INDUSTRY ADVICE: Take Care of Your Eyes – A PSA from BenQ

© BenQ

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This is a sponsored post in collaboration with BenQ.

We’ve been working with BenQ for a while now, they’ve helped share their technical knowledge at events such as our Professional Development Day, and on the Shutter Hub blog with their Introduction to Professional Monitors, they’ve even sponsored a YEARBOOK Award!

If you don’t know BenQ already, they’re the world’s largest professional monitor brand, specialising in the photography, film and design markets. They focus on the quality and specification of their monitors, enabling consistent colour accuracy across their ranges, and are one of only a few brands to be officially validated by Pantone.

So, who better than BenQ to give us some solid tips on looking after our peepers? Tallie Wright from BenQ shares her research…

 


 

The idea of taking more care of ourselves physically and mentally will not come as a surprising topic of conversation these days. With the added stresses of the world right now, it’s undeniably important to be taking care of ourselves, and sometimes in ways that we may not have even considered in our ‘normal’ routines. Screen time is on the up, and as photographers, it’s vital to protect your eyes.

If you’re used to working in a studio, you’ll have been using high-quality editing monitors and very reliant on the features they offer. So as you take your work home with you, you’ll need to make sure you’ve got a monitor that can give you the same professional quality you’re used to, and after spending more hours indoors editing, it’s more important than ever to take care of your eyes.

 

Things to consider about eye strain when looking at photography monitors:

Flicker-Free Eye Protection

Generally, screens produce flickering not visible to the naked eye when it generates light. Flickering occurs 5.8m times within a regular 8-hour (working) day of looking at a screen and this long exposure to flickering generated by the screen can seriously impact your eye health. It can leave you with fatigue, headaches, and blurred vision, and that hurts creativity and productivity. You need to find a flicker-free screen that uses stabilisation technology to keep the picture from flickering. This reduces the pressure on the eyes as well as eye fatigue from looking at a screen for a long time.

 

Low Blue Light Technology

Blue light is probably something you’ve heard of a lot over the last couple of years, with many sources stating its damaging effects on our eyes. Light is divided into visible and invisible light, which the human eye can only perceive when they enter the macula of the eye. It is then when the eye shapes this light as image and colour. Blue light is the more powerful visible light, including the colours blue, indigo and violet light. The short-wave blue light of violet light (UV) can penetrate through the cornea and the lens directly into the macula, causing damage. So, finding a monitor that helps filter blue light should be high on your monitor checklist to protect your eyesight from long-term damage, strain and dryness.

 

Brightness and Ambient Light

More often than not, you initially think a bright screen appears clear and easy to read. However, a monitor that is too bright can be a significant reason why your eyes get tired when looking at a screen for a long time. And on the other hand, if a monitor is too dark, this strains your eyes, as it is hard to read. So yes, you guessed it, there needs to be a balance. You want your monitor’s brightness to match your surrounding workspace brightness or ambient light. This is more comfortable for the eyes, as it reduces the irritation of bright light and will protect your eyes from fatigue and irritation. Look for a monitor with a sensor that depicts the surrounding ambient light and adjusts accordingly. What’s more, brightness technology in photography monitors not only helps with eye health but is also a key part in providing colour accuracy too!

 

Finally, and maybe most importantly, you need to take appropriate rests and breaks from screen time. So, don’t forget to go and get a cuppa, blink and rest your eyes (and stretch too)!

 

Not only will a BenQ monitor allow you to work from home efficiently, but their latest photography release also includes the above features (and more) to help significantly reduce eye strain, whilst keeping up to date with the latest colour and editing technology. Find out more about BenQ’s eyecare solutions here.

The latest photography monitor from BenQ, the SW321C, surpasses industry standards to deliver guaranteed consistent colour performance whilst protecting your eyes. Whether you’re working on a photo or video, you can effortlessly relive every remarkable moment with the SW321C; it has recently won the TIPA award for ‘Best Professional Photo Monitor’ Award too!

 

Key features of the SW321C include:

  • 4K (3840 x 2160) with IPS Technology and an impressive 99% Adobe RGB colour space, 100% sRGB/Rec. 709 and 95% of DCI-P3/Display P3, the SW321C displays incredibly realistic colour for all types of photography.
  • Impeccable colour reproduction from a 16-bit look-up table (LUT) that improves RGB blending accuracy.
  • A sharp and a true-to-life representation with the Delta E ≤ 2 in Adobe RGB and sRGB colour space renders the truest view of the original image.
  • Benefit from an unbelievably authentic representation with the BenQ Uniformity Technology that fine-tunes the colour and brightness at hundreds of sub-regions for screen-wide colour accuracy.
  • Produce consistent and accurate colour with built-in hardware calibration that allows you to adjust the monitor’s internal image processing chip without changing the graphics card output data.
  • Preview the HDR effect during post with HDR10 and HLG formats and video format that supports 24P/25P film content to be displayed at native cadence without pulldown to prevent playback distortion of the source video.

 

If you’re looking for more information about how BenQ’s photographer monitors can improve your health and workflow, then let us know, or visit colorconfidence.com and other photographic retailers for the latest options from BenQ.

 


 

This is a sponsored post in collaboration with BenQ.

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