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I’ve got an I1 Display Pro, and I’m reasonably good with DisplayCal, but I don’t really know where to start on settings that are easier on my eyes for productivity/office tasks.
I’m a stock trader. After squinting at charts and tiny numbers for 6 hours, I often find my eyes are literally burning.
I have an array of two stacked 32 inch monitors, with two vertical 27’s beside them. My main 32 is an Innolux IPS, and the other is a cheaper Samsung VA. I’m looking at these two most of the time.
I generally calibrate to 6500k white point. Would a cooler temperature be better?
The advice I most often see is to lower brightness. I usually calibrate to 160nits. However, I find that dimmer settings actually make it harder for me to read. Is this unusual? Could it be because of mediocre contrast (1000:1)?
Most text I read is white on a black background, if that makes any difference.
thanks
Calibrite Display Pro HL on Amazon
Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.The often recommended brightness of 80-120 nits is for photo or sdr video viewing in a dimly lit room. Outside of color critical work brightness should be user preference, so long as it’s not super bright in relation to the room lighting as that can cause eye strain. That brightness is fine for a room with the lights on or a room that gets some sun.
If you’re room is somewhat bright you might try adjusting the brightness and color temp to be an approximate match the appearance of a piece of paper in your usual lighting conditions as having too much of a disparity between the screen and your surroundings may cause eye strain.
One other thing is since you are looking at a lot of small fonts on different panel types and with rotated screens disabling cleartype might help. Windows cleartype only works with RGB and BGR stripe pixel layouts so rotated screens or some VA monitors that have the pixels arranged in a triangle pattern don’t work well with it.
Try running the cleartype tuner and see if you can find the settings that look the best for each of your displays.
CIE standard illuminant A, if the monitor has such a feature, would be easier on the eyes if the information display is for reading only. Or anything below the D50 ICC standard. Is it reasonable to use a daylight simulator for reading (D55 and above)? Thus try to adjusting your information display’s whitepoint as close to CIE A illuminant. If the information display lacks a 3D lut, there is some code in these forms that hooks into Microsoft windows “compositor api” allowing the users to “color manage” the entirety of the OS’s GUI. The workflow could be: Displaycal calibration setting whitepoint = 2856 K –> profile –> create LUT –> “dwnlutgui.”
dwnlutgui can be found if searched this parameter:
“I made a tool for applying 3D LUTs to the Windows desktop”
cheers
Most text I read is white on a black background
have you considered an e-ink screen? should work well here and might help
The often recommended brightness of 80-120 nits is for photo or sdr video viewing in a dimly lit room. Outside of color critical work brightness should be user preference, so long as it’s not super bright in relation to the room lighting as that can cause eye strain. That brightness is fine for a room with the lights on or a room that gets some sun.
If you’re room is somewhat bright you might try adjusting the brightness and color temp to be an approximate match the appearance of a piece of paper in your usual lighting conditions as having too much of a disparity between the screen and your surroundings may cause eye strain.
One other thing is since you are looking at a lot of small fonts on different panel types and with rotated screens disabling cleartype might help. Windows cleartype only works with RGB and BGR stripe pixel layouts so rotated screens or some VA monitors that have the pixels arranged in a triangle pattern don’t work well with it.
Try running the cleartype tuner and see if you can find the settings that look the best for each of your displays.
Thanks, I totally forgot windows had this whole cleartype utility. I’ll have to go through the wizard a few times for each screen, and see if it helps. Not sure if the programs I use would be affected by it though (mainly thinkorswim.)
That makes sense that a sideways VA monitor might have different interpretation of text. Would this apply to IPS or TN displays at all? My verticals are one of each.
CIE standard illuminant A, if the monitor has such a feature, would be easier on the eyes if the information display is for reading only. Or anything below the D50 ICC standard. Is it reasonable to use a daylight simulator for reading (D55 and above)? Thus try to adjusting your information display’s whitepoint as close to CIE A illuminant. If the information display lacks a 3D lut, there is some code in these forms that hooks into Microsoft windows “compositor api” allowing the users to “color manage” the entirety of the OS’s GUI. The workflow could be: Displaycal calibration setting whitepoint = 2856 K –> profile –> create LUT –> “dwnlutgui.”
dwnlutgui can be found if searched this parameter:
“I made a tool for applying 3D LUTs to the Windows desktop”
cheers
2856k sounds terribly red, but I’ll give it a try.
I’ll have to do some research to see if an LUT would work with the programs I use.
I’ve never worked in this environement (panels field), but with my experience I recommend you:
- Set graphs color and background to be most comfortable to your taste, and informative as well (bucks=green etc.). Pure white lines/detail color should be choosen for dim enough panel. Comfortable background may be of brown mush color or dark grey.
- Choose sRGB or Photo preset in all panels menus. This limits saturation (RGB primaries) and should be +/- close to one standard, contrast should be +/- close to sRGB (some other than gamma 2.2). Of course, “reading” preset is even better, but it has different implementation for different panels and is usually too yellowish.
- Have in mind, two suqare meters of panels is like stadium light. Large display should be more dim than small one, if you use it for daily work. I prefer 100 cd/sq.m for office software (generally white screen) at small panels. 160 value sounds like very high for broker’s battleship, but dim GUI may cure it.
- 800:1+ contrast level, that is surpassed by modern IPS and VA both, is enough here. But some displays have wrong internal settings at some screen frequencies, sRGB mode is sometimes implemented with contrast decrease too. This should not be a big problem to you, use the the worst black point level between displays if you calibrate them.
- You should find some optimal brighness that allows you to see text and graphs at sunny day, but not very well, – if you have window in your room. Seems to be more than 100 cd/sq.m with dim GUI. If your room has artificial lighing only, it may be 70-120 cd/sq.m
- The same story happens with WP. I prefered 6800K in my last office, but I prefer 5000K for evening work at home. This depends on typical ambient light and on walls color. This may have tint, so better to make simple profile for one (most saturated from box) panel to evaluate the result, than use color pick up tool (WP setting by xy coordinates) and rebuild it. Use these coordinates at other panels, but in some cases we should find similar WP by our eyes (panels may have significantly different lighting spectra, which interfer with ambient lights in our eyes/mind).
- Windows GUI don’t use color management in most cases, so ICC profile wont help you to show bizware identically. There’s self-made LUT tool on this forum that can help, but you don’t need it. Set sRGB/photo for all panels and calibrate them to the same WP+brightness+[black level (this works so-so)]. Note that native contrast is usually decreased after vcgt WP correction and sRGB mode usually blocks WP tuning in display menu. Profile Loader wiil put calibration curves correction to videocard 1D LUT, no more correction is needed to you. If you multidisplay videocard don’t have 1D LUT part… it is a problem.
- I don’t think that there’s significant difference between IPS and VA panels here, simple make better placement to your taste. I’ve calibrated 32″ VA panel, I saw the image, it’s not critical for office work and eyes fatigue.
To clarify with ClearType Windows only supports sub-pixel layouts of left to right RGB and BGR which is what most LCD displays have.
So if you rotate the display to portrait orientation the sub-pixels are no longer arranged left to right they are top to bottom. So unless your rotated displays happen to have an uncommon top to bottom sub-pixel layout which becomes left to right when rotated ClearType should be turned off or set for grayscale mode. (i’ll explain grayscale ClearType later)
And again some VA panels use weird sub-pixel layouts since they are using TV panels which are less likely to use the standard left to right RGB or BGR sub-pixel layouts. You could always get a jewelers loupe or magnifying glass and see if you can make out how the pixels are arranged if you want to be sure.
Also ClearType only really works if your monitor has a digital connection and is set to it’s native resolution. VGA is a no go.
Now about grayscale ClearType . Some applications will use ClearType’s anti-aliasing in a grayscale mode. I think Edge does this as well as Windows Store apps. They do this to be friendly to tablets that are more likely to be viewed in different orientations.
It is possible when going through the ClearType tuner to have all ClearType text use this grayscale mode. When you are going through the tuner there will be a screen with 3 choices. The left one is regular ClearType with full saturation of the sub-pixel colors. The middle is 50% saturation, and the right one is grayscale which give you some fairly good font smoothing without any of the color fringing or sup-pixel origination reliance.
It should be noted that some applications don’t follow the defaults set in windows for font smoothing and ClearType so all this might be a waste of time depending on what application you are using. One way to tell how fonts are being rendered in a program is just take a screenshot of it and zoom in and see if the edges are red on one side and blue on the other. Then you know it’s using standard ClearType.
Also as someone else mentioned if you haven’t ever or recently gotten your eyes checked that’s a good place to start if you’re getting headaches. Even mild astigmatism will make reading small text give you headaches. Also you could look into getting some computer reading glasses that have a slight magnification and possibly a yellow tint.
I’ve never worked in this environement (panels field), but with my experience I recommend you:
Set graphs color and background to be most comfortable to your taste, and informative as well (bucks=green etc.). Pure white lines/detail color should be choosen for dim enough panel. Comfortable background may be of brown mush color or dark grey.
Choose sRGB or Photo preset in all panels menus. This limits saturation (RGB primaries) and should be +/- close to one standard, contrast should be +/- close to sRGB (some other than gamma 2.2). Of course, “reading” preset is even better, but it has different implementation for different panels and is usually too yellowish.
Have in mind, two suqare meters of panels is like stadium light. Large display should be more dim than small one, if you use it for daily work. I prefer 100 cd/sq.m for office software (generally white screen) at small panels. 160 value sounds like very high for broker’s battleship, but dim GUI may cure it.
800:1+ contrast level, that is surpassed by modern IPS and VA both, is enough here. But some displays have wrong internal settings at some screen frequencies, sRGB mode is sometimes implemented with contrast decrease too. This should not be a big problem to you, use the the worst black point level between displays if you calibrate them.
You should find some optimal brighness that allows you to see text and graphs at sunny day, but not very well, – if you have window in your room. Seems to be more than 100 cd/sq.m with dim GUI. If your room has artificial lighing only, it may be 70-120 cd/sq.m
The same story happens with WP. I prefered 6800K in my last office, but I prefer 5000K for evening work at home. This depends on typical ambient light and on walls color. This may have tint, so better to make simple profile for one (most saturated from box) panel to evaluate the result, than use color pick up tool (WP setting by xy coordinates) and rebuild it. Use these coordinates at other panels, but in some cases we should find similar WP by our eyes (panels may have significantly different lighting spectra, which interfer with ambient lights in our eyes/mind).
Windows GUI don’t use color management in most cases, so ICC profile wont help you to show bizware identically. There’s self-made LUT tool on this forum that can help, but you don’t need it. Set sRGB/photo for all panels and calibrate them to the same WP+brightness+[black level (this works so-so)]. Note that native contrast is usually decreased after vcgt WP correction and sRGB mode usually blocks WP tuning in display menu. Profile Loader wiil put calibration curves correction to videocard 1D LUT, no more correction is needed to you. If you multidisplay videocard don’t have 1D LUT part… it is a problem.
I don’t think that there’s significant difference between IPS and VA panels here, simple make better placement to your taste. I’ve calibrated 32″ VA panel, I saw the image, it’s not critical for office work and eyes fatigue.Thanks for the detailed rundown.
My monitors disable color adjustment in RGB mode. Are you suggesting I just calibrate that mode anyways? The default is not quite balanced.
I’ll try nudging down my brightness a tad when I recalibrate. Unfortunately my screens are both moderately reflective, and seeing my room lights reflected in my work bothers me.
To clarify with ClearType Windows only supports sub-pixel layouts of left to right RGB and BGR which is what most LCD displays have.
So if you rotate the display to portrait orientation the sub-pixels are no longer arranged left to right they are top to bottom. So unless your rotated displays happen to have an uncommon top to bottom sub-pixel layout which becomes left to right when rotated ClearType should be turned off or set for grayscale mode. (i’ll explain grayscale ClearType later)
And again some VA panels use weird sub-pixel layouts since they are using TV panels which are less likely to use the standard left to right RGB or BGR sub-pixel layouts. You could always get a jewelers loupe or magnifying glass and see if you can make out how the pixels are arranged if you want to be sure.
Also ClearType only really works if your monitor has a digital connection and is set to it’s native resolution. VGA is a no go.
Now about grayscale ClearType . Some applications will use ClearType’s anti-aliasing in a grayscale mode. I think Edge does this as well as Windows Store apps. They do this to be friendly to tablets that are more likely to be viewed in different orientations.
It is possible when going through the ClearType tuner to have all ClearType text use this grayscale mode. When you are going through the tuner there will be a screen with 3 choices. The left one is regular ClearType with full saturation of the sub-pixel colors. The middle is 50% saturation, and the right one is grayscale which give you some fairly good font smoothing without any of the color fringing or sup-pixel origination reliance.
It should be noted that some applications don’t follow the defaults set in windows for font smoothing and ClearType so all this might be a waste of time depending on what application you are using. One way to tell how fonts are being rendered in a program is just take a screenshot of it and zoom in and see if the edges are red on one side and blue on the other. Then you know it’s using standard ClearType.
Also as someone else mentioned if you haven’t ever or recently gotten your eyes checked that’s a good place to start if you’re getting headaches. Even mild astigmatism will make reading small text give you headaches. Also you could look into getting some computer reading glasses that have a slight magnification and possibly a yellow tint.
Thanks for more insight into how cleartype works. I could see the bolding and anti-aliasing effects, but some of the later segments of the tuner I really couldn’t notice much of a difference between the texts.
I’ll try the screenshot trick to see if it works in TOS, but to be honest my expectations aren’t high for most parts of the software. The text is usually imbedded in graphics.
I’ll just turn off cleartype for my verticals.
I will have my eyes checked, but I’ve had 20/20 vision all my life, and still did a few years ago last I had them checked. I really do think it’s just a stamina problem, as my eyes only start to get sore after about the 6 hour mark.
My monitors disable color adjustment in RGB mode. Are you suggesting I just calibrate that mode anyways? The default is not quite balanced.
I’ll try nudging down my brightness a tad when I recalibrate.
Set both displays to sRGB/Photo, don’t do anything else. Make fast calibration, use 1xCurve profile type. I’m not sure in correct gamma setting: sRGB gamma will give you more consistent result in sRGB mode, but 2.2 is more close to standard GUI view. Then test profiles, check for brighness levels and redo them in better quality after some brightness tuning for one of displays. Use linear law: if you’ve got 145cdm for the first display while it shows 165 before calibration, and 160 for the second one, tune that fisrt to 165/145*160cdm at pre-calibration stage to get ~160 after calibration, i.e. close to the second display.
