Got my HD satellite installed today, and the install tech said that his brother, an optometrist, claims that HD sets are significantly worse for children’s eyes than standard TV sets.
Sounds like bunk to me, but has anyone heard anything along these lines? Any bizarre studies out there?
No clue why HDTV is worse than standard, nor why it’s the case just for children…
Dono about the HD part but the TV part is what’s bad for them in general.
Yeah, but the guy was adament, that HD was worse.
Is TV in general bad (ignoring the content for a moment) in smaller doses in lit rooms?
I’m not a doctor, but I do know a lot about video display devices. The only difference between an HDTV and a standard TV is the amount of lines of information being displayed. Thats it. Nothing else. If I had to guess, I’d say it would actually be easier on the eyes because it provides a more seamless image.
This would be like saying that running a higher resolution on your computer monitor is bad for your eyes.
Because of the improved picture quality, children are more enticed to sit closer to the screen, and rest their eyes on the display. This, at least in labratory rats, has led to chafing and vision imparing callouses forming on the lens of the eye.
That’s actually true. It makes the text smaller and lowers the refresh rate. At 1280x1024, my refresh rate is so bad, I have to lower my resolution if I’m going to be looking at my monitor for long periods of time to avoid major eye fatigue.
I dunno, the enhanced realism might lead to motion sickness or focusing issues in younger children. Just a WAG.
Well, thats only because you’re straining the system too hard so that it forces it into a lower refresh. If you had a better video card/monitor combo, you can easily go that high (and much higher) and still have good refresh rate.
As for text being smaller, thats a good point, but there are ways to remedy it. Windows has an option where you can increase text and icon size to comensate for the higher res. I’m running 1400x1050 with no problems at all (15" screen, 60hz refresh).
The point I was trying to make was that for a given image, the more lines you have available to reproduce that image, the better. Think back to calculus and Riemann sums. The more divisions you have, the better the approximation of the original.
I don’t have a cite or anything, but I frequent another message board that focuses on high definition front projection systems. The members there who have kids have posted saying that the kids love seeing their favorite characters “life size” on the big screen. Not one of them has mentioned their kids getting sick from watching high def. On the contrary, most of them reported that their kids couldn’t tell the difference (or at least didnt care about the difference) between VHS and high def.
A search for the string “HDTV” yielded no results at:
The American Academy of Ophthalmology
The National Eye Institute
The Sight and Hearing Foundation
Some creative Googling yielded this article, but it does no single out HDTV.
I went to a certain optometrist once. I asked him about corrective laser eye surgery. His suggestion was that my eyes weren’t 20/20 and they were like that for a reason and that I should spend more time not wearing glasses and accept my sight for what it was, since that was the more natural state of my eyes.
Long story short, some optometrists are quacks. This guy might be one too.
Should have been more specifric.
The TV programing not the TV per se.
NOW you’re on to something!
The way I see it, old CRT (cathode ray tube) TVs emit UV radiation, whereas LCD and Plasma TVs do not emit any type of radiation (other than visible light) as far as I know.
See this link: http://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q1433.html
Ah, yeah, that shit’ll rot yer brain.
Sorry for the misunderstanding.