IPS glow – What is it and How to reduce it?

IPS glow is a slight glow that occurs in the corner of your IPS panels. IPS glow appears especially in a dark room and shouldn’t occur if you have a good quality monitor.

Here we’ll cover the IPS glow problem and how you can fix it on your computer monitor.

What Is IPS Glow – The short answer

IPS Glow is a bright glow that occurs in the corners of your outer panel frame. The IPS glow is more visible in dark room or when viewing lower brightness content.

Is It different to backlight bleed?

Yes, IPS glow is a different issue to backlight bleed.

Backlight bleed occurs when light escapes the edges of the screen. It occurs no matter the brightness settings and viewing angle.

You should be able to tell the difference by looking if the light bleeds from the edges or corners of the screen. A black screen test video for both using ambient lights and the right monitor adjustments should detect both.

Does Screen Brightness play an Impact?

Yes and No, the If your IPS panel suffers the impact of IPS glow then your computer will have it no matter what. Of course, the brightness of the IPS panel frame does impact the severity of IPS glow.

Viewing angle also plays a role, unlike backlight bleeding which is uniform no matter where you view the IPS monitor from you can increase and reduce IPS glow depending on where you look at the screen from.

Do you need an IPS monitor for this problem?

Yes, IPS glow is a problem unique to IPS monitors. It is due to a technological drawback of the IPS panels and so far there is no blanket solution as manufacturers are still looking for a solution to reduce IPS glow or an IPS glow fix altogether.

It comes down to the IPS panel frame construction and how much IPS glow you experience is linked to the monitor quality. A high quality monitor shouldn’t have this problem, or at the very least you won’t have this problem for a long period of time.

How to fix IPS Glow

First, when doing some research online I noticed how bad the IPS glow is on the screens that are trying to depict the problem and how bad it is.

These pictures appear to have the screen brightness jacked to 100, use the perfectly incorrect viewing angle and no ambient lighting.

In short, these pictures generally give the worst case scenario, and simply reducing the brightness and adding some ambient light should make the problem much better than these images depict.

Viewing IPS glow like this is just terrible for your eyes, don’t do it.

First and the easiest way to fix IPS glow is to adjust the brightness depending on your environment. Reduce the monitor brightness at night when there isn’t a lot of natural light coming in. Increase the IPS monitors brightness when you are working during the day and around more natural light. How much IPS glow you experience has to do with the contrast in brightness between the IPS screen and your surroundings, especially at the corners of the screen.

So aligning these two is an easy way to help.

We also know IPS glow is impacted by viewing angle unlike backlight bleed which occurs uniform no matter the angle.

This is good for us as it means we have a chance to reduce IPS glow on the panel frame we are using if we adjust the angle to make viewing more favourable for us.

Simply adjust the monitor up and down to try find a position that still allows you to see and reduces IPS glow at the same time. You can also sit further away from the monitor which should help significantly.

Finally, but not a quick fix for IPS glow is to add some ambient light around your IPS display, add a desk lamp or some LEDs. This again should level out the brightness between the screen and surroundings.

As you might have guessed there is no permanent solution here and the viewing angles and a darker environment can make the issue worse.

It is a monitor defect unique to IPS panels and monitors that hasn’t been solved yet. The only options so far we’ve found are to reduce the impact to the naked eye, an ideal setting should lower the perceived IPS glow around the corners.

While, once you’ve seen the IPS glow on your monitor it becomes difficult to reduce how noticeable it is, this is entirely possible depending on how you set up your external environment and you should be able to get it to a point where when you are playing games you get too caught up in the moment to even notice the IPS glow.

Wrapping Up – IPS Glow

I’m afraid at this stage IPS glow a necessary evil if you choose an IPS and not a TN panel. The hardware defect of the IPS monitor makes it even more obvious but sooner or later it can become a problem for all displays.

It is entirely possible to manage the impact of IPS glow and get it to a stage where you might not even notice it’s there.

This can be done by adjusting the brightness, changing the viewing angle and adding external light to your room.

It can be the worst when a new monitor experiences IPS glow so hopefully your monitor is old before it experiences bad IPS glow.

IPS glow as we’ve looked at it also different to backlight bleeding which occurs in all monitors and is mainly characterised by light escaping the edges of the display, in other words the outer panel frame.

IPS glow on the other hand, only impacts IPS monitors and given it impacts the corners of the display, can be seen as a problem with the inner panel frame.

Backlight bleeding is a separate issue in itself so we won’t cover it here.

At the end of the day, until they invent a new technology, IPS glow is here to stay so it is better to learn to manage around the corners instead of try and solve.