> There's a huge difference in having a surface that's white reflecting your room color versus having a display blasting light directly into your eyes.
What's actually different between a photon of a given frequency that enters my eye after reflecting off a surface and a photon of the same frequency that enters my eye after being emitted from a display?
> You sound like a person who uses a terminal with a black bg and neon green text and claim that as superior. Maybe to you but surely not for the majority
BTW, in the CRT days green on black was actually objectively superior if you were using small fonts on most displays. That was because most displays would have slight misalignment of the red, green, and blue, especially near the edges, leading to color fringing around white things. For small text, the fringing could make text blurry and hard to read.
Pure green on black had no red or blue, so no fringing. Red on black or blue on black would have worked too, but most people find those much harder to read than green on black.
Because the light emitted from the LEDs of the display is focused towards your eyes by a very reflective film behind the panel while the light reflected off a book's page is heavily diffused due to the roughness of the paper.
> What's actually different between a photon of a given frequency that enters my eye after reflecting off a surface and a photon of the same frequency that enters my eye after being emitted from a display?
Nothing.
OTOH, the spectrum of photons emitted from maximally white and maximally black pixels on an LCD screen is probably nothing like those reflected from black ink or bright white paper under any realistic lighting conditions.
But "your room color" is not the same frequency as "display blasting light". The former will vary with time of day (some displays try to mimic that now).
Reading black text on a pure white computer screen capable of a decent contast ratio is more akin reading black text on tin foil with a studio light behind you.
Yes, you are of course right, technical limitations have had reasons in the past to use suboptimal solutions if we're talking about coloured pixels in CRT or LCD displays even but in today's world with our display technology there's no real reasons to use those other than personal preference.
About the photons, you could look into a regular paper sheet's or book page paper's albedo values and compare that to the light emitted from a led display, it's not even in the same ballpark. Why do you think people enjoy reading on an ebook reader rather than a normal tablet with a lcd/led display?
Artificial light strains our eyes way more than normal sunlight (or even indoor lighting) reflecting off of surfaces indirectly lighting everything for us.
> What's actually different between a photon of a given frequency
Well, none, of course. But the point is that white paper and a display's #FFFFFF probably won't send the same wavelength or number of photons into your eye.
> What's actually different between a photon of a given frequency that enters my eye after reflecting off a surface and a photon of the same frequency that enters my eye after being emitted from a display?
One of them gives me a migraine after 5 minutes. I assume because light being reflected off a sheet of paper gets weaker, though I'm not sure how.
What's actually different between a photon of a given frequency that enters my eye after reflecting off a surface and a photon of the same frequency that enters my eye after being emitted from a display?
> You sound like a person who uses a terminal with a black bg and neon green text and claim that as superior. Maybe to you but surely not for the majority
BTW, in the CRT days green on black was actually objectively superior if you were using small fonts on most displays. That was because most displays would have slight misalignment of the red, green, and blue, especially near the edges, leading to color fringing around white things. For small text, the fringing could make text blurry and hard to read.
Pure green on black had no red or blue, so no fringing. Red on black or blue on black would have worked too, but most people find those much harder to read than green on black.