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How to improve your WFH lighting to reduce eye strain

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Re: How to improve your WFH lighting to reduce eye strain

#161

Post by namibj »

wonger_ wrote: post #71
wyager wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the color temperature situation has improved, the actual spectral quality of most consumer LED lighting still leaves a lot to be desired. CRI makes an effort to measure this, although it's a low-granularity measurement. I personally buy surplus cinema lighting equipment and use it to light my house. I have a bunch of fancy cinematic LEDs with high CRIs that produce decent light, although they still can't fully…

Where do you buy the surplus cinema lighting equipment? And how do you mount it inside your house? I went down a high CRI office lighting rabbit hole last year and I could only find expensive, new photography lights.

Just get modules or strip from Yuju; I have zero bad experience over many years with them.

Sure, it's not cheap, but IMO ~1$/W plus simple PSU (either some standard voltage, or dimmable current, depending on what you got) for good and 1.5~2$/W for very good CRI is quite fine.

Re: How to improve your WFH lighting to reduce eye strain

#162

Post by jwr »

bensandcastle wrote: post #41

The natural light and diffuse light are good tips. Next is to get a big screen eg. 85" 4K and put it 1.5m away. That should be your main display. I don't have that all the time, but then I get some variety, 85" @ 1.5m a lot of the time, laptop some of the time, driving/walking etc. for longer range. 1.5m is the midpoint of focus for the muscles in your eyes. I built augmented reality displays and this was the focal p…

I would disagree with 1.5m, but I do recommend checking how close you are to your monitor.

Let's assume you have a reasonably sized office monitor (27" or so). Extend your arm with your hand as a fist, forward. If your screen is closer to you than your knuckles, it's too close.

Now, for the height: all monitor stands are too low. If you keep your head straight and look at the monitor, you should be looking at the upper third. VESA mounting arms or monitor stands solve this problem.

Re: How to improve your WFH lighting to reduce eye strain

#163

Post by vvladymyrov »

BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #154
BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in a basement and had fairly good success with certain "led shop lights" to make the space feel more like it has natural light (though I could improve things further). I do find however, that using diffuse lighting and minimizing shadows is what makes lighting feel artificial. Natural sunlight has very parallel rays that create very evenly lit surfaces with very sharp shadows. Whereas most artificial light has ra…

What I'm trying to achieve is lighting a bit like in these "Artificial Skylight" concepts: https://architizer.com/blog/practice/materials/let-there-be-... They claim their technology is about "Rayleigh scattering" but I think that's mostly marketing mumbo jumbo. Sure that might add a bit of diffuse blue but their main secret, I would bet, is parallel rays which explains why their fixtures require so much space above…

I’ve installed 4 similar skylight lamps to the basement. Bought them on Amazon for 700$ each (had to replace 1 because it had uneven light). They make basement light much closer to ourdoor light and made basement very cozy and comfortable. I had depth space in the ceiling, but width of the lamp didn’t fit between joists - so could not push lamp all the way at the ceiling level. End up building nice boxing around lamp. So it was medium complexity project with great result.

Re: How to improve your WFH lighting to reduce eye strain

#164

Post by teslabox »

gehwartzen wrote: post #132
toddmorey wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the history of LED lighting, it took quite a bit of work (hybrid phosphor technology, etc) to get them to emit warm color temperatures. The exact color temp can be a personal preference, but I think a lot of people aren't privy to the difference the color temperature of "white" light can make! I want to go on a guerrilla campaign around my neighborhood and replace porch light bulbs with warm equivalents.

I just went through this with my car. All the OEM overhead interior lights were horrible 6000k+ type bulbs that not only made the interior feel like a hospital room but completely ruined my night vision turning me into the classic “Jesus!! You’re going to kill someone!” dad whenever my kids would fiddle with them at night. I cannot overstate how much of a difference it made switching them all to 3000k warm whites. Of…

The bad LEDs can also be improved with yellow or amber film, which is more accessible to most people than desoldering.

I found a German company that sent me a free sample of their amber film. As I recall their market was semiconductor manufacturing, but I can’t find them again. Amazon has a variety of films that should work.

Re: How to improve your WFH lighting to reduce eye strain

#165

Post by teslabox »

onli wrote: post #120
Der_Einzige wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They claim to know a lot but then none of them build proper Cf Lumen or F.Lux style tooling (i.e. super easy default instead of requiring tons of setup) for turning ALL blue light off (red shifting) IN THE DEFAULT OS as the primary way to use your device at night. None of that wussy shifting the color temperature brown shit that doesn't meaningfully reduce blue light hazard. I can literally preserve my whole night vi…

I don't really get that impression. To the contrary: How dangerous blue light is supposed to be is commonly repeated, with many products for filtering it out, like glasses, and software in all devices that does the red shifting. Android has it by default, Linux does, macOS - is Windows missing? Or is there something in the implementation of those measures that you object to? But note that the wikipedia article you li…

There are old studies on the hazard of blue light. I found a few of them on https://scholar.google.com - I suspect they’re hard to find if you don’t know about specific keywords to include in your query.

The blue light problem has to do with how high energy blue photons interact with specific substances found in minute quantities in our eyes, leading to inflammation.

Re: How to improve your WFH lighting to reduce eye strain

#166

Post by neilv »

If the room in the illustrations is what you have to work with, consider sometimes putting the desk in front of the window, facing out.

When the sun is not line-of-sight, and you don't have any bright flares off other objects (like car windows or chrome).

That gives you natural light, it should be even left/right, and it happens to be awesome fill light for looking good on videoconf.

You can also glance around your monitor to refocus at a distance, frequently.

Re: How to improve your WFH lighting to reduce eye strain

#167

Post by gehwartzen »

teslabox wrote: post #164
gehwartzen wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just went through this with my car. All the OEM overhead interior lights were horrible 6000k+ type bulbs that not only made the interior feel like a hospital room but completely ruined my night vision turning me into the classic “Jesus!! You’re going to kill someone!” dad whenever my kids would fiddle with them at night. I cannot overstate how much of a difference it made switching them all to 3000k warm whites. Of…

The bad LEDs can also be improved with yellow or amber film, which is more accessible to most people than desoldering. I found a German company that sent me a free sample of their amber film. As I recall their market was semiconductor manufacturing, but I can’t find them again. Amazon has a variety of films that should work.

Absolutely! That was my initial idea as well. Glad to know it’s an option

Re: How to improve your WFH lighting to reduce eye strain

#168

Post by gehwartzen »

walterbell wrote: post #160
gehwartzen wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just went through this with my car. All the OEM overhead interior lights were horrible 6000k+ type bulbs that not only made the interior feel like a hospital room but completely ruined my night vision turning me into the classic “Jesus!! You’re going to kill someone!” dad whenever my kids would fiddle with them at night. I cannot overstate how much of a difference it made switching them all to 3000k warm whites. Of…

Well done! How did you figure out 3000K replacement part numbers for each SMD?

I happened to find someone on a German forum (cars a VW) that had taken his overheads apart to do the same thing who posted a p/n or rather an industry size. I had never dealt with replacing SMD LEDs before but it seems there is an industry standard sizing that most adhere to. Just ordered a few in that size from Amazon and they worked. From what I remember most in that size were rated for similar voltages so seemed pretty universal. I imagine as long as you can see the led and measure its dimensions finding a replacement should be easy.

Desoldering/soldering was a pain as they were tiny; like 2mmx2mm. One cool thing I learned though is that you can use a multimeter in its ‘continuity’ setting to provide enough current to light up these small LEDs which is very convenient when testing if you soldered them correctly.

https://www.zgsm-china.com/blog/something-you-should-know-ab...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Tiguan/comments/1hq2hae/changed_ove...

Re: How to improve your WFH lighting to reduce eye strain

#169

Post by thebrain »

The room of my house that I use as an office did not receive much sunlight from the window that faces a brick wall. I recently had a skylight installed and wow, it's been life changing. I don't even need a light on anymore during the day. I highly recommend installing a skylight to add more natural light to a room if it's possible.

Re: How to improve your WFH lighting to reduce eye strain

#170

Post by therealdrag0 »

toddmorey wrote: post #46
michaelteter wrote: post #2

This is another +1 for WFH. Many office environments have terrible lighting, and there's very little you can do about it.

I remember standing up on office chairs to twist the florescent tube bulbs above my desk just enough to turn them off. That light was just awful. It helped a lot until maintenance would come in at night and "fix" the light and I'd have to do it all over.

Same. Though mine got left off for a long time which was great.
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