How To Stop Glossy Screen Glare? Try A Paper Towel And Tape

There are plenty of computer users who absolutely hate the glossy screen, be it a laptop panel or desktop display. And sure, it’s easy enough to tell someone “Well then, don’t buy one!”, but sometimes there’s no choice in the matter. Maybe your monitor quit on you and you needed to buy a new one that day, and the only thing available were glossy screen monitors. Maybe the corporate laptop assigned to you has a glossy screen, so you were basically forced to use it. Maybe it was a situation where you bought a laptop online without checking if it had a glossy screen first, only to discover on arrival it does have one, and just decided to deal with it because you didn’t want to endure the hassle of returning it. You get the idea; there are any number of reasons.

The situation where the glossy screen bothers people most is if they’re in a room with a window, and at a very specific time of the day (usually a time span of about 2 to 3 hours), the sun is beaming into the room – even through the blinds or curtains – and glaring off the screen like crazy.

The fix? A paper towel and some masking tape. The paper towel can act as a light diffuser that will soften the light enough to get rid of most of the glare. You only need to diffuse a small area so it doesn’t reflect off your glossy computer screen, so one paper towel taped in a strategic location should do the trick.

How well your “custom diffuser” works depends on how far away the window is from your monitor. One paper towel will usually be enough to diffuse the light reflecting off your monitor from a window three feet away. If the window is further away than that, you’ll have to “engineer” something else, or use an anti-glare filter like this one (they’re not cheap but work wonders).

And as for why you’d use masking tape and not regular clear tape, it’s easier to remove. For example, in the office, a janitor would get quite testy with you if he found you sticking paper towels on the blinds with clear tape, because once clear tape is put on a plastic blind, it’s very difficult to remove. Masking tape on the other hand is easy to remove and since you’re only taping a paper towel, it will hold without issue.

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