Ctrl+F'd in this thread for "eye strain" to see if anyone else reports oddly having more eye strain from using a retina screen.
I used a 15" macbook pro retina for 2 years pretty much 8 hours a day and noticed my eye sight deteriorating rapidly. I thought it was just the hours I was logging in front of a computer screen and thought 'well atleast I'm using a retina screen'. But now that I've stopped using the macbook and have moved to an old 20" lcd screen and working on Windows 7, I find that my eyesight has recovered significantly. I can read road signs and my ability to change focus has improved.
I'm not sure what the explanation could be but I wouldn't be surprised to hear that your eyes are actually more stressed when they try to resolve the denser retina pixels.
The point of a retina display is that the eye perceives it as continuous shapes and gradations of colour and tone.
It's more likely to be down to the size of fonts and visual elements. Would you say the font sizes you viewed on the MBP were smaller or larger than those on the 20" display? (As perceived by you, not necessarily as displayed on the screen as viewing distance is also a factor). It may be the smaller screen size caused you to zoom out of content to fit more on the screen. That would have a far grater impact on eye strain.
The fact that smaller text would be crisp and readable on a retina display may have encouraged you to zoom out more than you might do on a lower resolution display though, so the retina display isn't totally off the hook as a contributing factor.
> The fact that smaller text would be crisp and readable on a retina display may have encouraged you to zoom out more than you might do on a lower resolution display though, so the retina display isn't totally off the hook as a contributing factor.
Thanks for the reply, yea I think this is the most likely culprit. Though, looking at the font size of Xcode right now it doesn't seem to be any smaller than this text I'm typing on my 20" monitor. At one point a year into working on the macbook I thought it could have been the brightness so I did change my Xcode background to black and used a program called 'flux' to reduce my screens brightness but it really didn't offer much relief.
Does your old 20" lcd screen have a CCFL backlight?
For some reason unknown to me, the light emitted by the LED backlight in my life (in an iPad 2) tend to cause a little unpleasant tension in me, but the CCFL backlights in my life (in an HP w2007 monitor and in a Samsung LN32A450 television set) do not.
