constant computer use bad for eyes?

[housenuts]

this year my eyesight has started going bad. i'm 23 years old. i've always had good vision and there's no evidence of this happening in my family at a young age. i have problem reading text far away, up close everything is fine.

could this be from constant staring at a monitor?

[BradleyT]

Get an LCD monitor. There's a world of difference.

[Blarg]

Yes, but much of the harmful effect comes from glare, which you can prevent or at least make much less bad.

Shade the top and sides of your monitor with either shields you buy from computer stores for that or just with some cardboard taped to your monitor's top and sides. Shading the monitor will also make your colors look better.

Also, get a polarized glass screen and put it over your monitor. You can get these from most computer stores, but get a good one. The cheap cloth mesh ones aren't good.

Adjust the lighting in your room, or your computer set up, so that the light is not directly behind, above, or in front of you. Ideally, the light should be soft and bounced off the walls before it comes to you, not making reflections on your monitor or desk, and not making you squint even a little.

A dark desk, dark keyboard, dark non-reflective mouse are best. But even if you can't take all these measures, even one or two should make things much easier on your eyes.

Round, bulging screens make the problem worse, too. Be sure when you buy monitors that they are flat screens or have very little bulge.

[gusly]

Agree with the glare thing. Another huge thing is video cards and monitors that are either not adjusted to a high enough refresh rate, or are just plain cheap and incapable of a decent refresh rate.

A lot of people haven't adjusted their video cards and have monitors that are running at the default 60 Hertz; this is just horrible for the eyes. You can actually see the flicker at this level. And the bigger the monitor is, the higher the refresh rate should be.

Don't know if this is your case or not, but I'm sure someone out there has this problem.

[lunapark]

Get your eyes checked by an optometrist. Often ppl are a little farsighted which creates strain on the computer and they don't even know it.
Also make a conscious effort to blink. Ppl blink 75% less when they are on the computer.
Every 10 minutes or so look off in the distance at something else.

[MicroBob]

all good advice. I have extremely sensitive eyes (but still have good vision somehow) so this is an important subject to me.

I have one of the screen-filters thing. The one I have is from 3M I think and cost $29 at Office Max. It helps.

The lighting in the room is especially important....if I turn off a couple of lights in the room then my eyes are really struggling with the screen. I have a lamp on my desk next to the monitor with a soft-bulb and also have lights to the right and left of me.

I was having serious squinting problems for quite awhile and it was very annoying. But adding more light around the room has helped a TON. much less squinting and no real issues with tearing or anything like that anymore.