251–260 of 316 posts
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Candles also supposedly awful for PM 2.5
What about pilot lights on a stove/oven? I have an old-school unit in my house that has three pilot lights that are always on... the put off a fair bit of heat. I don't love the idea of them burning constantly from an energy standpoint, but I didn't consider the health effects...
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Do you know does this actually lower the backlight or is it changing gamma or something like that. I'll try it anyways thanks
iphones are all OLED now, so there is no distinction. On an old LCD display there are some filters that do a linear/nonlinear mapping from 0->255 brightness to 0->64 for example, leaving the actual backlight at the same brightness. The downside is that colour banding and quantization start to get really bad - and 'black' starts to look very non-black.
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The Google Pixel has a number of settings for this. It has the standard slider, extra dim, night, and grayscale modes. I always laugh when I see competition over brightness. I cannot wait for e-ink monitors to improve and wish someone would make an e-ink phone. Edit: Those settings might be standard on Android and not actually Pixel specific.
I keep Extra Dim on at all times to lower the peak nits and to further dim the screen when using Night Light to read after dark. The biggest saviors to my longtime night reading habits, though, have been OLED and how many websites and ebook apps have competent true black dark modes.
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A Macbook's minimum brightness is quite bright. The thing that annoys me no end is that if you hit the "dim" button when it's at minimum brightness, it goes black - but fades out slowly and smoothly. So they're clearly capable of being dimmer, but Apple decided we're not allowed that.
Been a while since I used a MacBook but can't you do Shift+Opt (or just Opt?) Brightness+/- for an incremental change still? Works with volume too.
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A Macbook's minimum brightness is quite bright. The thing that annoys me no end is that if you hit the "dim" button when it's at minimum brightness, it goes black - but fades out slowly and smoothly. So they're clearly capable of being dimmer, but Apple decided we're not allowed that.
Been a while since I used a MacBook but can't you do Shift+Opt (or just Opt?) Brightness+/- for an incremental change still? Works with volume too.
I am a big fan of LEDs but the strobe effect is maddening and it only gets worse as they are dimmed. AC power crosses zero volts with every cycle so you need a driver circuit that can compensate. Most don't do a good job and I have replaced bulbs and dimmers multiple times to come up with something acceptable. At the family camp, I retired my kerosene and propane mantle lamps in favor of solar battery powered LEDs ma…
Interesting comment. I have a number of MR16 bulbs in my house that were previously halogen and are now mostly LED. They are a near constant source of frustration with bulbs burning out way too soon, some with what seems like wiring issues, a mix of incompatible switches, etc. Curious to hear what acceptable solution you derived?
Good dimmable LED bulbs from quality manufacturers like Philips dim very well with many incandescent (leading edge) dimmers. Usually these bulbs are larger and have space in the base for a driver circuit that derives a brightness signal from the waveform rather than passing through the chopped current.
Smaller bulbs with no built-in driver are much more suited to dimming using a trailing edge dimmer or dedicated LED driver. These strobe like mad on a traditional dimmer switch but may benefit from having a single incandescent bulb on the same circuit to round off the waveform a bit.
For one difficult circuit I put a 5w ceramic resistor in parallel with the lighting to smooth out the dimming response between two different fixtures.
I strongly advise against buying and using lanterns, they release a lot of toxic soot. Probably negating any health benefits you get from normalizing your melatonin levels by a large amount. Technology Connnections of YouTube made a series of in depth videos about lanterns, how they work, how they can spill and set you and your home ablaze and just how much soot they produce. Don't use them, unless you're outside cam…
The ebook reader part is a bit weird since the paper doesn't state which model they used. Many readers these days have warm LED lights. IIRC the Kindle Oasis can even adapt the temperature of the light.
It does state that it's an iPad (!) - see the Materials and Methods section, specifically page 1235.
Regarding the quoted e-book study: > Third, in the present study, the LE-eBook was set to maximum brightness throughout the 4-h reading session, whereas, by comparison, the print-book condition consisted of reflected exposure to very dim light. Yeah, max brightness is probably going to make an impact. I bet if you were in a room with a bright light reading a book, with an equivalent amount of lumens going into your e…
I am disappointed that many phones/tablets don't go very dim. From flagship to cheap, it seems that if you're in a pitch black room and check the time on your phone, the light will illuminate the whole room, even on the dimmest setting. I actually modded my phone by putting a resistor in the LED backlight circuit, which divided the brightness by 1000 - and it was still plenty bright at night (human eyes are logarithm…
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It looks at the emitted energy from the screen. The ebook emits directly, a foot from your face. The paper book is reflected energy, at a rather higher reflectance and a rather lower energy. It's amazing how dim a light you can read a paper book in vs an e-ink ereader.
A lot of people over the age of 40 or even 35 are going to have trouble reading a physical text from a comfortable distance in light dim and warm enough not to affect one's circadian rhythm. Though I see your points and agree with aspects of this piece I also really struggle to see how a dim light close to your face is objectively worse than lighting your entire room in order to read a book and think extreme statemen…