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
