If it werent for this problem i'd probably be fine getting a nice LCD like a sony XBR or something, but when i try and relax and watch tv in the dark it sears my eyes (yes i tried lowering the backlight, but even when excessively dim "looking" it still felt like it was giving off a stinging light). So now i dont know what to do. I thought about Plasmas but that has some deal breakers of its own that i do not want to deal with.

On the other hand "If" Pioneer made a 42' 1080p (or 1080i for that matter) display, i'd be set on that i suppose since it would be the best of both worlds so to speak, since i've been told Pioneers really dont make you need to worry about IR and they handle it well on all applications.

anyhow, now i'm stumped, i sort of need a TV soon so i cannot wait for anything new to come out anymore (especially since nothing new seems to be on the horizon at this point).

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=451527

Bias lighting won't necessarily relieve eye strain. Best thing to do with a LCD, since they ARE very bright, is keep some sunlight in your house or have some good lamps on the sides of the LCD TV.

With CRT and plasma, of course it's kind of the opposite, keep light out because the screens are dimmer.

edit : Oops I thought that post was about those LCDs with dynamic backlighting that react to the screen visuals (side LED things)

yeah but the thing is that i want to watch it in the dark like i used to with my CRT with my eyes not stinging beyond a few minutes. Besides when reading the very long winded description of bias lighting its purpose does not seem to be to releave the eyestrain issue (if anything it seems like i'm one of the few people it really bothers).

I just dont want to have to wince every time something white comes on the screen (i started to dread commercials when i had my XBR2). But i also do want everything else that an LCD affords me, which is why i find the switch to plasma a little troubling since the only company that i think can avoid IR completely doesnt make a higher resolultion model in the size i want.

This may sound odd but how far are you sitting away from the display? One of the causes of eye strain can occur if you are sitting to far away from a display in a dark room. Your eye notices that most of what it is looking at is dark and automatically opens the iris. Also I would mention that even a bright LCD display (60 foot-Lamberts) is far dimmer than a bright day outside (1000+ foot-Lamberts).

i'm sitting no further than i did with my older tube television which did not have this issue (or at least if it didnt my eyes would adjust after a few minutes).

You are not alone. I had the same problem with a 52XBR3 LCD viewed from 10-12' away in moderately and dimly lit room. I tried various forms of room lighting and bias lighting with little success. I dropped the brightness (picture) and backlight way down and used power savings mode but, as you mention, the picture was rather dull* (did eliminate flashlights and fans though ;-). I had no problems with eye fatique with the SXRD that I had before the 52XBR3 LCD and no problems with the SXRD that I got after the 52XBR3 LCD.
Maybe you're just sensitive to bright light sources like I am.
*Another thing I noticed was that motion blur was much more apparent with the overall brightness up high. When I dropped the overall brightness the motion blur was less intense.

[QUOTE=spincut;11899571]If it werent for this problem i'd probably be fine getting a nice LCD like a sony XBR or something, but when i try and relax and watch tv in the dark it sears my eyes (yes i tried lowering the backlight, but even when excessively dim "looking" it still felt like it was giving off a stinging light). So now i dont know what to do. I thought about Plasmas but that has some deal breakers of its own that i do not want to deal with.

On the other hand "If" Pioneer made a 42' 1080p (or 1080i for that matter) display, i'd be set on that i suppose since it would be the best of both worlds so to speak, since i've been told Pioneers really dont make you need to worry about IR and they handle it well on all applications.

anyhow, now i'm stumped, i sort of need a TV soon so i cannot wait for anything new to come out anymore (especially since nothing new seems to be on the horizon at this point).[/QUOTE

You might have a better chance of getting more responses and solutions from LCD owners on the LCD forum. Good luck.:)

spincut, I still don't have an HDTV, and I don't plan to upgrade for another year or more. Not that many programs are in HD right now (this should be different later on). It's OK if you keep the TV you have. Why do you have to get a new TV so soon?

One of the benefits of having a display properly calibrated for the room is that the ambient light is taken into account and the display is setup so it will produce a good image and not be too birght as to cause eye fatigue.

Most crt tv might put out maybe 100cd/m2 in brightness or so on full tilt, a LCD in "torch mode" can do 400cd/m2-500cd/m2 so yeah a bias light aint gonna do much to offset that much light comming from the display.

Eye fatigue can also come from poor picture adjustments because you eye cannot see the diffrence between details and is straining to detect dark detail.

Think of it like a overexposed film picture, you cant see detail cause its washed out from light except in this case its being clipped by the improper settings.

For what its worth I have my westy LVM-37w1 putting out about 120cd/m2 and still run a 15watt fluorescent lamp bias. It makes it much easier on my eyes.

Theaters normally are not pitch black either for this reason.

cut from wikipedia " In biological night vision, molecules of rhodopsin in the rods of the eye undergo a change in shape as light is absorbed by them. Rhodopsin is the chemical that allows night-vision, and is extremely sensitive to light. Exposed to white light, the pigment immediately bleaches, and it takes about 30 minutes to regenerate fully, but most of the adaptation occurs within the first five or ten minutes in the dark. Rhodopsin in the human rods is insensitive to the longer red wavelengths of light, so many people use red light to preserve night vision as it will not deplete the eye's rhodopsin stores in the rods and instead is viewed by the cones."

Either the room is too dark compaired to the screen or the display is improperly set for the rooms ambient light.

Some displays cant be set to accomadate a really dark room and LCDs with a regular backlight are even more limited but I don't see newer LCDs being incapable of being calibrated to a reasonable level as to not hurt the eyes.

Especially since my LCD is know for being way to bright at factory settings and it's from 2005 yet it can be made a third as bright, track 6500k decently and get a average error delta of about 1 accross a gamut of colors as reported by the monitor profiling software I use.

The only other option is a front / rear projector since you say plasma is a no go for you.

I feel the same way about LCD in the dark and many others have described the same complaint. LCD has this feeling of beaming light at you, even at lower brightness levels, unlike plasmas and CRTs which produce their own light through phosphors. Thus, pdps/crts produce a distinctly different feeling in the dark that many find more natural and soothing to the eyes.

And bias lighting isn't a complete solution to eye strain - proper screen calibration is essential. I have a ideal-lume bias light that I enjoy but I have no issues with eye strain watching in pitch black conditions without a bias light on a pdp that is properly calibrated.

Undermined, i "think" i understand what you're saying, but i did try do adjust the TV to my lighting, even trying the auto feature (which dimmed the light even BELOW minium backlight levels i noticed when dark) but then the picture just looked dimmer than even a plasma and still bothered me sort of.

I'm not sure what waldor was trying to say, i think his post got broken up by accident, since one minute he says he couldnt adjust the picture to help, also making it very dull, to saying it didnt bother his eyes :confused:

spincut, I still don't have an HDTV, and I don't plan to upgrade for another year or more. Not that many programs are in HD right now (this should be different later on). It's OK if you keep the TV you have. Why do you have to get a new TV so soon?

that would be a better point if i had an old tv to keep, which i do not. I recently moved into a house that wasnt even built to accomodate tube televisions. So it not only has to be flat, but i dont have a TV in the mean time to hold onto (until say, Pioneer finally decides to maybe make a 1080p 42", which i bet they probably eventually will).

I feel the same way about LCD in the dark and many others have described the same complaint. LCD has this feeling of beaming light at you, even at lower brightness levels, unlike plasmas and CRTs which produce their own light through phosphors. Thus, pdps/crts produce a distinctly different feeling in the dark that many find more natural and soothing to the eyes.

And bias lighting isn't a complete solution to eye strain - proper screen calibration is essential. I have a ideal-lume bias light that I enjoy but I have no issues with eye strain watching in pitch black conditions without a bias light on a pdp that is properly calibrated.

so you have owned and tried both and came to that conclusion then? its funny but unlike IR/Burn in or "reflections" very few people seem to have or recognize this problem so it was even hard to find out about at first, thinking all HD sets were affected by it. So you definetly beleive it has something to do with the type of backlight (fluorescent? that would makes sense as regular flourescent can irritate) as opposed to the CRT like nature of a plasma phosphor.

I just thought of something else that affects some people. since a uncalabrated display is very blue in color and blue colored light greatly reduces a humans night vision, the event that a uncalabrated display making your eyes tired might be higher that I had first considered,

Its the same also that some people like their lighting in there house to be the "cool white" type and others like the old fashoned "normal" bulb. "Normal" bulbs are very red in color and give off a "warm" color of light but fluorescent, ccfl and "cool wite' are much more blue and "colder" in looks.

If the lighting that you are subjected to
most of the day is the 'warmer" kind you might tend to see all other types as very harsh in nature and "cold" looking.

Kinda like how if you see a car with the new kind of headlights, they standout because they seem very "blue" as compaired to those on other cars and they might make it hard to see for other drivers because of how bight and harsh they seem. Where as on the other hand the driver in the car with these headlights can see with better clarity since the light of their headlights seems to shine brighter and is more akin to the illumination of sunlight. Its just to others it sees really bright since all of the other lights from the cars, streetlights, parking lots .etc is normally very "warm" and reddish-yellow.

Like how the light from a fish tank seems weird as compaired to "normal" room light. In reality the light from the fishtank is the same "color" as sunlight and also the same as a calibrated tv (6500K.) It only seems blue because and harsh because the other ambient light is reddish and we are not as sensative to reddish light as we are to green or blue.

Man there were some really smart pepole who though about this stuff and how human perception work when they designed the standards of color models, but TV manufactures just want their TV to be the brightest on the self in the big box store that is lit by lighting nothing like that found in most homes. Makes my head hurt and unfortunately causes eye strain.

no, i disagree, because you would be implying that every tv i have owned previous would have somehow been properly calibrated, and the truth is they they were no more calibrated than this tv was to look the way i wanted it to look. So i dont beleive that is the reason.