What monitor refresh rate is best for the eyes? A screen that is smoother and easier on the eyes has a greater refresh rate. It is ideal to have a display refresh rate of 120Hz if you want to lessen eyestrain. Although it wouldn't be necessary for eye health, a higher-end 144 or 240 Hz monitor would boost the number of frames per second and the overall smoothness of the display.
If you're less of a tech nerd than I am and more of a gamer, you might be asking why a faster refresh rate is better for your eyes. Let's start at the beginning since you might be wondering what a refresh rate is.
Hertz or Hz units are used to express refresh rates. Since hertz is a frequency, it describes how frequently something happens each second. When discussing refresh rate, Hertz refers to the frequency with which the image on the television screen changes to display a fresh image. Therefore, you need a television that can display at least 24 frames per second if your movie was shot at 24 frames per second. Since the majority of modern televisions refresh at 60 or 120 Hz, this won't be an issue. They can display a maximum of 60 or 120 frames per second since they can refresh the image on the screen 60 or 120 times, respectively.
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Frames per second and Hz
Movies are just a succession of photographs played one after another, which is what they were known as moving pictures many decades ago. A camera records these images at a certain pace, so one that shoots Hollywood movies might do so at 24 frames per second.
The movie camera is taking twenty-four photographs every second at a frame rate of 24 frames per second, and when those snapshots are stitched together, they produce a moving image. To produce a smooth-moving video, a camera now needs to capture a certain number of frames per second; otherwise, you would see something akin to an electronic flipbook.
How many frames are supplied to the screen while the movie is shown depends on the frames per second. Therefore, a movie that is shot at 24 frames per second can only ever show a maximum of 24 frames at a time. You should watch that movie on television that can display at least 24 frames per second if you want the greatest possible picture.
Now, you won't find a television that advertises frames per second when you're looking for one to watch your movie on; instead, you'll see something called a refresh rate.
What occurs when the refresh rate is less than the frames per second?
While we rarely have issues watching movies on our televisions, modern video games are made to meet a minimum frame rate of 60 frames per second, but they frequently go above and beyond this.
What happens then if you have a monitor with a 60Hz refresh rate but a 120fps video game?
You need a monitor that will refresh 120 times per second (120Hz) to get the most out of your video game. You will see half as many frames per second displayed on a 60Hz monitor. Imagine your video game as a collection of moving images, except this time, you can only view one image at a time. An extremely choppy image results from threading together and displaying every other picture.
This is precisely what occurs when you play a game with a high number of frames per second on a monitor with a low refresh rate. Because you are lacking half of the information, your picture is not fluid. Remember the flipbook I discussed earlier? Although this is an inflated example, it is much simpler to picture. Now, if you have a display with a refresh rate of 120 Hz, you will see every frame of the movie, resulting in an image that is smoother and seamlessly blends.
How are your eyes affected by the refresh rate?
There is some debate about whether 60 frames per second is the rate at which the average human eye processes and absorbs information since studies have shown that your eyes can detect changes at frame rates as high as 100 frames per second. However, this varies individually with some people taking in more information than others. Since our brains can only process 60 frames per second at a base rate, when we view anything that is displayed at a slower rate, we frequently experience mild disorientation as a result of our brain’s inability to comprehend how the images move and fill in the spaces between them.
Have you ever seen someone dance while a strobe light was on? Similarly, strobe lights operate.
The number of frames per second displayed by a strobe light that pulses at 10 Hz is far less than what our eyes can process. So everything we see looks choppy, like a stop-motion movie when the light flickers at 10Hz. As our brains attempt to fill in the blanks or "frames" that we aren't seeing but that we believe should be there, we may start to feel disoriented. Since we don't play 10-frame-per-second video games, this is an extreme example, but the idea is still the same. Because we are seeing pictures refresh rather than seeing seamless motion, lower refresh rates put more strain on our eyes and push our brains to work harder to fill in the gaps.
Conclusion
Being a graphic designer, you spend the majority of your day looking at still images, thus having a display that refreshes at 120Hz doesn't matter. Yes, the image is clear and crisp, but it is also clear and crisp for the kind of work you perform at 60Hz. Imagine it is nighttime and you are playing video games. While playing COD at 60Hz is feasible, switching to 120Hz will reveal a difference you were previously unaware of. The image is much clearer, there is no longer any blurriness while moving swiftly, and the image you see through the scope of your pistol is completely different.
So, What monitor refresh rate is best for the eyes? What We mean to say is that you probably won't notice a significant difference between a 60Hz refresh rate and a 120Hz refresh rate if you spend most of your time working on your monitor doing graphic design, coding, or even just browsing the web. The difference in refresh rate is more apparent, though, if you are playing a fast-paced game or one that was designed for 120 frames per second. Your eyes aren't having to work as hard to take in details since your brain is being provided more information about your environment.
