A sunscreen roller blind in a dark fabric. If you want the short version, that’s it, and in our Duo range the colour you want is charcoal rather than one of the whites.
That answer surprises people, because the instinct is to reach for something pale and light. Here’s why the opposite works better, and what to look at before you order.
Your eyes don’t struggle because the room is bright. It struggles because two things in your field of view are wildly different brightnesses, and it can’t set an exposure that suits both. Your monitor sits at one level. A sunlit window behind it sits at a vastly higher one. Your pupils split the difference and you get the squint, the headache and the washed out screen.
WorkSafe Victoria’s guidance on office environments lists this directly. Alongside controlling daylight with blinds, it recommends reducing the contrast between the foreground and the background, giving the example of a darker matte surface behind a screen.
That one idea changes what you should buy. You’re not trying to make the window dark. You’re trying to bring the window down closer to the brightness of your screen, and keep it there while the sun moves.
Slatted blinds give you angle control, and for a lot of rooms that’s the right tool. For screen work it introduces a problem of its own.
Tilted slats throw alternating bands of bright and dark across the wall, the desk and your peripheral vision. Every one of those edges is a contrast boundary, which is the thing you’re trying to get rid of. You’ve swapped one big bright rectangle for twenty small ones.
A roller blind lowers a single continuous plane of fabric across the whole opening. One brightness, no banding, no edges. For eight hours in front of a monitor that evenness is worth more than the ability to fine-tune an angle.
Where your desk sits relative to the window still matters a great deal. WorkSafe Queensland’s advice on visual comfort for computer work is blunt about it: avoid having a window in front of or behind where you sit. If you can turn the desk so the window is off to one side, do that first and buy the blind second. Our earlier guide to window coverings for home office screens works through the three desk positions in detail.
Sunscreen fabric is a mesh, and openness factor is the percentage of that mesh that’s open weave rather than yarn. It runs from roughly 1 per cent to 10 per cent.
A tighter weave down around 1 to 3 per cent cuts more glare and gives you more daytime privacy, and you give up some of the view out. An open weave up near 10 per cent keeps the outlook crisp and lets more light through, and does correspondingly less about glare.
For a home office you want the tighter end. This is one of the few rooms where you’d happily trade some of the view for a screen you can read at 2pm.
We don’t publish an openness figure for the Duo range on the product page, so if this matters to your setup, ask our team before you order rather than guessing from the swatch. It’s a fair question and we’d rather answer it than have you order twice.
Here’s the part that catches everyone. A white sunscreen blind does not reduce glare as well as a dark one.
Pale fabric reflects and scatters light. Pull a white sunscreen down over a sunlit window and the fabric itself becomes the bright thing, a glowing panel sitting right behind your monitor. You’ve replaced a small intense light source with a large diffuse one, and your eyes are no happier about it.
Dark fabric absorbs instead. The weave still lets you see out, but the fabric face stays dim, so the contrast between your screen and the window drops. As a side effect the view out gets clearer, because you’re looking through the holes rather than at a lit-up surface.
Our Duo sunscreen comes in ice white, white, white grey and charcoal. For a room where you stare at a screen all day, charcoal, every time. The whites are the better pick for a dim room that needs bouncing light around, which is the opposite job.
One trade-off to know about: dark fabric absorbs heat as well as light, so a charcoal blind on a west-facing window will feel warmer near the glass than a white one would. In a home office that’s usually a fair swap. On a wall of west facing glass in Western Sydney in February, less so.
A sunscreen blind mounted inside the window reveal is cut narrower than the opening so the tube can turn, which leaves a strip of clear glass down each side. On most windows that’s a minor thing. Behind a monitor it isn’t, because a direct beam through a 20mm gap lands as a hard-edged bright line, and a hard edge is exactly the contrast problem you paid to remove.
Mounting outside the reveal, over the architrave, covers the gap. Our measuring guide walks through inside against the outside mount and which measurements you need for each.
Sunscreen has limits. There are three situations where it won’t be enough.
If the window is directly behind your desk, your monitor will mirror it. No mesh fabric fixes a reflection, because the window is still a light source pointed at a glossy screen. You need a blockout for those hours.
If you’re on camera a lot, a bright window behind you will make the webcam expose the window and turn you into a silhouette. Same fix.
And a low west sun in the late afternoon comes in under everything and hits at eye level, which no fabric grade handles gracefully at that angle. Our Vibe blockout range comes in ice, cloud, mist and storm. If you’re weighing the fabric grades against each other more generally, our guide to blockout and light filtering fabrics covers the differences.
The catch is obvious: run a blockout all day and you’re working in a cave with the lights on, which brings its own eye strain.
Run two blinds on the one window. A charcoal sunscreen mounted inside the reveal against the glass, and a blockout mounted outside over the architrave, each on its own chain. Sunscreen down through most of the day, blockout pulled across for a couple of hours, the afternoon sun is a problem or when you’re on a call.
Put the blockout on the outer layer. It’s the one doing the light-sealing work, so it wants to be the blind that’s wider and taller than the opening. Reverse them and you’ve given your best fabric the tightest fit.
It’s two blinds and two prices rather than one, and it removes the compromise, which for a room you work in five days a week is usually money well spent.
| Your situation | What to get |
| Window to the side of the desk | Charcoal sunscreen roller, tight weave |
| Window in front of you | Charcoal sunscreen roller, plus a lamp so the room isn’t darker than the screen |
| Window directly behind the desk | Two blinds, charcoal sunscreen plus a blockout |
| Frequent video calls | Two blinds, blockout drawn for the calls |
| West-facing window | Two blinds, and expect to use the blockout after 3pm |
| Dim room, minor glare | Light-toned sunscreen is fine here |
Get the fabric decision right and the blind style takes care of itself. Sunscreen grade first, colour second, then work out if you need a second layer behind it.
Ready to sort your workspace out? Buy roller blinds made to your window size, with free delivery Australia-wide.
