Hacker News Reader

Comment by mdp2021 | Hacker News Reader

mdp2021

In general: when reading, one may normally want to maximize contrast while minimizing "beamed" luminosity (meaning, the amount of light made to directly hit the eye).

That is for eye comfort.

So, yes: we adjust text for maximum contrast (#000 to #FFF) and adjust the light accordingly. This is expected behaviour.

Which, by the way, is also in general energy efficient.

View on HN

That is the part I don't really understand.

If your screen setting make the black on white / white on black way too intense to the eyes.

Shouldn't people adjust their screen to match their need?

Why on the earth a website lower its own contrast because it expect everyone using a over contrast screen.

It basically make the site unreadable for everyone that has a sane setting.

I do prefer #000 over #FFF (or vice-versa) and generally agree with your sentiment, but it is worth noting that portions of overly-bright screen do not generally trigger the "seared eyeballs" sensation. There are scenarios where allowing a scant 1% of a photo (for example) to be over-bright means much more range in the rest of the image. Personally, I prefer a display that simply matches the static contrast ratio of the human eye. I use ambient lighting to keep my pupils from dilating when viewing a dark screen. (Which has the side-benefit of avoiding the dark-to-light transition that people hate so much.)

Unrelated fun idea for hardware engineers: develop a GPU that outputs average image brightness before each scanout. This allows the monitor (or GPU itself, though you'd suffer quantization issues) to slowly ramp during dark-to-bright transitions. Consumers would love the feature: people like to stare at devices in dark rooms (bed etc) but melt their eyeballs every time they navigate from a dark page to a light one. This would prevent that pain.

> There are scenarios where allowing a scant 1% of a photo (for example) to be over-bright means much more range in the rest of the image

I think that is why hdr invented at first place. Sdr is never meant to present "sun casting on you directly". The sdr #fff in hdr setting is called "paper white". Looking at paper shouldn't hurt your eye in reality and nor does on screen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com