Best for the eyes, CRT or LCD?

Does anyone have any opinion on this issue?

I am talking about more than 12 hours/day staring at monitor which can affect eyes, moreover in Air Conditioning room.

Thanks

i hear people swear up and down favoring one or the other. depends on the individual i guess. try a FAIR experiment, under normal room lighting and with common source material...LCDs being better in bright light, CRTs better in darker. settings..

CRT - 75 hz. vsync on.
LCD - digital connection (dvi/hdmi). set source material to native resolution. turn down the brightness (most are made too bright in order to hide poor contrast ratios) - then view the "useable contrast ratio" - the one you will be seeing when brightness is accepable. vsync on. see if ghosting bothers you while scrolling text (try them side by side. i say that because its a fact people see things not otherwise noticed that way - like ghosting on lcds).

proper calibration, latest drivers... what else ok hope it helps.

LCD is just generally better because it doesn't have radiation like CRT's do, also they don't flicker because the entire screen isn't constantly updated like they are on CRT's..

LCD is WAY better to sit in front of then CRT's.. without question

Not entirelly accurate. It is true that LCDs have near zero elecrtromagnetic emission but that does not make them less strenuous to the eye as per se. A good CRT working at 85 or 100 Hz is completely flicker free. Moreover its vastly superior clarity requires of the eye less effort in order to focus on fine details, say, text. That is exasperated by the tendency of manufacturers to turn up the brightness in TFTs in order to cover up for their poorer contrast. CRTs on the other hand with their more vivid coulours can be more tiresome in games but then again their image quality and colour depth is head and shoulders above that of TFTs.

I would have to say that my eyes experiences less strain when I'm looking at an LCD monitor for a prolonged period of time as opposed to CRTs.

Yeah I have an idea as a matter of fact; TFTs are usually too bright at their default settings.

HI,
Ever since I had lazor surgery on my eyes I am now extra sensitive to monitors.
with my experience here are all the things that will help. I need to look at screens for over 8 hours a day, 2 screens at work and im a gamer at home.

1) drop the crt if your using one. i cant even look at one now for over 1/2 hour now
2) keep your screen al least at arms length away.

remember even with lcd, selection of the bigger screen the harder on the eyes.
pick the largest size of a comfortable range with the smallest native resolition.
some lde pixels are way too small , a good size is 22" wide 1600x1050.

monitor brightness -- thats where it's at.. You need something that can tone down its bright whites without compromising overall color. Contrast just dont cut it.
turn off any color enhancement features as they hurt too. All these features are signs of an extra bright monitor. The worse monitor i ever owned i called it the eyebleeder.. HP 24" widescreen. cd400 brightness is a big no no for eye eyestrain. cd300 is ok. 250 is prefered if you can find them.
Bleeding of light is another indicator of a screen that is too bright. If you place up a black screen and see loads of light around the edges then it could cause problems. THe best i have seen for no bleeding is Dell. I can stare at 2 of them all day ar work with no issues. there is 0 light bleeding on my work screens. I just turn the brightness down some and it's cuts out the extra bright white intensity.

Another note.. If you find any monitor that you can turn the brightness down to 0 and it's still bright! well that should speak for itself! skip that complete model line for your choice.

Now for monitor settings. ATI has some nice features for this . you can set desktop and 3d enviroment seperatly.
In the color settings, you can select a feature call saturation.. its kinda like the same color enhancment feature monitor provides. if your color seems a bit too cartoon like. Open up a personal outdoor photo and adjust so it looks "real" not extra nice and bright.
Gamma can also be toned up afterwards if you find some of the blacks are now too dark. this is found under color settings also. contrast adjust normally.

The last thing i can think of is font and remember ever bit counts. You need to use true type font on an lcd , this is great for reducing eyestrain. Do whatever you can to keep your font clear. ALWAYS run your LCD in native resolution, any less will cause pixel blending over the additional pixels ( blurred text ). this is very important.

For me Dell and Samsung are the best. Dell is by far most superior in ever way for reducing strain. ( i never tried the new 23 + screens but plann to ) possible they may be a bit bright also. Dell is the only monitor that clearly had no light bleeding out around the edges up to there 22" That will be my next test is i ever decide to go 23" + i have to weigh in the fact tho that the 23" has extra small pixels tho well. wither way. I wrote this hoping to help everyone with this. There was and still times i strain my eyes so bad i cant even looks at tail lights at the car in front of me when following another car to work.. yeah.. its that bad. Today I manage my eyes to be able to play games for a few extra hours a day.. anyway.. Good luck to you all.

Hello,

I have doubts these days on which monitor to choose. Had laser surgery also, 1 month ago, and now need to find good LCD (It has to be LCD because CRT are not practical anymore) Heard something about "Eye protectin" models but did nto hear whhich are they Acer, Dell Samsung or some else.
Could you please tell me for some good LCD 19"+ 4:3 with, especialy designed with eye

Cheersprotection

There are seemingly conflicting statements on the Internet regarding LCD and CRT monitors.
One side says that CRTs are better, while the second side prefers LCDs.

I will explain what is going on according to what I have learned while studying this topic and thinking about it every day for more than a whole year, but first I will tell you a bit about my experiences with monitors.

Since my childhood i have been watching 50 HZ CRT TV for almost every day of my life. I never had serious eye problems. At the age of 16 I bought a PC with a 75 Hz CRT monitor and spent about as much time with it as I did prior to that with watching TV. After updating to Windows XP, the operating system set 60 Hz on my monitor instead of 75 Hz. This damaged my eyes slightly and it was hard to use the PC until I noticed the problem and corrected it. My eyes were fine afterwards, but only until I got a notebook with a Liquid Crystal Display. At that time I was studying at my university and had a lot of stress and fear of exams. I had a poor nutrition and not much sleep. This resulted in me having weakened my nervous system, but I didn't know that back then. The LCD notebook wasn't used much at first, but when I started using it like I was used to with CRTs, I started to have increased pain in my eyes that wouldn't go away. Since ruining my eyes with the LCD I developed an intolerance to every other type of monitor as well. Out of all currently available monitors I could use a CRT the longest - about 15-30 minutes a day. Afterwards the eyes would hurt double as much until I had a good night's sleep. I had constant pain in my eyes for more then a year, even without using monitors anymore.

Here is the explanation regarding CRTs and LCDs:

LCDs.

While the Liquid Crystals of an LCD have no real flicker in proper LCDs (without the mentioned Hi-FRC), the backlight of such a monitor is a CCFL (Cold Cathode Fluorescent Lamp) that has high frequency flicker of about 20 Khz (numbers vary with different monitors). The theory said that this flicker is too fast for the eyes to notice and this aspect of the LCD was totally ignored or regarded as a very "unlikely" reason for the problems of a small percentage of the population with LCDs. While it seems to be true that this flicker isn't bad for the eyes directly, it harms the nervous system, for the brain is unconsciously affected by this high frequency flicker. By weakening the nervous system, the flicker of the CCFL backlight would cause pain in the weakest parts of the body or the part that was the most used during the exposure to the backlight's flicker - the eyes. Additionally, LCD pixels are not fully back when black pixels are required, but are leaking this high frequency flickering light.

LESS SIGNIFICANT (BUT IMPORTANT) FACTORS: The CCFL has too much blue in its spectrum. Blue is harder for the eyes to process and may contribute to eye pain. Too much of it can have bad hormonal effects.

LCD CONCLUSION: The flickering backlight of an LCD can be bad for the eyes indirectly through the nervous system. Most people with a healthy nervous system will find LCDs better for their eyes until the state of their health changes, for LCDs are indeed better for the eyes directly, but bad for the nervous system, which makes them bad for the eyes of people with a sick nervous system indirectly. Plus, the flickering light comes from every pixel of the screen, even through the completely 'black' ones. Flickering light = bad for the nervous system. More flickering light = worse for the nervous system.

CRTs.

CRTs, on the other hand, are much less bad for the nervous system, because of the lower frequency of their flicker. I have realized that the higher the frequency of flickering light, the worse for the nervous system. But if the Hz settings are too low (like 50 - 65 Hz), they might be bad for the eyes directly. This is why some people can't use CRTs.

Different people have different limits in consciously perceiving flicker in CRTs. This is called the Flicker Fusion Threshold (FFT) and some people can even consciously perceive flicker above 100 Hz.

CRT's have completely black pixels and let less flickering light to enter your eyes.

LESS SIGNIFICANT (BUT IMPORTANT) FACTORS: The radiation of CRTs can also be bad for the nervous system and may contribute to eye pain.

CRT CONCLUSION: CRTs are less bad for the nervous system and your eyes will hurt less if the pain is nervous system related, but a low Hz setting and an individual FFT sensitivity may cause the monitor to be directly bad for the eyes.


SOLUTIONS. The solutions are monitors without flicker:

1) Using an LED backlit LCD with full brightness.

All LED LCDs use Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) and flicker at 99% brightness and less. Some even flicker at 100% brightness, so you have to be lucky. The brightness has to be set to 100 % in the displays menu . To make it less bright one can lower the brightness in the graphic card's menu. It will have no effect on the PWM dimmer and the backlight won't flicker.

2) Modifying an LCD to work with incandescence as I did.

More about this topic here: http://vasyafromukraine.webs.com/

Of course, eye strain from focusing on a monitor is an important factor. Everyone should take brakes and not forget to blink. But when you can't look at an LCD for 10 minutes without having hard to describe eye pain, then you know that there is something else. That's about how much I could use an LCD - from feeling the pain instantly to using it for 10 minutes. All that it took for me to be able to use the same LCD all day long was to change the flickering CCFL backlight to non-flickering incandescent light.

So don't underestimate flicker!

If you can use an LCD longer - great. If you have a weakened nervous system and prefer CRTs, then you should stay with them. If your nervous system is weakened to the degree that mine was, then I suggest either not using monitors at all or getting one that has no visible or invisible flicker, like the one I mentioned. More information on my site.

I'm not sure about the use of an LCD for 12 hours, even with a healthy nervous system. Besides, so many other dangers are connected with it that no one would say it's healthy with any monitor. Even reading a book for 12 hours a day every day would be bad for a lot of things, not just the eyes.

Yes, it seems that the majority of people is immune against the ultra-fast ccfl flicker, but there are more and more people having very similar symptoms to mine, maybe less intense, but they are definitely present.

pcnate seems to be one of us and is mildly affected by this:

"I have found that LCDs are much more tiresome on my eyes than any CRT that I have ever seen, except those that have a refresh below 75 or 85 Hz

I do not understand why this is.

Does anyone have any ideas?"

It is also true that many in my situation can't use monitors to write on forums about their problems. This is why the problem seems smaller than it really is. Many can't even go to stores with fluorescent lighting and have to live an isolated life. These people (including me) often have no idea why this is happening, for everyone is saying that LCDs are better for the eyes and that fluorescent lamps are safe, but what no one is saying is that the flicker, not consciously perceived, can be bad for the nervous system and cause these symptoms. You can read about how I got to that conclusion on my website http://vasyafromukraine.webs.com/

As a matter of fact, I am taking anti-epileptic pills as part of my efforts to completely recover from this, prescribed by a proper doctor, of course. To recover from this takes a lot of time, more than a year. While I am much better today, I still can't use LCDs with CCFLs or be near fluorescent lamps (all fluorescent lamps flicker). I can only use the incandescent LCD that I modified and LED backlit LCDs at full brightness, when no flicker is present. CRTs are a lot better for me than LCDs with flicker, but they flicker too. I'm avoiding them completely after having found better monitor solutions.

You can read about similar cases, where people can't use LCDs or fluorescent lamps on many sites on the internet. To get to know this problem I would recommend reading this first: www.cloanto.com/users/mcb/19960719lcd.html

To find the most incredible accounts of how fluorescent lights can affect a small part of the population go here: http://www.businessweek.com/the_th [...] s_the.html

The problem definitely exists and I'm not the only one having it. The symptoms may vary slightly, but generally eye discomfort, eye pain, headaches, dizziness are the most common ones. I believe that they are all nervous system related. This is a very important issue and it is not taken seriously enough.

My intention for writing this is to make people more aware about this problem. You are very fortunate if you have no problems with flicker in light sources. Remember, the sun has no 20 kHz flicker. We are not meant to be under flickering light.

The flicker of a CRT is less bothersome because it has a much lower frequency.
Also, flickering light comes from every pixel in an LCD, because there are no completely black pixels in LCDs, unlike in CRTs.

I have looked at factors such as glare, size, brightness, ambient light a long time ago. I have tried almost every tip on the Internet that one can find. None of the most likely reasons were the case. I know It's hard for you to believe this, because you are not affected, just as it is hard for me to imagine you using a CCFL LCD for 15 hours with my experiences with CCFL backlight.

How else would you explain me not being able to use my AMOLED phone for 5-10 minutes without eye pain, but being able to use it all day long with will brightness?
There are 5 levels of brightness in this phone. With it set to 4 I can't use it, but when it's set to 5 it works for me. We know that it uses PWM and flickers when not at full brightness. I'm using the phone under the same conditions, only with the difference of it having no flicker and it being brighter, which should be harder on the eyes because I find it too bright.

The same goes for LED LCDs at full brightness and the incandescent LCD that I modified. The common denominator is flicker.

What about plasma? I think unfortunately the smallest you can get is a 42" TV, but using that as a monitor might help. I know whenever I am at a place like Best Buy looking at TV's, the plasma sets are easiest o my eyes and seem to not strain them.