Computer screens are a complicated business for me: most screens are too bright for my eyes even at the zero brightness setting. I have had some luck with the most recent laptops I used, though – a Dell Latitude 7490 I bought second-hand last year, and an HP Pavillion Gaming Laptop provided by my company, both of which have excellent screens – so I wondered if maybe monitor technology had improved enough lately that I would be able to get an external monitor that won’t burn my eyes after a few hours use. So I decided to try my luck with a Lenovo L22e-20 monitor.
When it arrived, I tried it out and was immediately disappointed. It was just as bad brightness-wise as every other LCD external monitor I had used. Even at the zero brightness setting, the black background was not black, but dark grey, which made the contrast too low. The image quality was really good for watching videos, but for staring at text for extended periods of time, it was just not comfortable to look at; my laptop screen was much better. I was so disappointed that I decided I would return the monitor and order a different one.
A couple of days later, I decided to try it again, and to my great surprise, the monitor did not look bad at all. The black was really black, the brightness was pretty good (though I wish I could lower it a little bit further at night). I wondered if I had just gotten used to the new monitor, but the difference was so great that it was hard to believe it was just a psychological effect.
A few hours later, I wanted to see how i3 would handle workspaces when screens are disconnected or connected to a running session. So I disconnected the Lenovo monitor and connected it again – and to my even greater surprise the screen came back with the awful brightness of the first time. I tried to look at every setting in the monitor, but nothing had changed; I tried disconnecting and connecting again, to no avail; I tried to turn everything off and on again – nothing changed, same awful brightness.
The next day, I decided to look at XRandR settings – maybe it was some software-side gamma or brightness setting or something that was affecting the brightness. I ran xrandr --verbose, and gamma/brightness values were normal, but I noticed something else: there were five different 1920x1080 modes for the screen. This is the relevant part of the output:
1920x1080 (0xa4) 148.500MHz +HSync +VSync *current +preferred
h: width 1920 start 2008 end 2052 total 2200 skew 0 clock 67.50KHz
v: height 1080 start 1084 end 1089 total 1125 clock 60.00Hz
1920x1080 (0xa5) 174.500MHz +HSync -VSync
h: width 1920 start 1968 end 2000 total 2080 skew 0 clock 83.89KHz
v: height 1080 start 1083 end 1088 total 1119 clock 74.97Hz
1920x1080 (0xa6) 148.500MHz +HSync +VSync
h: width 1920 start 2008 end 2052 total 2200 skew 0 clock 67.50KHz
v: height 1080 start 1084 end 1089 total 1125 clock 60.00Hz
1920x1080 (0xa7) 148.500MHz +HSync +VSync
h: width 1920 start 2448 end 2492 total 2640 skew 0 clock 56.25KHz
v: height 1080 start 1084 end 1089 total 1125 clock 50.00Hz
1920x1080 (0xa8) 148.352MHz +HSync +VSync
h: width 1920 start 2008 end 2052 total 2200 skew 0 clock 67.43KHz
v: height 1080 start 1084 end 1089 total 1125 clock 59.94Hz
Here, besides the resolution, frequencies, and other characteristics, each mode is identified by a hexadecimal code in parentheses (0xa4, 0xa5, etc.). Turns out you can pass those codes to the xrandr --mode option instead of a resolution such as 1920x1080 to select one among multiple modes with the same resolution.
I decided to try the other modes, just to see what difference it would make – and lo and behold, the second mode made the screen brightness good again! All the other modes left the screen with the bright background. I don’t know what it is specifically about this mode that had an effect on brightness, but I notice two things: it is the mode with the highest frequency, and it is the only one with -VSync rather than +VSync (the xorg.conf manpage tells us this is the polarity of the VSync signal, whatever that is). Maybe one (or both) of these elements is involved in the trick.
Actually, even if you run xrandr without the --verbose option, it will list potentially multiple modes for each resolution, by showing all available refresh rates for each resolution:
HDMI-1 connected 1920x1080+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 476mm x 268mm 1920x1080 60.00 + 74.97* 60.00 50.00 59.94 1920x1080i 60.00 50.00 59.94 1680x1050 59.88 1280x1024 75.02 70.00 60.02 1440x900 59.90 1152x864 75.00 1280x720 60.00 60.00 50.00 59.94 1024x768 75.03 70.07 60.00 800x600 72.19 75.00 60.32 720x576 50.00 50.00 50.00 720x480 60.00 60.00 59.94 59.94 59.94 640x480 75.00 72.81 60.00 59.94 59.94 720x400 70.08
I had never paid much attention to this, but you can actually select the specific mode you want by calling, for example, xrandr --output HDMI-1 --mode 1920x1080 --rate 74.97, specifying both the resolution and the refresh rate. In some cases, though, there are multiple modes with the same refresh rate (for example, the 720x576 line above has three different modes with the same refresh rate 50.00); in this case, I think the only way to choose a specific mode is to specify the hexadecimal code of the mode listed by the --verbose option.
If you don’t specify a refresh rate or give a specific mode hex code, XRandR will theoretically select the “preferred” mode, which is the one with a + sign after it in the output. For this Lenovo monitor, the preferred mode is a bad one, so you have to override it with these options.
The weirdest thing about this story is that, on the day the monitor was suddenly good, Xorg had apparently selected a non-preferred mode by pure chance for some reason. If that had not happened, I would probably have never discovered that the monitor had a good mode at all.
@c.m.: OLED was in the back of my mind while I was searching, but it did not yell loud enough from there to reach the rest of my mind. And now looking at the prices, I see why I didn't see any in my ascending-price-ordered search. I actually did order another screen, an EIZO FlexScan EV2360 [1], in a fit of mild millionaireness, but it will probably only arrive next week.
[1] https://www.eizoglobal.com/products/flexscan/ev2360/
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c.m., 2021-02-08 22:16:36 +0000 #
i had written thus:
did you consider an oled screen? they're amazing to look at and will give you the deepest blacks you can get without actively sucking photons in from the environment, a technology which could be used to power the screen itself so i'm not sure why nobody had that idea yet.
yet a flash of insight prompted me to look for the cheapest such. the recommendation stands as by my calculations you should be a millionaire by now. the calculations however do not stand.