I will say, it does seem to make it easier to fall asleep at night.

OLED displays have a different problem; they have so much noise at low brightness that the image falls apart. Still, I think a monochrome OLED display is what the person who wrote this article actually wants. It would have better performance in every respect to E-Ink, and it doesn't sound like their application requires E-Ink's low power.

On the other hand, E-Ink is amazing in sunlight, where smartphone displays can't get sufficiently bright.

On the various Android devices I've owned, I've used a useful app called Screen Filter that adds a translucent layer on top of all apps to dim the screen beyond the artificial manufacturer-imposed minimum brightness, which worked especially well on OLED Android phones, but also LCDs worked fine too.

That said, I don't think reading in poor lighting conditions is a good idea for your eyes, no matter the technology.

OLED displays have a different problem; they have so much noise at low brightness that the image falls apart. Still, I think a monochrome OLED display is what the person who wrote this article actually wants. It would have better performance in every respect to E-Ink, and it doesn't sound like their application requires E-Ink's low power.

My understanding too is that OLEDs can have "true black" pixels that emit no light at all. For "dark mode" style screens, this is a huge benefit, because the majority of the screen may simply be turned off. Conventional LCD screens still send current to each pixel, but the "black" is simply tuned to a dark frequency, rather than being altogether off.

The question is whether the intensity is discussed in the link. My point was that the discussion is more to do with the frequency of light than with intensity.

Sure, think of things like polarizing filters, lasers, etc.

Polarization is just related to the orientation of the electromagnetic waves, and it is a property I didn't mention, you're correct. I don't think it really matters here, though. It's kind of like which direction you shine a light, except whether the waves are all oriented the same way or not. I would almost argue that it's an extrinsic property since uniform polarization is almost exclusively the realm of external things like filters, not the light source itself.

Your "etc." is a little vague.

Ok, light can be described by its intensity and wavelength. So what? Can you tie this to the original parent post?

You can break it down further - intensity is just the "number" of packets (photons). So, really, light is just frequency and travels at max speed (C) because photons are massless.

Where are we going with this discussion?

Edit: I am not able to respond to you below so I am responding here. You're right on this one - it doesn't matter what the originating source is, light is light whether it is reflected or emitted.

So, the saying that light is just "intensity and frequency" is naive and flat-out incorrect.

Which things can a light source vary, besides wavelength and intensity? It's easy to define intensity in this context as the photons being emitted per period of time. This isn't like trying to define the intensity of sound as an intrinsic property, when it really depends on a number of actually intrinsic variables.

*within a given medium, which is external to the light... which means it won't change based on reflected vs LCD.

Starting by pointing out that intensity and wavelength are the only intrinsic properties is a great starting place.

You still haven't pointed out any additional properties that have any bearing on how your retina is affected. I was wrong the say that there were no other properties, since we can endlessly discuss the quantum nature of light or how it experiences no flow of time since it travels at the speed of light or all sorts of other properties...

but none of these things change based on the light source. Light is light, except for the intensity and wavelength. Unless we're willing to consider things which could affect reflected light just as much as they could affect emitted light, since they're the same thing. Light.

I'm not sure why you're so set on this obviously inaccurate thing and are now moving the goalposts to stuff about retinas and what the meaning of 'intrinsic' is. All I'm saying is both light and especially the perception of it are fairly complicated. You can just read up on it like everyone else instead of building a weird messageboard logic hill fort.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Now, does this have any meaningful bearing on e-ink displays? The contrast ratio is closer to stuff you get in the natural world, but apart from that it's still a monitor.

>visual systems fed from a constrained input domain lose the ability to meaningfully represent real-world input.

Seems to imply that looking at a computer monitor for too much of your life means you won't be able to see the real world, or not "see it right", whatever that means.

The only example of that I've seen is some people (kids, presumably) commenting on the Nvidia RTX demo videos that the non-raytraced versions, which lack real world lighting dynamics, look "better" than the raytraced ones, which were, to me at least, obviously closer to physically realistic, representative images. Now, whether they were saying that because their eyes have literally programmed themselves for cheaply rendered video game worlds, or because they didn't want to face spending the asking price of the RTX hardware, is up to the reader.

If a monitor has bad contrast and you turn up the brightness, that's not the fault of the light source. That monitor still won't even come close to the amount of blue light that a blue sky emits, even at maximum brightness.

Personally, I think all monitors made in the last 10 years should be as legible at low brightness as a piece of paper is in an equally poorly lit room.

On the other hand, passive displays (books, e-ink) by their nature inherently match ambient lighting conditions, because they simply reflect ambient light. This is the equivalent of a monitor with a much wider range of contrast and brightness levels equipped with an automatic adaptive adjustment with sub-nanosecond response times, something that simply does not exist with present technology.

So yes, in theory a monitor could potentially match a passive display in terms of reducing eye strain and tiredness but in practice it is beyond the state of the art for now.

Edit: thank you, Dark Reader[0]

[0]https://darkreader.org/