
In the blue light filter setting on iOS Apple already uses wording like "some people think it reduces eye strain" or some such non-committent language that makes clear people ask for this, but Apple knows it doesn't actually work.
For daytime, facing a window while using a monitor is a major source of strain. This, of course, is a common post-pandemic arrangement as Team/Zoom calls look best with natural light on your face, but it's not doing your eyes any favours. The reason being that natural light intensity changes by multiple orders of magnitude, between sunny and overcast. Since the monitor stays at a constant brightness, your eyes have to work hard to keep the monitor at a constant perceptive brightness against a widely varying background, invariably causing strain over the course of the day.
[1] https://www.benq.com/en-ca/lighting/monitor-light.html
Genuine question: why not just turn your lights on?
It seems like this is effectively making your wall brighter, which turning on your lights will have the same effect.
Unless the room lights are specifically designed for optimal lighting of the workspace, they cannot achieve the same effect. In typical homes, the room light is either a single ceiling fixture or lamps (one or more), spread throughout.
The one thing I miss from CRTs is being able to turn the brightness way way down at night and still have good contrast. At least for text.
The lowest brightness levels often have very poor contrast levels and will cause more eye strain as your eye will have a harder time discerning what’s on screen.
Additionally at lower brightness levels you may have higher flicker on displays due to PWM.
It makes sense to work at a brightness level that is appropriate for your environment. If your screen supports ambient light detection, enable it. Ideally you don’t want your eyes to constantly be shifting between brightness levels of your screen and the world around it.
If you do have eye strain, make sure to take regular breaks and excercise your eye by focusing on things at different depths. That has been shown to help push presbyopia to later years (but nothing really prevents it)
Also HDR colors are NOT best at maximum brightness. It’s a common misconception because humans react better to brightness. It wholly depends on your display technology , but color accuracy and depth are not linearly related to brightness and often have a falloff when you get to higher brightness unless you’re using an OLED display.
In color accurate fields, monitors aren’t set to highest brightness. Colors are calibrated against a standard Nit value which may be lower than what the monitor displays. Above and below those values, your colours are often going to be wrong compared to the intended content.
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