Awful LED lights everywhere in USA...and upcoming incandescent ban!

I am already living in this inevitable "future" that you speak of.

https://blog.nus.edu.sg/jeremiahchan/2020/10/12/singapores-lighting-and-its-effects-on-our-health/

In this city, ranked with the highest light pollution in the world, has already been completely replaced islandwide with the following led specs:

Extremely bright light of over 1500nits
7500kelvin
PWM 200 hertz with 99% modulation / 2000 hertz but with even higher brightness intensity

They can be found in everywhere with every 3 - 6 feets (or 1 - 2 meters), across the entire city. Streets, shopping malls, subways, stations, you name it. During the covid lockdown they took the opportunity to renovate ceiling lamps to leds. They even put neon signs and digital bill boards with the above led specs everywhere as well. I have to wear sun hat indoor as their ceiling is typically only 2.5 meters low and I stand at around 1.9m. Therefore, the led is right in my central vision, and only around half a meter from my head.

To cope with this,I have to wear shades (to cut down on the glare and brightness intensity) and 98% blue light fitover glasses(to reduce my sensitivity to flickering) wherever I go outside.

Occasionally, I could even see the led light source flickering in my peripheral vision. That's because while their switch to cheap LED have increased brightness by 2-3 times, they kept the PWM hertz low and modulation high to reduce overall electrical energy consumption. Being able to percieve brighter light flickering in the peripheral vision is due to critical flicker frequency.

Yea, that's just how bad and awful it is. It's inevitable.

jordan Not sure how to take the photo as the light you will see will still be luminescent, but here it is currently using as daylight backlighted in front of my window, hooked up to my macbook laptop, with its screen permanently turned off.

jordan Reds are especially rich, I turned on the laptop display for comparison, not sure if the picture does justice, the laptop screen colors are much pale in comparison, my mobile camera is not that good. But besides color, the strain totally vanishes, you can look at the monitor all day and have zero strain.

jordan Perhaps different people are affected by different things, for me its the light. Color depth is as good as it gets, have a friend, a university professor of mathematics that has the incandescent bulb one and said that he could not believe how vivid the colors are, he spends much of his time in front of a computer as well and his eye and mental strain also vanished. And it makes sense, your primary interface between you and the monitor is light, if you have quality light/photons you have a quality experience. I have been searching for alternatives for many years, first i thought it was display quality, so started getting expensive displays, with no pwm or flicker or blue light, but still didnt make a lot of difference.

beyondthelight Woah. This is one of the coolest looking sites I've seen in years, not joking. So much of this is basically my aesthetic too ahahahaha ꩜꩜꩜ like shockingly close, can't believe I didn't hear about this till now. This is the branding the Daylight folks wish they could have had

The price for the smallest + incandescent included model is super attractive compared to all the other competing sunlit RLCD monitors, if this is not a scam that is…

a 100 CRI monitor with basically the highest gamut coverage achieved yet is something that even the wider display community who doesn't care about strain would stlll care a LOT about. Especially because of the potential for wide appeal anyway, I'll wait to see more coverage on this before I can believe it's legit. I'm not much of a crypto fan so I always will be a bit skeptical whenever that's involved, even though anonymous payments is arguably a valid use.

Looks like it used to be called SolarBacklight before now? Both web domains have the same content (although the font is different).

Open source guide (as mentioned at the end) has such huge potential too. Always great to see this — of course doesn't neccessarily mean much yet until it actually happens though.

(and is satisfying for me to finally see alternate ways of doing this being thought of, as so far all of the methods to achieve wider color gamuts have just been brighter and harsher backlights over and over.

There is still the issue of someone who designs content for this monitor either "requiring" dithering or just having a ton of banding though if they want to gamut map sRGB to it's usual less saturated color space. Much more "true bit depth" than just 8 or 10 would be needed to both keep sRGB at its usual saturation level but allow for higher gamut content as well without any banding or dithering)

No FRC really does 100% matter, for example ONYX BOOX is naturally lit but still uses spatiotemporal dithering to display grayscale in fast mode. It "freezes" when still which is nice and only moves when animations or scrolling is happening. But it remains true that during any movement, the dithering noise will move all over the place to random positions constantly and still causes strain and annoyance for me, even if the backlight is off.

Are you affilated or friends/online friends with them? Given that this is your first post here and your name / pfp seems roughly in line with their branding. Or did the university professor reccomend it to you? In that case are they friends with them?

If it's none of those, how did you find out about it? There's nothing on Google aside from the website itself, and even that hasn't surfaced that high up in results yet

beyondthelight Color depth is as good as it gets

What you are referring to is NOT color depth, this is color gamut. Depth means how many in-between shades or "precision" you can have within a gamut — for example 100% sRGB panels each at 6, 8, or 10 bits will all have the same saturation level if they are told to display RGB 100%,0,0, a properly sRGB calibrated screen reading "100% red" will generate a specific shade and saturation of red.

What changes with depth is not saturation but how many steps are in-between 0 and 100% (where 100% still refers to the same maximum saturation of a gamut). 8-bit means this scale is the common 0-255. 10-bit uses 0-1023 instead. Both will take 255 or 1023 respectively to mean "100% of whatever the native gamut they're built to support and 'max out at' is".

However, the gamut coverage of this display is very groundbreaking if true.

(In fact, as I mentioned earlier, if you want to "accurately" display sRGB gamut content on this display in its usual desaturated form there would only be a very narrow range of e.g. 8-bit to actually represent that —

because, if this display is 8-bit but has such a unconventionally wide native gamut, 255 will mean something more like "100 CRI INCANDESCENT 2004 SPIRAL DREAM RED" and not sRGB red

So either everything is oversaturated [which in this rare case, actually is a positive and actually has the potential to heal instead of hurt because of such a nice lighting method, basically a selling point of this display]…

But if you trying to get color "accuracy" for existing content on this display [which has never been done with such a wide gamut before], there's either LOTS of banding, which I am actually fine with and MUCH prefer instead of dithering FWIW! — or dithering has to be used)

Finally, nothing comes up for the US patent? Am I searching for it wrong on USPTO or does it just not exist (yet)?

DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs I did told them that i was going to promote their monitor as it changed my life, because i know almost nobody knows about it, my professor friend told me about it, i love their website also, I don't know what search engine you are using, in duckduckgo incandescent monitor is the first match that shows up, there are also videos of people making incandescent monitors, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHJx7D-ttdM i guess is something that just  recently was discovered.

jordan BTW, they just added a contact form to the bottom of their site!

I also finally found the Spectrumview patent:

https://ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadPdf/11415835

https://patents.google.com/patent/US11415835B2/en

Interesting that it's been in development all the way since 2019

Seems similar to Eazeye at the surface, but what really intrigues me is how Spectrumview is claiming to offer such wide gamut coverage and seemingly brighter results even with just sunlight, compared to the typical washed out look that other RLCDs have

jordan

the supply chain issue again… still it's refreshing to hear that they are willing to change the panel. Did they mention who makes their panels?

photon78s I have the 27" solar and a 24" incandescent bulb for night, at full incandescent bulb power touching the display feels warm, not too hot, at half power is just room temperature. The light box has three fans running at low speed, its very quiet but you can still hear a whisper, i think it has a pretty good ventilation

jordan Oof, yeah I would not consider buying until there is an option without FRC.

In monitors, FRC consistently gives me much worse symptoms than PWM.

My most reliable laptop actually has some mild PWM (which has a low enough flicker depth to not impact my productivity but occasionally I feel light eye pressure or very minor headaches from).

However, despite this PWM, the reason why I can consistently get so much done on that laptop is that I was pretty much entirely able to eliminate FRC and any image enhancement / post-processing.

Bad high-flicker-depth PWM can totally make a display unusable or very irritating to look at for me too, but FRC and other post-processing methods are always "the ones that really get to me" and cause longer term effects in addition to significantly interfering with reading and learning.

Incandescent colors have so much power to heal but if the display still has FRC that's something I almost always notice, it will prevent this display from living up to its brand and achieving "true expanded 2D peripheral vision field and completely still dreamlike quietness state as if frozen in time ꩜" effect.

DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs I contacted them about the frc color dithering and they said the same thing as Jordan and Photon78s said, its about a supply chain issue, seems non frc panels are really hard to get.

Before I was just like you guys, always searching for the next display or tweak to see if the eye strain disappeared, but now since i got these i don't need to search anything else, because i know i have the best displays available on earth. No joke, the experience changes entirely when you change the light, is much more immersive as well. LED light that fu...s you up, is no coincidence that the name of this forum is LEDstrain.

I guess there are two schools of thought then, one that thinks the strain arrises from software related and the other that the strain arises from the light itself. I have not had any strain whatsoever of any kind, but its just my experience. Besides that the monitors themselves are awesome, they are made of wood, so much nicer than plastic, you can actually feel the hand of the people that made them, these monitors should be three times the price, at least.

I think it would be useful if the company performed the kind of testing folks here are doing with high speed cameras, oscilloscope measurements of PWM, microscope videos of pixel inversion and FRC, color spectrum measurements and more and shared that with us.

LED strain is not only about the static spectrum of the light but also the dynamic fluctuations (flicker) and motion that humans are naturally and biologically wired to be sensitive to. I think natural light sources even if flickering (sun, reflective water, fire, etc.) do not have the same frequencies and rhythms of light intensity and color changes that these displays and other artificial sources produce.

DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs Ok I agree both software and light matter, but more light because light is the raw substance from which the software then gives form, like pottery in which the clay is the substance and then is shaped, but you cannot make fine Chinese ceramic for example with mud, the kind of primal substance defines the boundaries of what can be done with it. So i would first fix the light, and then its configuration and all the ways you can give form to it.

photon78s you are right on target, will pass the word, some more hard core data that can be measured by anyone.

photon78s I think natural light sources even if flickering (sun, reflective water, fire, etc.) do not have the same frequencies and rhythms of light intensity and color changes that these displays and other artificial sources produce.

agree, different types of light have different frequencies and rhythms of intensity and color, but here is where it gets interesting, what is artificial light, how do you define it, is artificial light electric? Then are thunderbolts artificial? My take is the same as the spectrumview site and other sources says, there are really just two types of light, incandescent and luminescent, nearly all electronic displays are luminescent, but there is natural luminescence like in fireflies.

beyondthelight

By artificial and in the context of this forum, I mean light from devices using led based backlight technology, oleds, etc.

This is a great site by a scientist who is also a participant on this forum ("jen" username on this forum):

https://www.flickersense.org/testing-leds-and-screens

Quoting that webpage:

Random flicker might be better than regularly pulsed flicker. Candlelight flickers slowly, but it doesn't harm me and even makes my brain feel a little better when I'm recovering from LED injury.

I view that many natural light sources do not have the same regularly pulsed flicker as our devices (artificial source). FRC (temporal dithering) and pixel inversion are very regular flicker patterns. Lots of measurements (including my own) on this forum confirm the regularly pulsed flicker aspect of current displays.

Also [emphasis mine]:

All of the LED lights that are OK for me have some special quality. Some are DC or have good AC/DC conversion and have low, non-periodic flicker. Some have low flicker that lacks color flicker and that has either a very random pattern or slight randomness to its pattern. This suggests that specific engineering for qualities not yet described by the IEEE report and not yet clearly defined may be required to create safe LEDs.

I wrote previously about what would be a more "ideal" display. I mentioned and included color spectrum as a criteria (WLED backlight spectrum peaks) so I am definitely interested in seeing improvements in the "quality" of the light itself, "the raw substance" as you termed.

https://ledstrain.org/d/2589-products-to-try-or-avoid-pwm-flicker-and-temporal-dithering-testing/158

More about FRC here: https://forums.blurbusters.com/viewtopic.php?t=6799\

I wonder if these older LCDs due to their being not as accuracy as current displays are more comfortable.

Very old LCDs like an early portable TV or old 1994 Thinkpad, had a lot of pixel noise, the electronics weren't able to adjust pixels as accurately as they can today.

I wonder what folks here have to say about this statement from https://forums.blurbusters.com/viewtopic.php?t=6799

Looks to me that FRC is not "below the noise floor" of people's vision despite claims to the contrary [emphasis mine]

Human vision already has natural noise (but most brain filters that). The same problem affects camera sensors.

The important job is to make sure FRC/temporal dithering is below the noise floor of human vision. Also at high resolution, FRC pixels are so fine that it's almost like invisible spatial dithering instead of temporal dithering. Also, FRC is dithering only between adjacent colors in the color gamut, not between widely-spaced colors (like some technologies such as DLP has to).

beyondthelight

Happy that the monitor works for you. At the moment I will wait for more reviews and testing data.

Anyone care to explain this statement:

In fact, many modern light sources, such as LED lights, use a combination of incandescence and luminescence to produce light. Incandescent materials can provide the initial heat to activate luminescent materials, resulting in a more energy-efficient and versatile light source.

Reference: https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/incandescence-vs-luminescence.382420/