Recently I read an article about the Daylight computer which is a new E-Ink tablet designed with mental health in mind. Aside from looking very elegant the main promise is because of the different type of screen, this device will reduce digital eye strain both because the more natural light coming from the screen (if needed) and also because it does not feature any colors on screen.

To me, this is very enticing: it will act much like a crossover with e-readers, but this time running a fully-fledged Android-based OS called “Sol:OS” that also has access to the Google Play Store for popular apps like Spotify and modern web browsers. I remembered recently visiting a concert with a friend and seeing his phone in the dark having a grayscale screen instead of the normal colorful display. So I decided to do a little experiment.

Using the “color filter” accessibility feature on iPhone I changed my screen to only show grayscale. Next, I enabled “night shift” to filter out blue tones from the screen to get a more natural looking image. Initially it seemed this turned the device almost unusable but after some time of getting used I noticed my usage behavior slightly changing. To further solidify my new usage patterns, I permanently enabled “Reader” for all sites meaning any website article I visit is stripped from any kind of distracting content on the side or navigation elements.

After some weeks having my phone set up this way I can conclude it does bring some interesting changes to my behavior: I tend to spend less time looking at video’s and photo’s, with more time spent on reading. I feel less need to check out social media, but rather look for more “slow” and deep-dive news and other articles. Overall I notice my use of the device is down with remaining use mostly focused on using some core apps for banking and mobility that I won’t be able to use otherwise.

While my usage patterns definitely seem to have changed simply by visiting the marketing website of this new product, early research seems to indicate no real benefit to blue-light reduction in screens¹. And as I already own a previous-generation iPad that works just fine, I think I’ll skip over this new revolutionary product for now.

1. Wolffsohn, James & Lingham, Gareth & Downie, Laura & Huntjens, Byki & Inomata, Takenori & Jivraj, Saleel & Kobia-Acquah, Emmanuel & Muntz, Alex & Mohamed-Noriega, Karim & Plainis, Sotiris & Read, Michael & Rony, Ridowan & Singh, Sumeer & Utheim, Tor & Craig, Jennifer. (2023). TFOS Lifestyle: Impact of the digital environment on the ocular surface. The Ocular Surface. 28. 10.1016/j.jtos.2023.04.004. ↩︎