Originally Posted by zacheryjensen
This is a myth, that's not what causes eye strain on computer screens. What causes eye strain is a combination of poor eye sight or too great of distance from the screen for your font size and poor brightness settings. You will get sore eyes staring at any reflective surface if it's too brightly lit or not brightly lit enough. It has nothing to do with there being a back light.
In reality the only reason these readers are causing less eye strain for people is because you can easily position them for comfortable distance and lighting. It's hard to reposition computers, even laptops, due to size and shape issues.
Using a handheld device with backlit LCD where you set the brightness correctly, use appropriate font sizes, you will not get eye strain either.
E-Ink is cool and all but it's propagation of a myth to think it, on its own, is a solution to eye strain. Proper lighting and font size (relative to distance from your eyes) are the matters leading to eye strain. Get corrective eye wear if you have poor eye sight, even when using a standard computer screen and that can go a long way to dissolving eye strain. Fixing the screen brightness (usually lowering it but sometime raising it depending on ambient light) is secondary to that.
Some less important factors for eye strain include the distance you scan during regular use. For example, if you are reading on a computer screen and you have the page set up so that you're reading across the entire screen that's going to have your eyes sweeping your whole computer screen over and over. That's bad. Use smaller page widths, show a few on a screen at once if you like. Another way e-Ink based readers help without actually needing to be e-Ink based. They are small screens so not much text can fit width-wise.
Another is staring at anything at nearly the same distance for long periods of time is the eye's equivalent to holding up your arm in the same position for a long time. It causes muscle pain. That's what eye strain is, fyi, it's muscle pain. With a handheld reader you will move it around and not even realize that you're helping your eyes by doing so. If you're stuck at a computer screen the best solution to this problem is to take breaks for your eyes. The best way to relax the eyes is to stare off into the distance. If you have a window, look out of it at the horizon, as far as you can look without squinting for focus.
Squinting, staring, large sweeps, poor lighting (leading to squinting) and other similar stresses can occur just as much on an e-Ink screen, or even a paper book, as they can on a fixed or portable backlit LCD. It's a matter of adjusting the situation to benefit your eyes, something that most portable eBook readers lead you to do without even thinking about it, that solves eye strain. It's not a magic feature of E-Ink.
E-Ink is great for battery life, and easy to read in brighter lit areas such as outside. It has relatively poor contrast these days but nothing worse than your run of the mill cheapo mass market paperback. It's a cool technology but it's not, on its own accord, a solution to eye strain.
As someone whose career and hobbies have had him staring at all kinds of terribly small and irritatingly blocking text on bad monitors for 20 years, 10+ hours per day, I can assure you that there's no reason you have to suffer eye strain on a backlit screen. If you suffer eye strain, go to the eye doctor, explain it, and they will help give you tips on how to fix it, and possibly recommend reading glasses or the like to deal with it.
As one last tip, remember that all modern computers can adjust font sizes, both throughout the whole system and often within a random application. For example, in most browsers you can increase and decrease font sizes arbitrarily in the menu or with keyboard shortcuts like alt-+ or alt-- or command-+/command-- for mac users.
|