LG C1 - Headache / Head Pressure suggestions?

thatsjord

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Hi All,

About a month ago I purchased a 65" LG C1 OLED, and have essentially suffered with headaches and what I would describe as head pressure throughout. I took a 3 day break from the television which removed any lingering headaches / pressure and had it return within about 10 minutes when using the television again. Here's my current setup and what i've tried.

Personal Setup -
Viewing Distance - 3 metres
Room Brightness - Medium / Dark
Bias Lighting - Philips lightstrip set to warm white (About 40 brightness)
Eye Health - Good, had an eye test on the 5th of Jan 2022.
Additional Info - I wear blue light blocking glasses (no correction) as I've found it helps with eye fatigue with work (Software developer)

General Settings
All energy saving settings disabled.

HDR Settings (Movies / TV) -
Filmmaker Mode
OLED Brightness - 35
Contrast - 85
Screen Brightness - 50
Colour Temp - Warm 50
Sharpness - 0
All motion settings disabled (afaik this is done by Filmmaker mode by standard)

Playstation 5 Settings -
Game Optimizer
OLED Brightness - 35
Contrast - 85
Screen Brightness - 50
Colour Temp - Warm 50
Sharpness - 0
Input set to PC mode for full RGB spectrum (confirmed in ps5 menu)
All motion settings disabled

I have tried enabling Motion Pro / Tru Motion and BFI at various different settings with no difference. I have also enabled / disabled the blue light reduction but that made no difference.

Ratchet and Clank on the Playstation 5 seems to be the worse offender for giving me headaches / head pressure, i've tried the game at fidelity mode (40fps on 120hz) and at performance mode (60fps) and the experience is essentially the same. Particularly when the camera is panning, it feels like someone is pressing my temples.

Having done a bit of research I did notice that some people seem to struggle with OLEDs and headaches and thought I might just be one of the unlucky ones that falls into that category, but I've been daily driving a Google Pixel 2XL for the last 4 years which uses and OLED screen at 250hz PWM (see - Google Pixel 2 XL Smartphone Review ) and i've never had any experience of headaches / head pressure before. Could it be that the slight dip in brightness at every pixel refresh cycle that all OLEDs have is causing this?

Additionally my daily driver for work is a Iiyama G-master GB3461WQSU which is a IPS panel with no flickering / pwm and apart from the odd bit of eye fatigue (sore eye / twitching etc) i've never had any issues with headaches. My previous TV the Sony KDL-43W755C (VA Panel) also caused me no issues.

Anyway, if anyone has any suggestions, tests they'd like me try I'm open to all ideas!
 
You're not sat too close, the screen isn't too bright and you've experimented with all the motion settings so I'm not sure what else you can do ?

I think your penultimate paragraph provides the answer - if you have some kind of intolerance to OLED then you may need to switch back to LCD.
 
Are you getting headaches watching normal tv content also or just playing games?
 
I remember buying a Toshiba lcd tv in 2007 and immediately getting headaches every body said I must be imagining it but I switched to a Panasonic plasma and never had any problems again
 
People with unique sensitives in their eyes may not suffer the same problems as others do even with similar sounding issues, its really hard to say what possible solutions there are.

The phone you have uses AMOLED which is different from TV WOLED. As mikej points out you might have sensitivity to WOLED light spectrum if you have to lower OLED pixel light.

Past forum thread worth reading.

Another forum dedicated to eye strain.
 
I had the same problem. I’d never had a problem with any kind of eyestrain/headaches until I bought an LG C1. It gave me the same symptoms as you describe and I have since then tried a number of 2021 range LED TVs - Samsung, Sony and Philips and all of these have given me headaches as well for some reason. Extremely frustrating not being able to work out what’s causing it and now I’ve just given up with all the faff of returning TVs.
 
I seriously doubt it’s related to motion. Not from what you’d describe. Your OLED light settings and contrast in HDR should both be at 100. Thats the whole point of HDR maximising the dynamic range. It doesn’t mean your average picture level is brighter but these need to be set to maximum to allow the full dynamic range of brightness to be available to your TV.

I also wonder if by turning your brightness down you are exaggerating the flicker and perhaps you have made it worse?

I’d also try not wearing the glasses and see how that goes.
 
For HDR, I have set mine at 90% of max settings for night time viewing and 100% for day time viewing. A tiny compromise to protect my vision during viewing in a dark environment.

If you think its the TV then return or resell it and buy a LCD TV but remember not to crank up the brightness for SDR on LCD TVs which can get 3-5x brighter full field than OLEDs and complain HDR looks dim even at max settings :)
 
Go to the opticians.

I had this. Turned out I was getting older, and now needed glasses, without realising.

However, when they asked me to read the chart, which I could read fine, then stuck a lens in front of me and told me to read it... fudge me.. it was like someone had turned my eyes into 4k! Now wear glasses when watching TV and no more headaches.
 
What TV did you have before the OLED?

Sorry. Just seen that you had a Sony. It's a fair ly big jump from 43" to 65" so that might be giving your brain some problems readjusting to the new size especially as you say on panning as you can no longer take in the full screen as easily with your eyes.
 
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Go to the opticians.

I had this. Turned out I was getting older, and now needed glasses, without realising.

However, when they asked me to read the chart, which I could read fine, then stuck a lens in front of me and told me to read it... fudge me.. it was like someone had turned my eyes into 4k! Now wear glasses when watching TV and no more headaches.

Very good advice.

I heard that vision gets poorer between 40-43 for a typical adult which fits my case.
 
You haven't by any chance changed your seating position/posture to compensate for the new screen?

I've found if I sit at a certain angle with my feet up and head slightly off centre I'm almost guaranteed to get pressure right across the front of my head and a lingering headache for the rest of the day, which is annoying as it's the most comfortable position.
 
Sound advise from others above, id add try this calculator here:

Its from thx home theatre recommendations and guides you on what should be your viewing distance between yourself and TV, but it counts for Monitor and screens also.

Id factor in also RSI (repetitive strain injury) regardless of watching TV or on the Monitor or screen, you should always he seated properly and should take regular breaks (every 30 mins) from watching TV, its getting much harder to do this since you get involved in the film and some are 2hrs+ long so you get locked in and don't move from your seat.

I do regular blinking exercises to help moisten my eyes and eye exercises (looking at another long distance object for few secs not TV!), you have to do it regularly though every 2-3 hours, but it keeps the headaches and eye strains away and opticians away from the wallet.

I too set my OLED or TV brightness down to 35-45, anything higher my eye balls and headache would be the first thing to trigger off. Set the brightness level that is comfy for your eyes imo.
 
Very good advice.

I heard that vision gets poorer between 40-43 for a typical adult which fits my case.

Yes from 40-45 its natural you would need glasses although you might get lucky, from 48-52 you will naturally require reading glasses my optician has told me this 3 times to prepare, but I have told him I plan on being 20/20 till I am pensioner 😎
 
Just to update on this, as some people might find themselves in a similar position.

In the end after persevering with the LG C1 for a month and seeing no improvements I eventually returned it and replaced it with a LG QNED90 (65") - my rationale behind this was that it's a completely flicker free tv, has a similar feature set to the C1 (hdmi 2.1, vrr 120hz etc) and uses an IPS panel which is consistent with my computer monitors (which do not cause me headaches).

It made an immediate impact, and I haven't suffered from a pressure / cluster headache from using the television since the swap.

Unfortunately I cannot specify which aspect of the OLED panel was causing the headaches but my best guess would be that it's either related to the nature of the line by line flickering of the LG OLEDs, or as @next010 pointed out it may be a sensitivity to the WOLED light spectrum (as i still don't suffer from headaches using my phone which uses AMOLED).

Hopefully someone might find this helpful.

note: I did state in the original post that I had visited the opticians v.recently after purchasing the c1 just to rule out being an issue with eyesight.
 
How high is the tv as I once owned a 65” tv and found out about 1-2 hours watching gave me headaches it took ages to work out what it was-if the tv is to high your eyes are under constant strain by using your muscles to look higher than is natural I got a different stand which was 4” lower and the headaches went,
 
I had the same problem. I’d never had a problem with any kind of eyestrain/headaches until I bought an LG C1. It gave me the same symptoms as you describe and I have since then tried a number of 2021 range LED TVs - Samsung, Sony and Philips and all of these have given me headaches as well for some reason. Extremely frustrating not being able to work out what’s causing it and now I’ve just given up with all the faff of returning TVs.
Just checking if you ever found one that didn’t bother you. I’m having the same issue with a Samsung S95B OLED I bought two weeks ago.
 
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I would have suggested the opposite of what you did - turning up the OLED brightness slightly (40-50), turning down the contrast slightly (60-75), and boosting the black level slightly. All reduce the effective dynamic range of the panel, but would give your eyes and brain an easier time, particularly if you have possible scotopic sensitivity and/or contrast sensitivity.

I would never use BFI or the other game modes for general viewing, BFI on OLED is disgusting and gives me a headache very quickly. I would be tempted to try a very low (1 or 2 out of 10) for De-judder only. I've enabled this super low setting for just a couple of films (e.g. No Time To Die) as I really needed some gentle faked motion blur to help my eyes given the speed of lateral motion and size of the moving area on screen.

You might find that sort of super low level interpolation may help you, by mitigating OLED's very staccato ability to render frames with almost no pixel rise/fall compared to traditional LCD.

Also, slightly frustrating I know, but if you can't alter your seating position, you might have to buy a smaller OLED (I know you eventually bought the QNED IPS panel instead). Interested to know what you make of that QNED Mini-LED panel..


The larger the screen the harder it is for eyes in general, unless you're sat at a distance roughly equivalent to ~2.5x screen width as a minimum. Had viewing distances drilled into me by my tutors since university (and latterly my employer!) and it does make sense.


My theory is that the more the TV remains fully in one's foveal (central) vision, I believe the less one's eyes need to do in terms of saccades and refocusing, thus the brain consequently needs to do less. And so, fewer headaches.


Bias lighting is ok, but it must have a decent CRI and not use PWM for dimming, otherwise you're compounding the issue putting bad light around bad light. I use D65 white point strips from MediaLight (biaslighting.com), I imported some from the US years ago and bought some more from the UK distributor this year for my C2.

In the room I also have a couple of freestanding lamps with warm white CCFL bulbs, one at the back and one to the side of the TV in my peripheral vision. I turn them on if I need to give my eyes a break, which is quite often at the moment.
 
Just to update on this, as some people might find themselves in a similar position.

In the end after persevering with the LG C1 for a month and seeing no improvements I eventually returned it and replaced it with a LG QNED90 (65") - my rationale behind this was that it's a completely flicker free tv, has a similar feature set to the C1 (hdmi 2.1, vrr 120hz etc) and uses an IPS panel which is consistent with my computer monitors (which do not cause me headaches).

It made an immediate impact, and I haven't suffered from a pressure / cluster headache from using the television since the swap.

Unfortunately I cannot specify which aspect of the OLED panel was causing the headaches but my best guess would be that it's either related to the nature of the line by line flickering of the LG OLEDs, or as @next010 pointed out it may be a sensitivity to the WOLED light spectrum (as i still don't suffer from headaches using my phone which uses AMOLED).

Hopefully someone might find this helpful.

note: I did state in the original post that I had visited the opticians v.recently after purchasing the c1 just to rule out being an issue with eyesight.
Did it take you a bit of time to get used to the LG QNED90? I followed your advice and bought this TV after the Samsung S95B OLED was causing me very similar symptoms that you describe. The QNED is definitely better, and not getting headaches, but still feel eye strain/fatigue, difficulty focusing after only a few minutes of watching.
 
When I first got my C9 after moving from a Panasonic plasma I had headaches for a couple of weeks, but they went away and I never had them since. No idea what about OLED can cause it though.
 
I would also go to the docs. I always used to headaches after using headphones. I then had a TIA in 2015 and was put on aspirin, statins and blood pressure tablets. Now I can wear headphones all day no issues. Please don't do any of this of your back your doc must advise this if it's necessary. No harm going back to your opticians and telling them your experience to see what they advise.Not saying this is the cause but worth checking.
 
Just bought used LG 55C8 and returning it. My eyes can't stand it. They are closing itself even at 0 brightness and contrast/ all options disabled and i feel "confused" and a little "dizzy".

A few minutes of watching it and on the next day - they are like "burned". Even watching at light not directly, but projected on the wall gave me the same symptoms. This is the end of using huge OLED screens for me (at least my OLED phone is very comfortable) ...
 

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