photophobia - which laptop display for my eyes?

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Hello,

I want to buy a laptop, but dont know for which displays to prefer. I know i need a laptop with anti-glare display, but what else is best for my eyes?

When I sit a while at my old desktop LCD-screen (S-IPS, Hp2035) i feel a headache after a while... after some hours its so strong that i cant stare at it any more.

Furthermore, when I go outside and see a car or a bicycle with those new LED-lights, they cause me much more pain than the older lights, therefore I wonder if it would be better to not use a LED display, but one still based on CCFL. Or is that a different story?

So, there are backlight-LED displays, or old CCFL-based LCD-displays (old laptops). Which one is better? Usually displays are recommended which have a higher brightness and a bigger contrast, but is this really the best option for my eyes? Is a WXSGA better for me than a WXGA? A higher resolution better?


best greets for any helpful comments

anton

I asked my computer geek husband and he said you might try wearing sunglasses and see if that helps.

thanks for your reply and asking your computer expert in your house
Actually I am wearing sun glasses as I write this
nice greets, anton

My pleasure Anton. Do the sunglasses help?

Hey Anton, my husband is thinking about you! He just emailed me from work and told me to tell you to try bicycling goggles because you can change the lenses and use different colors that could make a big difference.

Sunglasses sound like a great idea, also LED lit screens are brighter and light up instantly unlike the older kind which are softer and take a few minutes to warm up.

Tablet come with apps these days for night browsing, which allow extra low brightness settings, maybe something like this would also work for a laptop?

If you get a laptop. Make sure you get one with a matte screen, not a glossy one. Another very important thing to note is. If the laptop used a LED back light for the screen (Most if not all do now). You will wanna keep the screen at full brightness, why? Because LED are dimmed using a technique known as Pulse Width Modulation (PWM). What PWM does is dim the light not be lowering the power to the light but rather does it by pulsing it on and off really fast. This pulsing is suppose to happen so fast that you are not suppose to be able to see it. But a person with AS or other sensory disorder. It can cause major headaches and severe fatigue.

i use a typical laptop screen, but i have installed a little background program called F.lux.
this program saturates the colour of your screen with a soft yellow, making it appear a lot less bright. it is supposed to reduce the impact of blue screens at night, but it works wonders during the day too

That will not affect displays. With a car/bike headlight, you are staring straight into the LED, hence you get lots of glare. However, on a display, the LED light is diffused across the whole display area. This is achieved by using lots of layers of material which diffuse and direct the light. Therefore, there should be no glare from the backlight.

If you want a good idea of what is going on with backlights, try watching this Dave Jones video. He demonstrates how the LED light is distributed across a large LCD panel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdtyxt9OLlU

Its hard to advise on things like resolution, as that is usually down to personal preference. For example, you may like the extra "real estate" provided by a larger resolution, or you may prefer a lower resolution so that things appear bigger.