i had noticed that my imac at home would produce significantly more eye strain that my cinema display at work. i tried a number of things to reduce the strain; a wide variety of lighting scenarios, cmd-opt-control-8 to invert the screen, and a utlity which is supposed to help with strain called Nocturne. The whole time my imac’s brightness was set to the lowest setting, turning it up any higher resulted in immediately pain. It was at that point that I decided the problem was clearly caused by too high a minimum brightness setting and downloaded Shades. Shades allows you to lower the brightness of your display below the pre-set minimum but adding a low alpha black layer above everything else in the core drawing engine (i think). Life has been good since.
