Anti-Glare Computer Screens That Work in Sunlight?

Belfont9 asks: "The company I work for operates in a very sunny climate, and our facilities rely almost completely on natural light. The problem for our coders is that all that light makes reading a computer screen for many hours truly painful - even if we use the standard 'anti-glare' screen covers. Dimming the entire rooms (eg through the use of shades) isn't an option. Could the Slashdot community suggest some good computer screens for use in such conditions?"

Comments

Monitor Hoods!

[ihtagik]

Yeah that's right, Monitor Hoods! [google.com] I know they lok a little goofy but after having the please of using a LaCie monitor with one of these things a while back during an unexpected outdoor coding session, I swear by them. PS: no affiliation to LaCie or any monitor hood company, honest

Roll your own

[realgone]

Count me as one more vote for monitor hoods; the things are life savers. There was this one agency I used to work for that got unbelievable sunny, starting around noon every day. Made trying to design print pieces near impossible, since the light and glare would tend to wash out all colors on-screen. Those hoods were the only thing that kept me sane.

But here's the best part: forget LaCie, you can make your own hood in a couple of minutes for a only couple of bucks. Heck, we used to do it all the time.

(1) Run down to your local Pearl/Staples/etc and buy a poster-sized piece of black mounting board. (Or any other reasonably thick, dark and matte -- i.e., non-glossy -- material will do.)

(2) Measure the width of the front of your monitor casing and cut a piece of board to slightly more than that width by, let's say, 18 inches deep. That's the top.

(3) Cut two more pieces, half the width of the first but the same depth. Those are the sides.

(4) Now all you need to do is get some strong tape -- again, matte black if you can find it -- and tape the pieces together: side - top - side.

(5) Place atop the monitor, tape side up, and let the side fins flop down. (For another couple of bucks, add some velcro tabs to keep the whole thing firmly in place.) Welcome to the Land that Glare Forgot.

transflective lcd

[fabio.parodi]

Try to find transflective lcds. They reflect external light: more light, more bright images. The problem is, most trasflactive LCDs are b/w and small. Few manufacturers have color VGA-size products: for example, lg-philips makes LC121S1. Someone told me that also NEC has one.

Of course, you will need to add LVDS interface, inverter, and a box.

Re:FlatPanels, maybe?

[funky womble]

I agree that changing colours helps a lot. Laptops are good too (but can have other problems - like on mine I can't swap the keycaps to Dvorak layout, which I don't know well enough to not need to look occasionally, but do know well enough to never want to touch qwerty again :-)

I've been using #453dad background and #9191d6 menus, white text, with the monitor brightness turned way down. I find these colours work a bit better than white-on-black (since black monitors also show quite a lot of reflections) and much better than black-on-white... The other day I realised how similar they are to the Commodore 64 standard colours, quite interesting since I think they were likely to have been chosen to work under not-quite-ideal viewing conditions.

Works great on a lot of things, but websites can be difficult - certain colour text .gifs with a transparent background are a particular problem - and I also had trouble with a lot of websites that set bgcolor but not text, link and vlink... Opera is a big help, just modify the user stylesheet and you're only a ^G away from a readable page if something really doesn't work.

White backgrounds are pretty horrible looking if you get used to something else, *and* they waste electricity on CRTs :-) Maybe they wouldn't need so much lead in the tubes to block electrons if standard desktops had darker backgrounds too. Maybe it's all a plot by space aliens to cause us to be exposed to radiation so we mutate quicker... Yeah, space aliens, that must be it.