Low blue light monitors
- Thread starter smilertoo
- Start date
Monitors have had the capability to lower blue light levels for a long time. All such a mode typically does is lower the blue colour channel to reduce blue light output from the backlight, which can be achieved on most monitors. Several monitors have presets that do exactly that as well - 'Reading', 'Paper', 'Warm2' etc. depending on manufacturer. The downside to this method is that the contrast and colour balance is affected, although your eyes do adapt to the latter to a large extent. The upside is of course the reduction in blue light output, which is particularly important on your standard WLED backlight with its spike of blue light.
There is a lot of strong scientific evidence that blue light that is pumped out in significant quantities affects sleep cycles. It affects hormone levels, amongst other things, and is a very important signal to keep our bodies alert. And it's why we generally feel 'awake' during daylight where blue light is plentiful but start to wind down in the evening. I have a lot of anecdotal evidence to back this up, between me and other family members. We all swear by reduced blue light output on monitors at night, whether from a dedicated 'Low Blue Light' mode or other method.
However, those 'significant quantities' that have been verified to have a measurable effect are far above what a desktop monitor can produce. Even if you had an array of 6 30" panels, that would not be a sufficient amount of illumination to cause a real effect. The mechanism is physiological rather than psychological, so the normal process of visual adaptation to low-light conditions does not play a part.
There is a much stronger argument for visual comfort, as most internal illumination (i.e. light bulbs) that will be lighting you room at night are of a much lower colour temperature than the D65 illuminant (i.e. '6500k') that sRGB monitors are designed around (with the assumption being that they will be used in an environment with a certain level of illumination by D65 sources). By using something like f.lux at night, the colour temperature of the screen more closely matches that of the surrounding illumination.