New monitor that doesn't hurt my eyes?

[npothos]

Recently I borrowed someone's Acer Nitro 5, 17" laptop. The screen was perfect for me. I've been looking for a new monitor, I'm not sure how this screen translates to monitors. I've mostly had matte screens on my laptops and monitors. I hate glossy screens with a passion and I find most are too bright.

I tried to get the specs of the laptop to see if I could find a monitor based on them, but I guess because it's a budget machine, all they say is IPS, matte, full HD. I found this review on notebookreview.

"The Nitro 5 has a 17.3-inch display that operates natively at 1920x1080, resulting in a pixel density of 127 PPI. Acer does not sell any alternative displays for the Nitro 5, for reference."

"The IPS panel achieved an average maximum luminosity of 364 cd/m² according to X-Rite i1Pro 2, which is considerably brighter than all our comparison devices. Its black value is on the high side at 0.3 cd/m² though, resulting in a 1,357:1 contrast ratio. The latter is still impressive, but it falls short of the display in the Legion Y540, which has a better black value but dimmer display."

"We also like that the panel does not use pulse-width modulation (PWM) to regulate brightness, and it suffers from no obvious backlight bleeding. However, it also has terrible response times for a gaming laptop display and is well behind the competition."

I did check and 1080 at 24" is 108ppi, and 1440 at 27" is 108ppi, which is lower than the Nitro at 127ppi. Would I be happy with a lower ppi, I don't know.

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[kasakka]

You could also consider adding bias lighting to a monitor as this can help its contrast and who knows, maybe also feel more comfortable to look at. This can be as simple as some IKEA LED strips taped to the back of the screen.

Ultimately it's going to be hard to recommend a display that won't hurt your eyes because it's going to be highly individual. Sound like you might like a 4K screen somewhere in the 27" range that does not use PWM dimming.

 

[npothos]

You could also consider adding bias lighting to a monitor as this can help its contrast and who knows, maybe also feel more comfortable to look at. This can be as simple as some IKEA LED strips taped to the back of the screen.

Ultimately it's going to be hard to recommend a display that won't hurt your eyes because it's going to be highly individual. Sound like you might like a 4K screen somewhere in the 27" range that does not use PWM dimming.

Anything like the screen on the Acer NItro 5 17inch laptop, but in a monitor, would probably be fine. So I'm guessing I need no PWM, higher ppi, matte, ips, because there's little info on the screen I'm not sure what I'm looking for as that's rather general. I don't quite understand the stuff they were talking about in the review, other than PWM.

 

[DanNeely]

No PWM is probably the most important, since it's how a lot of cheaper displays achieve lower brightness levels than they can achieve by turning the backlight to its minimum value.

You'll want to avoid any high end displays with Ultra Low Motion blur, since they PWM the backlight off and then on again between each pixel transition to avoid showing some/all of the time the pixels are half-transitioned between the old and new values.