Reduce eye strain by changing monitor settings

Computer monitors are becoming so streamlined in their design that their presence barely registers at times. But all your computing time is spent staring at the screen ­ so it’s important that the image it displays is as comfortable on the eye as it can possibly be.

Of course, you’ve probably fiddled a bit with the knobs and buttons below the screen to get the picture looking better, but did you really know what you were doing beyond adjusting the brightness? And besides, the monitor’s controls are only half the story: there is just as much to be done in Windows to be sure that the display is producing the clearest possible picture.

In this guide we will explain everything you need to do to make your monitor shine.

The basics
The brightness control is one of the key settings to get right.

People have written books on brightness and contrast levels and you could get very confused (or just plain bored) trying to digest and understand all the rights and wrongs. But what all this research really boils down to is comfort. Is the display comfortable to view for long periods?

If you have the brightness too high, the intensity of the light can make your eyes ache; and if you have the contrast too low, you may strain your eyes trying to distinguish information on screen. So, set both brightness and contrast until the image ‘feels’ right. If, after a few minutes, your eyes are feeling the strain, adjust once more.

This should be considered an ongoing process, incidentally. Unless you work in a windowless box, the light conditions will change throughout the day. When sunshine is streaming in, you may need to increase the brightness to compensate, and vice versa when night draws in.

Some modern monitors allow settings to be saved as ‘profiles’, so it is quick and easy to switch to preset comfortable combinations – ­ refer to your monitor’s manual to see if it has this ability.

Advanced monitor controls
Monitors used to have at least a dozen screen-tweaking controls, accessible either by buttons and knobs on the bezel or, more recently, via on-screen displays (OSDs). Owners could fiddle with options to correct wonky pictures (pincushion distortion), remove odd swirly patterns (moiré) or restore the image balance after magnetic interference (degaussing).

But with the advent of flat-screen monitors and the digital video interface (DVI) connection, many of these controls became redundant, as the associated problems only afflict bulky, older monitors reliant on cathode-ray tubes (CRTs). Now almost all display tweaks are performed (usually automatically) on the PC. Even so, your monitor may still have a few advanced controls to experiment with.

Each display is different but most have a button labelled ‘Menu’ or similar, along with ‘+’ and ‘-’ buttons to move through options in the OSD and change values. Look in the OSD for a colour ‘temperature’ control, for instance. This is essentially a way of adjusting the display’s colour balance to better suit particular environments or applications.

In publishing environments, for example, a particular temperature setting may be used to more accurately reflect the colour of printed materials. At home, though, you might just want to use a particular temperature setting simply because you find it easier on the eye. So, if your monitor has the option, try a few of the preset temperature settings to see which you like.

Back to the computer
As noted, though, now there are as many ways to fine-tune the display’s picture from within Windows as there are from any controls built into the display. Now, the precise list of options will depend on both your monitor and the graphics card that drives it (and we will cover a few possibilities toward the end) but there are a number of universal controls.

Perhaps the most important of these is resolution. The modern flat-screen displays that most of us now use employ a fixed matrix of pixels (tiny square dots) to make up the image. This is known as the monitor’s ‘native resolution’.

While Windows and the attached graphics card might between them supply the monitor with an image that is below this native resolution, the resultant picture may look odd or stretched, because the monitor has to build the image from its fixed grid of pixels. So, we would advise checking that Windows is outputting its images to the monitor’s native resolution (you may need look in the manual for this figure).

To do this in Windows XP right-click anywhere on the Windows Desktop and choose Properties from the pop-up menu. Now click the Settings tab on the Display Properties dialogue box. If need be, use the slider in under the ‘Screen resolution’ label to change the resolution, moving it all the way to the right for the highest setting (that should be the monitor’s native resolution).

To achieve the same in Windows Vista, again right-click anywhere on the Windows Desktop then choose Personalize. Now scroll down the list of personalisation options to find and click Display Settings (near the bottom).

In either case, when you click Apply or OK Windows will attempt to change the display resolution. When it does, the screen may go blank briefly. If the change is successful, you will be able to read a message asking if you want to keep the new display settings.

Unlike most Windows dialogue boxes, this one has a timer. If you don’t answer within 15 seconds, it will assume something has gone wrong and revert to the previous settings. It does this for a good reason: if you make a change and something goes wrong, then of course you may not be able to see anything on screen.

Whether or not you need to change the resolution, keep this Display Settings dialogue box open for just a moment. There’s something else to explore.