Most Effective Monitor Settings to Reduce Eye Strain

Monitor Settings to Reduce Eye Strain

If you work in an office or even have your own setup at home, staring at a computer screen is likely to give you eye strain. Making your work quite uncomfortable.

If it is something that has been happening for quite some time, chances are that your eyes may start to feel tired and achy. Feeling of Dryness and constant urge of itching your eyes is also normal. Overall, it is unpleasant and may distract you from concentrating on your work.

The primary causes of eye fatigue and eye strain generally boil down to 2 monitor settings:

  1. Contrast
  2. Brightness

Contrast: Contrast is the ratio of the brightness of the brightest white to the darkest black that the monitor can produce. Higher contrast usually means deeper blacks, which has a big impact on the overall image quality of your monitor.

Brightness: This is a measure of the amount of light produced by the monitor. It is given in nits or one candela per square meter (cd / m2). One nit is equivalent to one cd / m2. For monitors performing general tasks, the typical brightness level ranges from 250 to 350 cd / m2.

The good thing however is that by doing minor adjustments and changing a few monitor settings, you can fix it. By making a few changes and some adjustments in your lifestyle, you can stop strain on your eyes. These settings will make your workday much healthier.

Let us have a look at these settings.

What are the Best monitor settings to reduce eye strain?

The best monitor settings to reduce eye strain is to adjust the contrast and brightness. Set contrast to around 60 to 70 percent and adjust brightness according to room light.

For Brightness, there are no specific settings to adjust. However, the following tips will help.

  1. If you are in a bright room or if you have a lot of light around you, you can increase the brightness of your computer monitor.
  2. If you are facing against light or have a pretty dark setting, keep brightness settings of your monitor low.

Other Additional Settings that can Help

Hue:

If changing brightness and contrast settings don’t fix your problem, the next thing that you can try is changing the monitor’s color hue. For brighter surroundings, keep cool settings. For darker surroundings, you should go for warmer hue settings. If you pick some high-end expensive laptops, they have sensors that can adjust these settings automatically.

Text Size:

Increase the text size by up to 3 times the original system settings. Just by increasing the text size, you will help your eyes by giving them lesser stress of reading small-sized letters.

Color Combination:

Our eyes generally tend to prefer black text on a white or a slightly pale white background. Thus, it is recommended to avoid low background color schemes.

Glare Filter:

To cut down on the amount of glare you have on the screen, you can add a glare filter. These are thing screens that can be placed over your monitor screen to cut the glaring that hit your eyes while you work.

Changes in lifestyle:

Changing your monitor: One of the most effective ways to reduce eye strain is by changing your monitor. By purchasing one of the best monitor for eyes, you can solve most of your problems without hassles. These are made especially with settings that are known to reduce fatigue and strain.

20-20-20 Rule:

Follow the 20-20-20 rule. Look away from the screen every 20 minutes, 20 seconds at a time, and focus on a fixed point 20 meters away. To make it easier, there is even a free web app that will remind you after 20 minutes, so you know that you should take a break for your eyes. It is called “Protect Your Vision” and is compatible with major browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.

Monitor Position

Position your screen 20 to 30 inches distant from your face and make sure your eyes match the top of your screen. If you cannot adjust the height of your screen, stack a small stool or maybe a pile of books. Making seat adjustments can also help. The most important thing to remember is to look down a little while you work. The center of the screen should be 15 to 20 degrees below the horizontal level of the eyes.

Eye Care

  1. Use Eye Glasses: Use eyeglasses that tend to cut down blue light from the screen. Consult your optometrist for more details. If you have glasses already, switch to the ones with an anti-glare coating on the lenses.
  2. Using Eye Drops: Consider using an eye moistening eye drop at least once or twice a day. These drops will help to moisten your eyes and refresh your eyes from the stress of work.

Changing Monitor Orientation:

It may sound weird, but it helps. For example, if you are a coder, consider changing monitor orientation to portrait. Using a vertical monitor, you will have a lot of space for code, which can help you perform in a much more efficient manner. You can refer to our vertical monitor setup guide for more information.

Conclusion

These were the best monitor settings you can try out to reduce eye strain. While there is software such as Iris and F.lux available to automate some of the above tasks, they are not perfect. You know your eyes better than such software. By following the basic guidelines we have mentioned above, you can get rid of eye strain very quickly.

If you have any questions, feel free to comment down below.

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