Also, all along, worry about glare as well as lighting levels. You might try the mirror test suggested by a veteran ergonomics expert. Place a mirror over the face of a computer screen. Then you can see where the glare is coming from—which window, which lamp; for all you know, the source could be a brightly colored painting or a glassed-in print.
Try to rid your office of glare instead of using a filter. “I believe in avoiding a broken arm rather than putting a splint on it afterward,” says Harry Snyder. If you need a filter, however, here are possibilities:
1. Coatings or etching applied during manufacture of the video displays. They needn’t harm the viewing quality noticeably.
2. Coatings put on after manufacture. Generally, but not always, they don’t work out.
3. “Colored plastic panels and etched faceplates,” which, says Eisen, “have such damaging effect on brightness and clarity of the characters that they should be avoided.”
4. Micromesh filters, favored by German ergonomists. Eisen says U.S. opinion of them “is mixed. They do a good job of reducing reflections, but the mesh makes for a restricted viewing angle, absorbs some of the light from the display, and scatters some of the rest, degrading the image.”
5. Polarizing filters. They may reduce brightness and shorten tube life, since you must crank up the tube to compensate; at $100 or more, they are more expensive than the other add-ons. But they give you a better image than other filters. The contrast especially can be impressive.
Noise Reduction
Don’t just buy the fastest, the cheapest, printer. Look for one with good manners toward the humans nearby—a quiet printer.
A daisy wheel can be a real offender. What more can you expect of a machine with a metal hammer constantly striking away? And dot-matrix printers often make a higher-pitched sound that mercilessly cuts through walls.