the good doctor on: All Screens Are Not Created Equal

Blog #20, All screens are not created equal.

If you have been involved with Covid you will also have experienced a jump in your screen time. This blog was started a week ago when gravity had a negative effect on my wall-mounted monitor and it crashed to the floor. Time to get a new screen, but what is best, from an optometric point of view? Factors like refresh rate and blue light are important but something I had not given much consideration to before was the curvature of the screen.

Going back to my early days of Optometry at Waterloo, words like horopter and stimulus to accommodation were part of our dinner talk at 58 Columbia (an optometry student house). It is nice to be reminded that these concepts are still relevant when it comes to our eyes. A concave (curved inward) screen makes the edges and the centre of the screen more equidistant, unlike the more common flat screen where the edges are much further from the eye. We must remember, however, that the flat screen was an improvement over the original screens which were actually convex or curved towards the viewer. The old monitors were actually cathode ray tubes.

With the newer concave screen the focus of the eyes does not have to fluctuate when using different areas of the screen. This should noticeably reduce eye strain. It is interesting to note that when we use multiple screens we always lay them out in a curved position in front of us just intuitively..

In an effort to reduce eye strain and improve our experience, some companies are making monitors with curved screens. The cost is comparable. So when my monitor got smashed falling to the floor, I went out and got a 27 inch curved screen. The theory is good, but in practical reality we will see. Maybe the next time you are at Burlington Eyecare, all the staff will have curved screens.

Til next week,

The Good Doctor, Dr. Mark Germain, Burlington Optometrist