Yes, it is.
One thing is reading a newspaper in which text amounts to a good percentage of the available area, and the rest reflects ambient light, and a whole different thing is a screen with some text in the middle and the free area emitting white light right to my eyes, de facto saturating them.
I would never read a white text on black paper newspaper, neither in the dark nor in the light, but I surely find dark mode on screens a billion times more readable than traditional light modes. Useable e-paper displays might change that one day, but the technology is still in its infancy.
Emitted light isn't a problem per se, because reflected photons aren't somehow radically different from emitted ones. Color and brightness profile is the problem. On a display, you have to have high contrast and brightness for images (that have lots of darker areas), so the system interface is in turn tuned for this high brightness—and then you have to deal with bright white under text.
Note how text on e-ink is excellently readable but photos look like crap—since they aren't carefully selected and adjusted for the medium like in print.
On screens, black text on a-bit-gray-with-a-hint-of-red is better, like here on HN, though still not the same. I wonder if it's possible to get close to paper/e-ink colors on an LCD/OLED screen, or the backlight's color profile is too different (apparently LEDs emit narrow bands of wavelengths, which might be harsher for the eyes—while sunlight and incandescent lights have all or most of the visible spectrum).
These are good points but miss an essential part of the story: reflected light almost by definition matches the brightness of the surrounding environment, meaning that the periphery is roughly the same brightness and white balance as the reading medium.
If I look at my laptop on full brightness in a nearly pitch black room, it is far less comfortable to read than if I turned on a lamp.
So there are two solutions to this. Turn on a lamp if you're using a screen at night time, and lower your brightness to have roughly the same level as the ambient light.
Or, use night mode if you don't want to turn a lamp on.
If I'm doing something like programming, I prefer the former. If I'm just in bed and feeling lazy and want to read twitter, I go for the latter so I don't have to turn a lamp on.
Yes, it probably correlates with ambient light. I like light mode but I also like to open the blinds, turn on the lamps etc, as opposed to the stereotypical dark basement hacking with a hoodie on.
Dark mode is also very often buggy, clumsy, the color schemes for syntax highlight are subjectively less pleasing, it feels gloomier, less cheerful, I see more distracting dust on the screen, smudges etc. Yeah I could also clean it more etc. The point is there can be multiple equilibra, one develops habits and preferences. It's not an absolute thing.
I use gruvbox, light when there is a lot of light around (e.g. im outside) and dark mode when im indoors.
There is more to this than all the biological talk too.
I use it as a context switch and prefer to review code in light mode, while i prefer to write code in dark mode.
Either it helps with the context switching or reading is just easier in light mode, while writing is easier in dark mode because its easier focus in on what im writing.
I think given a lot of people prefer dark mode for various things, people should assume they lack all the information for making bold claims based on biological studies alone.
Also I'm becoming more and more convinced that we humans are extremely adaptive. With regards to major and minor things as well. People can adapt to eating 6 small meals a day and then swear they would not be able to concentrate after skipping one of them. Others eat one meal a day, exercise fasted and skip entire days of food and report very good mental clarity and love it. Some only eat vegan and with a few supplements live very well. Other eat purely carnivore (exclusively salt, meat and water) and report good results after an initial phase of toilet hell.
Some people never exercise and live to 90 years. Some people are night owls and do their best work at 3 AM and have no concept of a schedule but get stuff done brilliantly. Others have to dogmatically stick to a schedule and a rigid morning and evening routine and swear by waking up at 4:30.
Partially it's their genetics but a huge part is habits and adaptation. Humans can function in the polar circle, in the jungle, on the savanna, in urban hell, in the suburbs, on farms etc.
Any study that wants to test the difference in benefits of different habits would need to allow for the adaptations to take place, the adjacent habits to adjust to the new style etc. You cannot just take one thing in isolation. Maybe I like light color schemes because I do most of my work in the daylight and sleep at night. There can be tons of confounders and doing months long randomized studies is rare.
As a photographer, as well as a Technical PM who spends all their time on a computer, and a non-zero amount of time optimizing my setup, and someone who has taken photos of computers and done exactly this to get the exposure correct: I don't know why I didn't think of doing this on a daily basis!
Every time I bought a new computer monitor in the last 10+ years, I had to turn the brightness way down in order to use it comfortably. I've gone as far down as 8% with some of the brightest monitors, and even with more reasonable ones I rarely go above 40%. Maybe these things are designed to be readable outdoors in direct sunlight. They're absolutely not suitable for indoors use, especially at night.
The other emitted-photon difference is flashing. If your monitor uses pulse width modulation to dim, any brightness under 100% is going to flash high-frequency lights at your eyes.
Supposedly if this is done fast enough it's not unhealthy, but it's a case of "no solid evidence it's bad for you" plus anecdotal links to headaches. I have personally had drastically fewer screen headaches since leaving my hardware brightness on 100% and lowering brightness via the driver.
I'm a believer in the spectrum thing, too. I find halogens way easier on the eyes than ultra-power-saving diodes.
The issue with emitted light is that it can be too bright and/or be at a vastly higher brightness than ambient.
When you read a book or a newspaper the brightness naturally fits with ambient light.
It's hard on the eyes to read a book on the beach because of the brightness (same effect as a snowy landscape under the sun).
Dark modes usually lower the brightness overall and reduce the contrast with ambient light as well.
How photos look on e-ink depends on how the SW is implemented. If dithering is used, then yes, random photos look like crap. But it can also use shades of gray (8, or 16), which is slower to update, but looks much better.
I am old enough to have written programs when "dark mode" was the default (black background and green or amber text, 40 columns, 80 columns if you were lucky), and I can tell you that light mode is much easier on my eyes.
Black text (real black, not this fancy grey web designers seem to prefer) and white background on a properly adjusted monitor where the white doesn't blind you is my go-to since monitors became good enough to make it possible.
By contrast, I am old enough to have written programs when "dark mode" was the default (black background and green or amber text, 40 columns, 80 columns if you were lucky), and I can tell you that dark mode is much easier on my eyes.
”... we strongly recommend that designers allow users to switch to dark mode if they want to — for three reasons: (1) there may be long-term effects associated with light mode; (2) some people with visual impairments will do better with dark mode; and (3) some users simply like dark mode better.”
And from a StackOverflow discussion:
Visual fatigue research: Unfortunately I could not find very much research which measured computer screen visual fatigue in comparison to black-on-white text as opposed to white-on-black. The only piece I could find was a short reference in "Reading text from computer screens" by Mills and Weldon (1987) from the journal ACM Computing Surveys. Section 4.1 of that paper, titled "polarity", goes over important works at the time, including this piece:
”In contrast to the results in these studies, Cushman [1986] found that subjects who read continuous text from positive contrast (light character) VDTs reported less visual fatigue (as measured on a subjective rating scale) than those who read from negative contrast (dark character) VDTs.”
I mean, parent post said "easier on my eyes" and "ymmv". It doesn't take much convincing for me to believe that light mode is easier on parents eyes and dark mode is easier on your eyes. I believe you.
It depends on the amount of light. Try reading a book outside on a clear summer day when the sun is at its zenith. Your eyes won't even stand it. It doesn't matter that the light comes from a direct source or from reflection. We can easily imagine more extreme experiments using mirrors and spotlights.
I find it weird that people feel the need to defend dark mode preferences based on arguments about why they think it's "objectively" better.
Does it matter? I mean, do you have to have a reason for preferring dark mode? I like dark mode because it looks better (to me).
I also prefer multi-color boxer shorts over white briefs. Does there have to be a justification? No. It's an aesthetic choice just like dark-mode, font-size, and color-temperature.
Could you explain what you consider to be the difference between emitted and reflected light? I'm asking because in the models of global illumination that also handle emissive materials that I've worked with, there's literally no difference between whether a photon was emitted by a surface, or came from somewhere else and bounced off the surface. So I'm trying to understand if there's some fundamental property here (e.g. like polarization) or LED color reproduction at play, that CG models don't capture. Because as soon as you have a ray of light with a certain intensity and mix of wavelengths, it really shouldn't matter how it was produced, so I'm trying to understand the quantitative difference in what is produced.
One of the more obvious differences is that paper is very close to a Lambertian reflector while LCD pixels are more directed. Hence the LCD viewing angle problem, though that gap is closing.
Apart from that, I think it mostly comes down to the fact that an LCD pixel doesn't actually change it's reflected colour when it starts emitting light of a different colour. This means that incident light falling upon the pixel and being reflected will necessarily become noise -- it won't contribute to the image. For instance, if the colour of the LCD surface is some kind of grey and the LCD is emitting green, the resulting colour will be
incident * r_reflected + emitted
Where `incident` is the incident light from the environment, `r_reflected` is some factor (< 1) representing the amount of grey component reflected from the incident light and `emitted` is the emitted green light. The result is some kind of mix of grey + green.
On the other hand, if you had a green coloured paper, then there is no emitted component so it becomes just
incident * r_reflected
Where `r_reflected` now represents the proportion of green light that is reflected. The end result is a more pure green.
Ok, that makes sense. But does any of that have any bearing on eye strain? Because it sounds mainly like a color reproduction issue, which seems pretty orthogonal to the whole 'black text on white background vs white text on black background' debate.
Emissive displays don't react to incident light in the same way as paper, even if they try. And they've been trying for a long time -- my grandmother had a TV from the 1970s with an ambient light sensor that would match the ambient color temperature.
They are always set too bright. I always wondered why are they simply not adaptive: you turn it on, and then set the brightness that you find comfortable. Then it adjust the brightness as ambient light changes by extrapolating from your chosen point.
Better systems could let you calibrate multiple points, so they would interpolate instead if extrapolate, but even a single point calibration would be amazing.
FWIW, I've tried dark mode and have to enlarge font sizes to read stuff compared to using very dim setting on my screens and light mode. I felt like I was in minority so didn't bother with exploring further.
But, I did realise and investigate blinking issue (I've got dry eyes, worse due to contacts and lots of screen time). I even have a few experiments in mind (like the typing break apps of old, I want my computer to trigger my blinking without adverse effects; whether it's by bluring content for a couple ms at a time to trigger eye refocus and blink, or whether it's something else, I still need to test it).
"FWIW, I've tried dark mode and have to enlarge font sizes to read stuff compared to using very dim setting on my screens and light mode."
I think the article mentions this indirectly, but then attributes it. Your pupils are going to adjust to the amount of light entering them a lot (most?). This means like a camera, a smaller hole will be less sensitive to focal problems.
So, unless you perfectly compensated for the amount of light coming from your display its likely the brighter backgrounds were dumping more light, reducing your pupils and making things clearer.
The first time I saw one of these in the flesh, it was striking. I'd be surprised if this kind of context-awareness in screens didn't work its way into most devices within the next decade.
>Yes, it is. One thing is reading a newspaper in which text amounts to a good percentage of the available area, and the rest reflects ambient light, and a whole different thing is a screen with some text in the middle and the free area emitting white light right to my eyes, de facto saturating them.
Photos are still photons. You can adjust the brightness of the monitor to be the same of a newspaper that reflects your favorite light intensity.
Apple's computers already do that, they have a sensor and adjust the backlight, some can even adjust the color tone to match the ambient light. I know, sounds like the future, but they had it for a while.
But, you often can’t turn down the brightness that much. And anyway the contrast of monitors is many times worse than the contrast of a printed newspaper. Photons are photons, but a screen sends very different pattern of photons to your eyes than a newspaper.
Is this true? Printed newspaper is the crappiest kind of paper as far as contrast goes. Anyway OLED monitors have good contrast and their brightness can be arbitrarily adjusted.
Then you need to get a better monitor. Some of the cheaper ones out there are insanely bright just so they can put larger numbers in the brightness and contrast columns. Good panels have decent contrast even when you turn down the brightness.
Hold a piece of paper next to the display. If a white background on the display (e.g. open Notepad) is noticeably brighter than the paper, dial down the display's brightness.
At work my brightness dial is down to 0. At home it's at 16.
It looks wrong at first, but you'll get used to it within a day or so. Colleagues coming to your desk will remark upon it.
I completely agree. Modern screens are made to stay readable in direct sunlight. The maximum brightness is really high. The screen I'm currently looking at is at 6/100 and I could probably turn it down a bit more.
I would love to have a good e-paper laptop for coding, reading and communicating. I actually consider today (and even 5-yr-old) e-paper displays perfectly usable for all real tasks except watching video and playing realtime games. Compilers and editors (and web pages) should change to avoid unnecessary output and require less screen updates though (this would actually be great anyway - whatever kind of screen I have I prefer unnecessary presentation dynamicity to be avoided).
I've seen a couple who hacked together setups using Android e-ink tablets, but I'd love to see someone make (and sell) a product with a little more polish.
The main barrier is that almost all modern GUIs depend on high refresh rates, but it's not hard to imagine a GUI designed from the ground-up for ePaper. Little-to-no transitions, pagination instead of scrolling, maybe a customized version of Firefox with a prominent Readability toggle, etc
I wouldn't be surprised if the e-ink display market exploded in the near future with Dasung getting the refresh rate into usable territory and the availability of color e-ink. I been trying a couple of things to help with eye fatigue and the following helped me quite a bit: setting up "Breaks For Eyes" for osx to remind about taking breaks, switching to the light "Brutalist" theme for emacs and moving most of my longform reading to a Boox e-ink tablet, though I wish the Android Pocket app would support pagination and there was a good Reader-mode-by-default browser.
Doesn't unnecessary refresh deterioration the e-ink display and diminish its power efficiency? I really see no reason for the display to refresh until the actual information you need to view changes. What do you need a higher refresh rate for? Wobbly window effects, smooth scrolling, verbose build output and intense action games?
I really don't want the screens to adapt by increasing refresh rates, I want the software to adapt by ditching scrolling for pagination, giving up unnecessary visual effects, decreasing verbosity (only displaying what I really want to see) etc.
My old Kobo Aura e-reader (gen 2 I think, amazing device) had a browser built-in. On one occasion I had to use it to log in and retrieve flight details when my phone battery died. That was probably my most frustrating tech experience of the last five years. Partly, the browser app was not great, but also because every single action required multiple 1-second long refreshes of the screen. Type a letter? Refresh. Scroll? Multiple refresh. Zoom? Multiple refresh. Select a button? Multiple refresh. Press the button? ... you get the picture.
As you say, every app and website would need to be completely redesigned to work with e-paper. I don't see that happening, but even then typing or editing text with a long delay is very annoying, as anyone who has used SSH over a slow connection will tell you.
> Type a letter? Refresh. Scroll? Multiple refresh. Zoom? Multiple refresh. Select a button? Multiple refresh. Press the button?
That's because the damn smooth visual effects. Most of the transitions between these states are animated in a multiple number of frames. There would be no problem if it switched straight to the target state. Also scrolling should be replaced with pagination and zooming should ask you to enter the percentage rather than let you zoom visually.
> As you say, every app and website would need to be completely redesigned to work with e-paper.
I really wish every app to be designed that way anyway - that would mean less of pointless fun but much more of eye and brain comfort.
I don't know if there is a scientific paper on this but it feels like moving stuff depletes brain resources much faster, causing more stress and attention deficit.
The only thing I want displayed is what really needs to be displayed (exactly what I have came to view + some useful auxiliary information perhaps). The only thing to update at any given moment of time is what really needs to be updated.
As for smooth transition visual effects I have always hated them altogether and always disabled them on every PC I used.
I recently got a Likebook Mars and since it's got Android 6 and Google Play store, it works perfectly out of the box for my purposes (emails, reading, writing). Not gonna replace your computer any time soon, but great for focusing on one simple task, would highly recommend:
I'm in the market for an external display to be used for text/coding only, in portrait mode. An e-paper display would be ideal. A quick search just seems to show that these displays are only sold as modules and no one is selling a finished product unless you go for something completely over-featured (e.g. wacom tablet). Do you have any recommendations?
I use termux and boox 3 for this and it works amazingly well. The main reason why I haven't switched 100% to not using a laptop is that I haven't found a portable keyboard to go with it yet.
In some sense your eye might not care, but it really do seem that either eye or the brain cares. Not necessarily about the background or foreground itself unless the background is really bright, but something more like the relative contrast of our entire field of vision, and interacting with the size of elements.
A good black and white (true grayscale CRT display) in a properly lit room can be eminently readable and cause very little eye strain. However, as soon as you start to use color and images, and/or the room isn't properly lit, it seems the level of contrast necessary for make colour look right - especially in images - also tend to make white backgrounds far too bright. According to my experience the effect get worse the bigger the screen is.
It does seem to be an issue, but not really a problem with the text versus background color, rather because we handle gamut/contrast/color the same way in both UI elements, on screen text, and images.
While this might partially be down to the last decades dominance of LCD screens with rather poor color rendering that nobody has cared to fix it, the color profiles of UI, text, and images should really be adjusted separately.
So why does dark background seemingly alleviate this issue for some fraction of people? I don't know for sure, it could be the brain "averages" light over a small area, when determining some global brightness/contrast measure, thus making might on black seem less contrasty while still allowing use of brightness/color range that also works reasonably well for images?
I notice my daughter brought up with screens around seem to care less, but that could be a coincidence.
This is the biggest problem with the using dark mode on reflective screens. (Another one is that web sites force their own themes which are usually light, so switching between windows becomes painful.)
You can’t state it as a fact, it’s only your opinion. I’m using dark mode on my phone just because of the battery savings but I prefer much more light mode unless I’m reading before sleeping in a pitch black room.
>Useable e-paper displays might change that one day, but the technology is still in its infancy.
I run termux on top stock boox 3 as a thin(ish) client and it works amazingly well. It's some of the most enjoyable terminal time I have had in years because it's so limited.
Yes, it is. One thing is reading a newspaper in which text amounts to a good percentage of the available area, and the rest reflects ambient light, and a whole different thing is a screen with some text in the middle and the free area emitting white light right to my eyes, de facto saturating them.
I would never read a white text on black paper newspaper, neither in the dark nor in the light, but I surely find dark mode on screens a billion times more readable than traditional light modes. Useable e-paper displays might change that one day, but the technology is still in its infancy.