Will You Get Eye Strain By Using the Amazon Kindle?
That’s an good question because for many years as a child the thing you hear most often from your parents is the daily shout of “Don’t sit so close to the TV!”.
Thinking that sitting close to the television will ruin your eyes and get you on the fast track to wearing glasses. And who wants to wear glasses when they are only 10 years old?
Now that ebook readers such as the Amazon Kindle and Apple’s Pad are available, I wonder if they will be guilty of causing eye strain as people will tend to use these for longer amounts of time?
Looking into this a bit more it seems that the typography (the arrangement of text on a page) on the screen and software being used are factors in how easy or difficult it is to read something from a screen.
Apple’s IPS LCD screens have really wide viewing angles but the glass on the screens is highly reflective and this could make it harder to read in bright conditions and therefore you r eyes would strain to make out the letters and words.
E-ink technology (such as that used by Amazon’s Kindle) is great for reading conditions where there is a lot of sunlight but if the lighting is on the dim side paper would be better and an LCD display would be better than a device that uses E-ink. Although Eink gives an excellent reading experience in bright sunlight, the downside to having E ink is that is has a low contrast ratio in darker settings where there is less contrast and backlighting on the screen.
How our eyes enable us to read is through the ocular muscles which jump around as our eyes move through all the words. This jumping around of the muscles can cause our eyes to strain irrespective fo whether we are reading something from a screen or whether on paper. It is therefore advisable by many health professionals, to take a break from continued reading, say every 10 minutes, look elsewhere, pick a point further away, (it is better if you are looking through a window and you would look at the furthest point in view). in doing so you let your eyes rest and take a break.
The screens we have nowadays are a vast improvement on the screens we had many years ago and the screens are being updated every 8 milliseconds or so which is much much faster than they were being updated earlier – this means we have hardly any flicker. (The human eye moves at a speed of 10 to 30 milliseconds).