P.P.S. It seems that almost all flicker-free monitors in the 20 to 24-in range have 1920x1080 resolution. I’m not going to be able to avoid subpixel rendering and temporal dithering.
So the remaining questions are: minimum brightness? does any of this actually help with conditions like mine?
While this doesn’t make it any cheaper a 10 bit panel likely won’t have temporal dithering - that’s something I’d expect in cheaper panels. Subpixel rendering is pretty much inherent to LCD and OLED so you can’t get away from that but a higher resolution should make it largely a non-issue.
I wouldn’t really worry about brightness - it sounds like you prefer things on the dim side and any decent monitor should allow you to practically turn the backlighting off. In any event those kind of specs are never to be trusted.
Whatever you get make sure you order from somewhere with a good return policy just in case but I think you’ll find something that works well for you. It just isn’t likely to be on the cheap end.
Good luck!
I’ve had a lot of bad experiences with brightness.
… Or does anyone know of a way to throttle a monitor?
I can turn some apps, like Firefox, down to 1 frame per second. That helps stop smooth animation and helps deal with standard web design, though it’s not quite enough to deal with Vector Wikipedia or some other sites with wide poorly-differentiated sidebars.
I can’t turn my system below this monitor default of 50 frames per second. Apparently some current monitors can get down to 24 frames per second, but it’s hard to find the relevant data, and they can’t go farther.
Tried updating my Mac to the latest version. (Fortunately I kept a partition with a working copy of my current version.) The update broke text rendering, gave me awful eyestrain and a migraine, and the new System Settings, including Accessibility, were unusable due to standard app design,
Tried the previous version. The update still broke text rendering. Tried an alternative finder which would let me customize fonts, to make them readable. But that required going through the font app which is not readable.
Apparently Apple is trying to force users to use ultra-high-resolution monitors. Never mind the cost of updates, or accessibility constraints that may force lower-resolution monitors, or the like.
System-wise, I’ve tried a few versions of Linux on virtual machines, and will probably set up a Linux partition, but I’m not sure what disk format to use or which distro.
Hardware-wise, I’m not sure what to do. The Sun Vision Display rE monitor is supposed to have color without the usual backlight, but it’s expensive. Another option is to get a conventional lcd monitor and remove the backlight.
Most (at least flatscreens) are stuck at a set frequency so you really can’t throttle it in hardware to a certain FPS. There are fancy gaming monitors that support variable refresh rates but they usually bottom out at around 30 and aren’t user-configurable. They are optimized for pushing as many frames as possible for gaming where this is often desirable.
Monitors that purport to do 24Hz don’t do it natively, they are just taking a single frame and multiplying it by 5 if 120Hz native, or 3:2 if 60Hz native. (Which is why 120Hz can do 24Hz without judder versus 60Hz.) 24Hz is typically only used for displaying movies at their native film frame rate and as such is support is usually only found on TVs or very high end monitors.
But, this is all trickery as the monitor only ever displays at its fixed frame rate. It’s also trickery if you set the refresh rate in the monitor settings — the monitor is just figuring out how to interpolate the value at something that resembles the value specified. Often times poorly which introduces judder or ghosting.
This was all a very long and convoluted way of saying that I don’t know if there’s any really good solutions here for traditional flat screen displays.
Have you considered or looked into e-ink based monitors? They aren’t cheap, and they are B&W only (which may or may not be a plus for you). They are optimized for displaying static content, and have zero refresh when things aren’t moving on screen. Monitors using e-ink can have their refresh rate customized as well to optimize for speed vs clarity (fast and smeary vs slow and precise). They also can be run with no backlighting at all. This may be an option worth looking into. If you can tolerate it, it may be worthwhile looking at some YouTube reviews of these.
I’ve looked into e-ink and rlcd. If cost weren’t an issue, I’d go for the Sun Vision Display rlcd monitor. But it is, so I ended up going for a conventional Eizo lcd monitor with a lower minimum brightness. It seems to help, though it’s still not as good as e-ink or a printed page.
I want to reduce refresh rates to un-smooth scrolling and other animations, not to change screen flicker.
Yup, I understand what you’re trying to do. I know there’s lots of settings on Mac OS and Windows to reduce/disable animations and things like smooth scrolling and such (which I hate too, but for different reasons). I think I remember you saying you were on a Mac. TinkerTool has lots of tweaks beyond the “reduce animations” toggle in Settings, and there’s many more hidden things you can enable through the CLI. Unfortunately many applications can simply choose not to honor these settings.