What % monitor brightness and contrast is best on the eyes? what are u using?

To a large extent, i think it's just a matter of preference. However, too much brightness is not a good thing. It floods the rods and cones in our eyes (that detect color) and over stimulates them. It would be a bit like staring into the sun, only greatly reduced in effect. Colors at the long end of the spectrum, like reds, oranges and yellows, will be the most offensive to our eyes when too bright.

You could just adjust your settings to the point they look right to you. If you want to be more methodical and precise about it, you could do the following:

Find a picture in a magazine that looks good to you. Ideally, it would have flesh tones, reds and other bright colors. If you have a scanner, scan it into your computer. Now, adjust the brightness and contrast until the scanned picture most closely resembles the magazine picture. Some monitors have other controls as well, such as color balance, that you may need to adjust for optimal color.

Of course, be sure to check your adapter settings first. If set at 256 colors, you may want to raise it if your graphics adapter supports higher color.

Originally posted by Duster
To a large extent, i think it's just a matter of preference. However, too much brightness is not a good thing. It floods the rods and cones in our eyes (that detect color) and over stimulates them. It would be a bit like staring into the sun, only greatly reduced in effect. Colors at the long end of the spectrum, like reds, oranges and yellows, will be the most offensive to our eyes when too bright....


Rods and cones are not distributed evenly on the retina Roughly speaking, rods are around the edges while cones are more densely packed in the center of the retina.

The cones provide most of the color vision and provide a lot of detail in what we see, but they require relatively more light to stimulate them.

Rods, however, are significantly more sensitive to dim light and movement. But they do not handle colors well at all. The location of the rods on the retina and their sensitivity to moving objects at the periphery of vision is why we often see moving objects out of the corner of our eyes in the darkness of night. Additionally, if you want to look at dim stars at night, don't look directly at the star, look off to the side so that the light from the star falls on the far more sensitive rods around the edges of the retina.

Orange is the most stimulating color for humans, far more so than either red, yellow, green or blue.


Setting monitor brightness is also dependent upon factors such as ambient room lighting (should be dim and glare-free), plus the ability of the monitor to maintain sharpness at the brightness level that is chosen.

Originally posted by Mike the newbie
Orange is the most stimulating color for humans, far more so than either red, yellow, green or blue.

Absolutely. That's why its the best color for life jackets and markers for boaters and divers. In the event they are lost at sea, it's the easiest color for human eyes to detect from altitude (planes and helicopters).

To improve the odds, some Coast Guard choppers use pigeons as spotters. The eyesight of any bird is far superior to that of people. It makes sense to use them to find lost people.

Originally posted by Duster

Absolutely. That's why its the best color for life jackets and markers for boaters and divers. In the event they are lost at sea, it's the easiest color for human eyes to detect from altitude (planes and helicopters)....


Of course, if water were coloured bright orange, then I suspect the lifejackets might not me colured orange as well. ;)

imagine the disaster in the news:

The worlds largest Orange Juice tanker carrying 800 tonnes of Orange Juice capsizes at sea, 200 feared dead in the catastrophy. :D

Rescue helicopter crew crashes shortly after due to "blindness by orange" :)

Except that orange juice is yellow!. The color of the orange itself ranges from orange to yellow.