The cold blue light of modern touchscreens poses health problems (opens in new tab)

The author keeps on mentioning the military, but doesn't know that on all war ships the lighting in the operations room is blue:

http://warbird-photos.com/special/temp/CVN72-D5_Combat_Direc...

https://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Zumwa...

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/03/31/blogs/20160331WIP...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/US_Navy_...

Quotes from a military study regarding lighting:

> Dissatisfaction with the red lighting system caused the crews of many ships to alter the lighting within their work environment. Some would extinguish all lighting, and some tried a white light configuration in which the overhead lights in the vicinity of the visual display equipment were turned off, while lights away from the visual display equipment remained on. There were many complaints of eye strain, fatigue, and headaches. In addition, watch-standers reported that working under red ambient illumination was also fatiguing, made focusing difficult, and significantly impaired their ability to identify color-coded information from charts.

http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a273682.pdf

There is one area I'd like to see a universal ban on blue spectrum LED's - street and commercial overhead lights.

I live in Salt Lake City and there has been an unfortunate push by Rocky Mountain Power to replace all the streetlights with bright blue/white LED overhead lights. Their output is significantly greater than the lights they are replacing and the light is completely obtrusive. In the city there is the unfortunate and unavoidable issue of spillage into peoples bedrooms.

I've also had the unpleasant task of coaxing my dog to give up the dead birds that have suddenly started showing up my back yard. Likely attributable to the new "better" lights.

http://www.tracyaviaryconservation.org/lightsoutsaltlake/

I have fond memory of using amber monochrome CRT terminals/monitors, and I've preferred to it over the green or black/white monitors back in the days when color monitors were rarity. Amber/orangeish text always felt more soothing and pleasant, but on the other hand, green texts felt more readable (ie texts were easier to comprehend), although I couldn't explain why.

Edit: Back in the late 70's and early 80's, monochrome monitors were prevalent and one had to choose the screen color when choosing terminal/monitor. Apple 2's and most IBM PC's monitor were green, while Radio Shack TRS80 were bluish/white if I recall. At university, we had Wyse terminals with yellowish/amber color.

I also remember working on a terminal attached to a mainframe running IBM RPG III, and it was distinctly dark red, which was probably the coolest color I'd ever seen, and which I'd never seen anywhere else. That reddish color made me feel like I was in a sci-fi movie.

Is it really true though that a few tiny blue leds would affect our bodies that much?

If I recall correctly, significant effects required rather bright lights. The light level outdoors is like 100000 times brighter. A laptop probably won't make much of a difference then.

I run f.lux or redshift, but I'm suspecting that it really doesn't do anything rather than reminding me by going totally red and inconvenient that it's about time to stop trying to read or watch every interesting thing on the Internet.

For me, it's the endless source of interesting things that keeps me awake, I guess because I've stressed out and turned into a total information junkie. My mind craves information. Unfortunately it thinks that recordings of air traffic controllers etc is more valuable than sleep.

I highly recommend using f.lux to adapt screen colors at night. It makes reading some pages harder once it goes into full candle-light mode, but I take that as a signal that I need to start getting ready for bed!

Blue LED inventor and Nobel Physics Laureate Shuji Nakamura was my former classmate at UF MSE back in the late 1990s. At the time a pioneering institution in MOCVD of wide-bandgap GaN. Even back then there was a sense this would be a world-changing materials discovery.

And we may be on the cusp of the next brilliant revolution in lighting displays with solid-state Graphene. The graphene / graphene-oxide boundary represents a near infinite bandgap differential. And with a controlled applied voltage, can be tuned to any color in the visible spectrum and beyond.

Combined with extensive end user testing in the Human Psychology Lab this could very well lead to a breakthrough.

In my own experience the most glaring is the 5am wake up time. When pupils are dilated. And you are checking any overnight messages from Asia or Europe. Occasionally Nite Mode will simply fail to register and you get a good blast of photons directly on a still sleepy and sensitive retinal plane. Long term repeated exposures can't be a good thing.

I have a hatred of blue LEDs on household equipment, they always seem to be significantly brighter than their red/green/orange counterparts.

For example: If I need to leave my computer running overnight running a job, I have to tape over or block the power button in order to get a decent night's sleep as it has a nasty habit of utterly illuminating the room - the hard disk activity light is much more tolerable.

Here's a long personal (boring) story of my experience with different light colors.

Back when CFL bulbs were becoming a thing, I discovered with joy how much less irritated my eyes were (and how much more relaxed my mind was) when I used CFLs with high color temps - "daylight" temps around 6300K compared to the piss yellow color of typical incandescent bulbs. At first the "blue" light was shocking, but after a moment of adjustment it became so pleasing and illuminating.

So I fully embraced that for years, gleefully moving to LEDs with similar color temps. My last office had my custom made shelf all the way around the room that had upward firing LED strips. It was awesome!

But then, after an unfortunate several months of insane crunch-time work, I started having eye problems... many different weird things happening with my eyes, from focus issues to strange pressure feelings.

I did an about face and shifted my monitors to more red, at much lower brightness, and with dark mode UIs where possible. Then I turned off the super awesome daylight LED strips and just used one yellower little LED lamp behind my monitor to provide a bit of desk surface light. Almost instantly my eye issues went away. I was still working far too many hours each day, staring at my screens. The only change was brightness and color of all my light sources.

My ability to sleep didn't seem to change, but my mind was always too busy to fall asleep anyway. So I can't claim that changing colors improved my sleep. It did, however, seem to stop harming my eyes.

I just want to say that the links to cancer, obesity and even some of the sleep problems are probably concluded from correlation, not experiments (since you can't say: hey you, please only use orange screens for the next 30 years and then we scan you for cancer X).

And I think this is a problem, since you can't now for sure that wether the cause is blue light or the lifestyle people who are exposed to a lot of blue light have (staying up late, long office jobs, who knows?).

To be clear, I do not refute the harm of blue light, I just want to suggest being cautious with the broader health effect claims.

It is amazing to me that colors of instrument readouts is not regulated, when the research is extremely clear that red and orange (and yellow) are much better for night vision than white, blue and green. Add to that the huge screens in most cars these days and you have a recipe for night blindness caused by just looking at your infotainment screen for a second and not seeing a pedestrian due to the ghost image left on your retina.

It would be useful to know what percent of the population is affected by this. I look at my computer/phone up until I go to bed, and I’ve not seen any adverse effects. It’s an N or 1, but surely I’m not the only person who doesn’t experience the negative effects this article warns about.

Blue LEDs are a relatively recent thing, we’ve had decades of green and red LEDs on our gadgets and I’d expect the trend to balance out over time. RGB seems to be going through it’s thing and at least if you’ve got an RGB keyboard you can dial in whatever hue you like.

I find it sort of funny that the article describes all screens (and even lighting) as touchscreens in the title. I guess that is a sign of their ubiquity.

Blue started as a difficult color to make (and it still wears OLED screens much faster) and became a symbol of modernity. It also creates an interesting halo effect in most lenses (even our eyes) because we can't focus it well.

I've used Apple's Nightshift feature since it launched, and although I'm not sure about any changes to sleep patterns or general health affects, it does help reduce my eye strain at night. It's also interesting to see how quickly I become used to the colour shift, and how artificial the interface looks if I turn Nightshift off during the night.

i agree for leds, car displays and things like that, but for people who use their devices to looks at mostly calibrated pictures (photography/graphism/art/etc.) the warming displays functionality at night is not an option...

Amber Case advocating for orange UI displays?

Hmmm.

She does make a good, er, case, for change though, and I like her work.