Is Watching Videos on your iPod Bad for your Eyes?
On a mailing list recently, someone pointed out how they prefer watching videos on their iPod to watching on their TV. Admittedly, this person said he does not have a big TV, so the iPod in front of his face looks bigger than his TV at the distance at which he watches it.
My reaction to this is simple: I’m not going to sit around holding an iPod up in front of my face to watch TV shows or movies. (I’m surprised no company has come up with an iPod stand for watching videos in bed.) But thinking a bit more, I wondered: could it be bad for your eyes to look at something that close, especially something that moves? Your eyes have evolved to see at a distance of one or two feet to several dozen yards, at least with accuracy, and when you look at something as close to your eyes as the iPod needs to be, they have to converge, or cross a bit, to see correctly. Personally, I wouldn’t be able to see the video on an iPod very well without reading glasses, but I wonder about those with better eyesight and the long-term damage of such convergance.
It’s not the same as reading books, which you hold a bit further from your eyes (unless you have bad eyesight). In order to get the same apparent size for my iPod screen, I’d have to hold it much closer than a book; in addition, you are watching something that is moving, so your eyes have to work much harder to follow than if they simply read from left to right (or in other directions, depending on your culture). Finally, books are high-contrast devices: text is generally black and paper white, optimizing their readability. Videos are not at all like that: you’ll have many sections where the video is uniformly dark, which, again, makes your eyes work harder.
If any of my readers are ophthalmologists or opticians, what do you think? Is there a danger to watching videos on iPods (or other small devices)?
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Hi, I’m not an optician, but I definitely think Yes. In my case I spent too much time in front of the computer as a kid which completely ruined my eyes, to the point that I was a -7,0 on both eyes by about 17, and it stayed there ever since (27 now) The point is, looking at things too close for long periods of time will increase your chances of becoming nearsighted, of course I’m sure some people are more susceptible than others, but people under 17 are definitely more prone to this, since the eye muscles are more malleable than for grownups.