It goof for your eye (it is natural!), it is very good for your seasonal depression (if you live in high latitudes, like Canada, North Europe, etc), and now it is easy to achieve with sunlike LEDs.
It was a problem not so long ago,vwhen you needed a lot of expensive CFL lights, like Philips Graphica series with good (expensive) electronic ballast to avoid flicker.
Now it is much easier and cheaper, you only need to sacrifice estetics :-)
As someone who has had laser eye surgery and now apparently has permanently drier eyes my life is an indication that bright mode is worse for the eyes. If I sit in a bright room with a bright monitor my eyes hurt at the end of the day. Most of the time I don't notice it consciously during the day but the pain starts after the day is over. If I sit in a fairly dark room all day with low monitor brightness my eyes don't end up hurting. It's just how it is for me now, I wish I could sit in a bright room all day and simply turn the brightness higher on my monitor but it doesn't work.
Good grief this is narrow minded. Obviously we cannot limit all usage of screens to doing work in a bright room (and during the day presumably - you don't really want to have a sunlamp turned on next to you at midnight).
We, as very high-paid professionals, should ask for most ergonomic workspaces. We (or our employers) spent thousands of dollars for latest macbooks, cool chairs, motorized stand-up desks, etc. Light is no less important than that.
All the best conditions for «computer opetators» were studied in details in 1990s, really. What should be lighting conditions, what should be desk hight, which distance between screen and keyboard (say hello to laptops), etc. It is not a rocket surgery, all data are available, there is standards and recommendations («codes») in each developed country. It is shown, that proper workplace could double productivity, for both lathe machinist and computer user.
And why sunlike lamp wil be turnedvon next to me in midnight if I'm at home, in the bedroom (presumably) and not in my working place (on site or remote, it doesn't matter)?
You work from your bed? I have bad news for future your neck, back and hands.
Enthusiasm of people who throw away all this research and work from beanbags in the twilight with laptop on their hips astonishes me.
Me personally? I'm basically terminals everywhere. Whether it's work or play. Office, living room, bedroom, bathroom, on the train, at a bar, you name it. 2pm or 2am, I want a terminal and a browser. You better believe I'm not going to be in light mode and sitting under a sun lamp all the time.
Edit: ok I do use apps other than a terminal and a browser on occasion. An ebook reader for instance. A great example. If I'm reading a book in bed before I sleep I'm going to do it in dark mode. Don't want the extra lumens before bed.
no standard recommends illuminating workplaces at natural 10-kilolux levels for lathe machinists or computer users; most monitors are unusable in such an environment
I don't say it is always possible — I've spent 1.5 years changing rented places almost monthly, with only small laptop, without office to visit, as I fled from my country due to start of war.
First thing I bought when I settle on new place were chair, table, monitor and light.
But it (and dark mode) should be exception, not rule.
Many of us refuse to use 5+ year laptop, but why do we agree to crappy workspace and invent dark mode instead?
When I sit in the sun with my laptop, like outside in a cafe, I need to have everything on the brightest setting and light mode, and then I can see well. It feels great, too.
the sunlike levels that are natural and can affect your seasonal depression are 10 kilolux and up; direct sunlight is 100 kilolux. typical indoor illuminance levels (one bright lightbulb per ten square meters or so, such as a 100-watt incandescent or 10-watt led) are closer to 80 lux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lux#Illuminance
from this, you can easily calculate that, to illuminate the room to natural, seasonal-depression-affecting levels, you need on the order of 100 lightbulbs in a room that size, which will produce about a kilowatt of heat, similar to an electric space heater ('bar fire' in the uk)
(to calculate it another way, a lux is a lumen per square meter, a 10m² room has about 60m² of surface area, and a typical bright lightbulb emits 1000 lumens, so assuming no directionality and black walls and ceiling, you'd need about 600 of them to reach 10 kilolux. you need less than that because the walls do in fact reflect most of the light that falls on them and the bulbs do in fact have some directionality)
this is clearly an achievable project, and there are several people who have done it, and they report good results. however, 99% of the people reading this comment have never in their lives seen a room illuminated this brightly except through a large skylight, such as in a greenhouse
i've thought about undertaking it myself, but with a couple of tweaks:
- rather than illuminating an entire room to daylight levels, i'd like to try using one of those indoor grow closet things that people sell for growing marijuana, one that's big enough to sit inside of. that way i can use only a few thousand lumens instead of hundreds of thousands of lumens, which greatly reduces not only the materials cost but also the heat removal problem
- lumens are more than an order of magnitude cheaper from fluorescent tubes (not cfl lights—the straight tubes) than from leds, and though the efficiency suffers, it only suffers marginally
- light-emitting monitors, even the current ones whose brightness people are complaining about, are not bright enough for comfortable reading in outdoor environments; if you want to use a computer in there, you need a transflective or reflective screen of some kind
It goof for your eye (it is natural!), it is very good for your seasonal depression (if you live in high latitudes, like Canada, North Europe, etc), and now it is easy to achieve with sunlike LEDs.
It was a problem not so long ago,vwhen you needed a lot of expensive CFL lights, like Philips Graphica series with good (expensive) electronic ballast to avoid flicker.
Now it is much easier and cheaper, you only need to sacrifice estetics :-)