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Ask HN: Why were green and amber CRTs more comfortable to read?

2•CalvinBuild•1h ago
I have been looking into how early CRT displays were designed around human visual limits rather than maximum brightness or contrast.

Green and amber phosphors sit near peak visual sensitivity, and phosphor decay produces brief light impulses instead of the sample and hold behavior used by modern LCD and OLED screens. These constraints may have unintentionally reduced visual fatigue during long sessions.

Modern displays removed many of those limits, which raises a question: is some eye strain today partly a UI and luminance management problem rather than just screen time?

Curious what others here have experienced:

Do certain color schemes or display types feel less fatiguing?

Are there studies you trust on display comfort?

Have any modern UIs recreated CRT-like comfort?

Full write-up: https://calvinbuild.hashnode.dev/what-crt-engineers-knew-about-eye-strain-that-modern-ui-forgot

Comments

cheaprentalyeti•1h ago
It's an interesting paper, but I think the design decisions made here were less intentional than they seemed. The hardware producers were not making these decisions. They had CRT's and not modern LED's and made lemonade. And we were a lot younger in 1988.
fuzzfactor•15m ago
I get the idea that the green phosphor is easiest to see when it comes to contrast.

On the old ocilloscopes when you were getting some signals near the limit of device capability the traces could get pretty thin and hard to see sometimes.

With a less visible phosphor it might not have been possible to see anything at all at that point.

The green did seem to be a commodity for decades before the amber started becoming more common, never did prevail though.

I had two industrial monitors for non-PC's in the '80's that were vector-based and higher resolution than PC's had. Green was standard when launched, amber later became an option, and I ended up with each.

Liked them both :)

Top ocilloscope CRTs had already advanced way beyond the commodity green by then.

mtmail•35m ago
The reference links have 'utm_source=chatgpt'. I don't trust that they whole article wasn't written by an LLM.
bell-cot•19m ago
First thought: Development of amber & green CRT's was driven by real-world use - not consumer preferences. The military was especially focused on ergonomics in the decades after WWII - and for them, the failure of a fatigued operator to notice and process some data on a crummy display could get everyone killed.

Second thought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoreceptor_cell#Difference_... And slow reaction helps reduce fatigue for the kinds of information usually viewed on old amber and green CRT's.

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