Would Staring at Laptop in Dim Lit Room be Bad?

[pandaexpress]

I wasn't sure where to place this question, but thought it might be a biological one and went with this folder.

So, my parents were having this weird discussion the other day about using my laptop all the time in the dark. They think it's bad and sort of like reading a book in a dim lit room. But, I told them that my laptop as a screen that's lit up and that's different. But they still said it'd probably be bad for my eyes.

Would anyone happen to know what the real medical/biological answer to this issue is? Do we need to have good room lighting when staring at our laptops? I spend about three hours a day on mine and sometimes the room is pretty dark.

 

[Larry Cosner]

You can assure your folks, from a medical perspective, that there is no innately harmful potential to using a laptop in a dimly lit room. The gradient between screen lighting and ambient (room) lighting may impact how quickly your eyes tire. But there is no long-term biophysical harm that would come for any such gradient. (BTW: it is largely a folk-tale that reading in dimly lit environments 'harms' the eyesight. It, too, may tire your vision more quickly than a well-lit environment. But that does not lead to either ophthalmologic or neurologic damage of any sort, according to virtually all of the peer-reviewed literature. (Small pockets, as in all of the sciences, of disagreement exist.))

 

[rootone]

If reading in low level light was was harmful, then so would walking outside at night anywhere other than a brightly lit city center be just as harmful.