Eh, I prefer dark mode aesthetically, and also I personally find that, at 4 am in a dark room where the only lights are a single desk lamp behind my monitors, and the monitors themselves, white backgrounds are painful. I’m willing to accept that if I was in a sunny room at high noon that light mode might be better.
Yes this is also because these days monitor engineers optimize for peak brightness and totally neglect minimum brightness specs. Because 600 nits looks great on a spec sheet and it's just difficult to regulate (backlight) LEDs over a huge brightness range without affecting color accuracy or causing excessive flickering. Nobody looks at the minimum spec if it's even provided.
So what they tend to do is to have the low end of the brightness range way too high and often even use tricks like simply displaying a darker image (Rather than a darker backlight) which reduces color depth and accuracy even more.
I use my otherwise excellent LG 24UD58 with brightness at 0% during the day! So during the night it's way too bright.
You can accomplish this also by setting the contrast to a low value on screens where the brightness simply doesn't go that low. But some screens just incorporate this trick in the brightness control themselves. Also you can use software options of which dark mode is one. However all these methods (with the exception of dark mode!) result in screwed up color depth (and thus excessive banding also) and dynamic range.
I grew up with white on black displays but these days I prefer black on white because it's easier to read with eyes that have astigmatism. But I end up using dark mode at night anyway because otherwise my display brightness just isn't bearable.
What doesn't help is that I live in a hot country with no AC and during summer I usually live with the windows open at night and the lights off to avoid attracting bugs. So it's difficult. I really wish display builders would optimize for low brightness more.
The minimum brightness issue depends a lot on panel technology. IPS panels are great for their consistent color from any viewing angle, but they don’t give very dark blacks
If you want better contrast a VA panel does better, but they have color shift from different viewing angles.
Or if you have a lot of money, OLED is probably the best bet for this. But those are pretty new on the market and still expensive.
> it's just difficult to regulate (backlight) LEDs over a huge brightness range without affecting color accuracy or causing excessive flickering.
It's not difficult. Any problem is designer laziness. Only real problem is if white light source used have some nonlinearity with white balance, but having accurate current control isn't all that hard, just gotta use actual current control instead of just PWMing CC source with no filtering whatsoever.
The problem is exactly what you mentioned after
> Nobody looks at the minimum spec if it's even provided.
nobody tests for that so consumer can't even find the good ones easily.
The "for medical diagnostic use" label generally triples (or more) the price - you can get the same grade monitor for $2000 or so (sold for eg high end photography / videography / magazine production work).
Do you have any experience using radiology monitors for reading? I nearly pulled the trigger on one earlier this year, but I couldn't find a greyscale one that supported a D50 white point. (Apparently traditional light boxes use white points as high as 11000K.)
They aren't if you reduce brightness & contrast to something shortly above 10%.
As in my case. OFC brand new displays could use even less.
Also color temperature 'warm', something like 5000k, or even below.
If you can't setup them that way, they are broken by design and/or you're using them wrong.
Besides, even at high noon on a clear day I don't push them over 55%, when the sun shines in brightly from the side. Same during sunrise, or until sunset.
They used to say it was bad for your eyes to watch TV without having a lamp on in the room. Looking it up now, it sounds like it causes eye fatigue but not damage.
Yeah, having some back lighting definitely helps prevent eye fatigue. I can't do staring at monitors in a pitch black room anymore like I used to when I was in high school. Nowadays if I do that my vision gets,,,squishy.
