Im wondering if anyone else has an 'Acer 1916W 19" wide-screen LCD monitor'?
Ive had this monitor for afew months and wish I never bought it.

This monitor seems to be _extremely_ painful on the eyes and I cant figure out why. It is normally very bright but I have turned that down to 0 yet it still hurts. I thought maybe I needed to increase the refresh rate, so I did, to 75hz but still doesnt help too much. I have fooled around with all settings on the monitor but I cant get a configuration that doesnt hurt my eyes after about 30-60 minutes viewing.

It seems that mainly the irritation begins later in the day, when it is darker outside and lights on in my room. That may (or may not) seem odd, but it does seem to be happening. I may go out and buy brighter lights for my room..

I was also thinking maybe it had to do with the fact that it is a black monitor, with my old one being white, and the contrast of the black frame outside the bright and (mainly) white images on the screen.

The native resolution is 1440x900 @ 60hz; Im running at 1440x900 @ 75hz. I have a 128MB Nvidia card that works fine. This occurs in both properly configured windows and linux.

Thanks for any tips.

edit: This is my first LCD monitor. At first glance, the images on the screen seem no different from that of a CRT monitor. My old CRT monitor never caused my eyes to hurt (1024x768 @ 85hz)

Refresh rate problems usually result in flickering, not brightness. My Soyo LCD has a brightness setting and contrast. Turing one or both of them down should help. If you don't have these settings you could try the Gamma settings. In KDE they are in the Display settings when you right click on the desktop and select Configure.

thanks for replying.

yeah, i tried adjusting the refresh rate because i am not certain that it is a problem related to the brightness. im leaning towards a problem with the the black frame of the monitor or the brightness in my room. however, again, my old CRT monitor was in the same room with the same light, and i viewed it from the same distance away and angle.

at 60hz the text does look weird so setting it to 70-75hz fixes that just fine.

i just turned the brightness down to 0 and the contrast to less than 5, it still is hard to look at but maybe ill try and keep it like this for a day or afew hours.

besides contrast and brightness, i have these (relevant) buttons on the monitor: focus, clock, and values for RGB. besides these, i can use the tool that game with my Nvidia driver (at least in windows) to further adjust these, as wells as gamma.

i also checked precisely to make sure the monitor was line up straight with the desk so that i was viewing it directly on.

ill see how adjusting the contrast does for a while.