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Does Anyone Really Prefer Glossy Screens?
An anonymous reader asked a question that I've been wondering about too: "I live in a small southern European country where natural light abounds. This may sound good, but it is a pain when it comes to using laptops that come with a glossy finish, making it impossible to work unless you are doing it in the dark. To make matters worse, since we are a small market, most manufacturers only offer a subset of their product line, and don't allow you to choose any options available in other countries (like matte screens). Buying abroad is not an option since we have our own very specific keyboard layout. Why are manufacturers doing this? Does anyone really prefer using glossy screens for day-to-day activities?"
I like them a LOT more than flat screens. I think they are easier to read and more vibrant.
Yes, some of us do. I'm using a 27" iMac right now with one. My MacBook Pro also has a glossy screen. I probably use the combination of these two devices 10 or 12 hours per day, or more. Most of my time is spent indoors when working but I use it outdoors as well. Not a perfect solution but just get an anti-glare cover for the screen. Use that outside and take it off inside.
You might be able to find an anti-glare overlay similar to the screen protectors used for handhelds.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
I prefer matte. Glossy is just such a pain with dirt and finger prints and scratches show up easier.
I can't stand them, but I actually take my laptop with me all the time and can't always pick where I'm sitting in order to reduce glare. If you're constantly at a desk, and have control over the lighting and other environmental factors, they might be fine, but they generally look crappy to me even in controlled setttings.
I specifically ordered the glossy display on my MacBook Pro; the colors are far more vibrant and the screen brighter. I have not had any issues with glare, though I don't take it outside in the direct sunlight and use it in a room with dim lighting.
I much prefer it to the matte screens, that always seem dull and fuzzy to me; I had a previous laptop with a matte screen and I always thought it seemed like it was out of focus.
The ten seconds a prospective customer looks at it before the sale is given million times more weight that the several hundred hours the actual customer spends staring at it after the sale.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Matte actually has an opaque effect when the reflection is bright enough. Oddly enough, the same lighting is not opaque on a glossy screen surface. What's great about glossy is that if you have polarized glasses the reflection can be cancelled out if you're lucky.
What we really need is a pair of untinted, polarized glasses that allow you to rotate the lenses to cancel out the reflections on that glossy screen, much like a polarized filter on a camera lens can do.
Kriston
For me, it depends on what I'm doing with it. I think it looks fantastic in a dark room when you're playing games. It even gives the monitor a slightly classy, if overdone look. When it comes to getting things done, though, I'll take a matte monitor any day of the week. I'm glad my Latitude has a matte screen because I feel that office lighting would completely ruin the experience with the glare it causes.
It looks impressive at the store. That's enough to sway the mass market. Long-term usability is the concern of a few nerds, and the manufacturers don't really care as long as stuff sells.
This same issue shows up in software user interfaces. Testing -- and reviews -- are based on quick impressions. "Scientific" usability tests try to get subjects with no biasing prior experience, and then measure task performance with a new and unfamiliar UI.
Unfortunately, interfaces which have a great immediate discoverability are not necessarily the best for long-term use. That's a lot harder to get right -- and if a long-term usability improvement would come at the cost of those at-the-store decision makers, it loses out.
I recall the original arguments on some of the laptop forums that pushed for the overtake of all high end laptop screens to be glossy. Still makes me sick. The last thing I want to see when computing is my face. It's distracting as all hell. And, sure I'm not that pretty either. I have 20/20 vision, and do NOT get bothered by the matte covering on non-reflective screens. I even try to buy TV's with matte screens. Glossy in a big living room reflects so much stuff you can barely watch the show. Heck! Even movie theater screens are matte!!!! All this B.S. about glossy is so incorrect, it's amazing.
Laptops are invariably used in areas with bad lighting, glare, etc. Glossy screens are less than ideal in those situations.
My TV or desktop computers, on the other hand, are in controlled environments. I can eliminate glare, so I'll take the better apparent saturation that glossy gives me in those cases. (If I have a choice, that is)
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Which makes glossy a better sell in your nice well lighted Best Buy store.
I prefer my screen without an anti-glare coating outside. All an anti-glare coating does is turns a specular dot into a diffuse white out, the specular dot can be got rid of by angling the screen, the diffuse white out can't.
Not to mention that its easier to wipe the spunk off.
In the past, there were problems with matte screens and colors. Today, that's not so much so anymore. I think one of the best examples was the iPhone 3Gs screens. They were anti-reflective and anti-smudge, but they were not matte. We should see more of those types of screens. IMHO, there is no amount of color that's worth all of the reflection on a glossy screen.
The sun may be shining, but I think that the ask slashdot folks must live in the dark... :-)
These are obvious. http://www.visioncarefilters.com/products_3M.html
There are my favourites; the privacy polarized filter. No glare, and the fellow next to you in 12D quits craning his neck to read your Slashdot postings.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
It's easier to frame it as a "Glossy vs. Matte" debate, but no one goes out to make a glossy screen. Rather, the high amount of reflections is a side effect of the LCD surface treatment that allows for better color, brighter whites, and darker blacks.
So really it should be "Good-looking-screen-but-with-reflections vs. Not-as-good-looking-without-as-many-reflections"
I remember the first time I saw a glossy screen on a laptop (it was an otherwise completely hideous Sony). Colors looked so vibrant, but you could tell that glare would be a real issue. Absent direct light sources, they really do look better to me.
Glare can be a real issue, though, which is one reason why there's a market for iPad anti-glare sheets. The iPad screen is glass, though, so glossy was the obvious choice. The glossy IPS screen is quite striking next to a TN matte laptop screen.
What really irks me though is the predominance of glossy plastic bezels. Walk into any computer store these days and you're bombarded with shiny black plastic on nearly every laptop, monitor, and TV. Here there is no functional advantage - it simply shows fingerprints more and even can distract from the screen itself. But it's the latest trend in computer/tv "fashion" (remember when silver plastic was in?). I gave in when shopping for an mid-sized TV, as Samsung (my preferred LCD manufacturer) had all glossy bezels. It's fine so long as I don't touch it, but a glossy HP laptop was a magnet for fingerprints.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
if you ask people whether anyone likes guns at an NRA convention, you'll get one result -- if you ask at a pacifist convention, you're likely to get a strongly diverging result...
Many of the slashdot crowd will be people that work with a lot of text (source-codes, DB dumps, shells, ...) - for many of us, the matte screen is the better choice.
On the other hand - for many people primarily using their laptops to access Facebook, consuming multimedia content, ... the more vivid colours of the glossy screen have a higher appeal...
So - for the slashdot crowd, what split between those groups do you expect to find here?
Now look at the general population? I'll bet you, the split will be the other way around... And - for people not using computers quite as much, how much easier do you think it will be to sell them a computer with a 'vibrant'/'vivid' display?
What's right for most of us, may not be the right thing for most people out there...
What I found a bit surprising, though - for a professional photographer friend of mine, matte is the screen of choice as well - for less glossy, but apparently more accurate colour representation...
Unless you've got a house where three walls are all glass ( in which case stfu and stop moaning already ) just simply turn by 45 degrees, if this doesn't work then turn again. Continue this until you find a place which works.
It's what I did in my office, and now I never get screen glare, as the sun rises and sets to the right of me. (*Can't be bothered to figure out what direction I am facing).
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
There are two reasons firms do this:
1. The devices look prettier. This is the triumph of "industrial design" over function, similar to the way (it seems) Apple's industrial designers over-ruled the antenna / RF designers on the iPhone4. Same consequence: it's less easily usable, you have to learn to use the screen despite its failings.
2. Specsmanship. Glossy screens (called in the industry "glare screens", which really summarizes the issue) have higher contrast ratios - if the contrast ratio is measured in a perfectly dark room. Colors look nicely saturated. That way the vendors get to put very high contrast ratios on their specs and it's an arms race. Gottaproblemwiththat? Sit in a dark room, silly.
Of course, the only screens designed for reading (e-Ink, Pixel Qi, Sipix) do NOT use glare / glossy screens.
Import one. Then buy a replacement keyboard, they're usually 0-screw 1-plug replacements.
Quartz Extreme and Core Image. Are there any other real reasons to spend all that money on generic hardware?
Neither are optimal, and people should not be so polarized on the issue; there is a better option. It is called an anti reflective film, and you will find one on every piece of quality camera optics or eyeglasses. The goal of this film is to make lenses invisible, in order to transmit as much of the light as possible. (Which is more or less the antithesis of glossy. Matte is also reflective, it merely diffuses the light, though still degrades the image.)
Anyway, the default state of my glossy MacBook was nearly intolerable. Fortunately, I came across an aftermarket AR film, the Nushield DayVue. It is less than ideal and painful to install properly, but it is a clear improvement. (For best results, there must be an AR film stack on each surface, but the interior surfaces are not accessible in this case.)
I agree with the submitter. Not sure what the hell is going on in the monitor market. We had to deal with glares for years on CRTs, and then we finally move to LCD's which eliminates the problem entirely. I figured screen glare was dead for all eternity - and then someone decides "HEY GUYS - we figured out how to make the LCD screens glare too!".
To me it seems as beneficial as introducing a charging cord that you can connect to your wireless mouse at all times so that the battery never dies. It's truly one of those /facepalm things I can't believe someone actually did.
It wouldn't be so bad except that all the budget laptops are doing it. Seems if you want a matte version you're going to have to pay extra. Given how little I use my laptop, I ended up going with the gloss version there (and just suffer with having to turn out ever friggen light in the hotel room while use the computer). On my desktop though I did specifically track down a matte display - I couldn't take the gloss on a daily basis.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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I had the same issue using a GPS on my bike ... the glossy screen was a pain in outdoor light. Solution: matte-finish film applied to the glass. Cost was under $10, probably a lot more for a 15" (38 cm) laptop display.
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
For me a glossy screen is an absolute deal-killer. I once had a MacBook (the white, plastic one.) There were things about it that took some getting used to--I am accustomed to PC hardware running Linux. I could get used to the one-button mouse, the different keyboard shortcuts, and differences in the software like no X11 (at least, not ordinarily) and the Finder. I rather liked the idea of a PC running Unix without having to futz with installing an OS not supported by the OEM.
But what drove me to sell the thing on eBay was the glossy screen. Gloss makes it absolutely impossible to do any work with any bright light source over my shoulder. I do a lot of work in a terminal, and a black background is just impossible to read. So I switched them to a light background. That actually wasn't easy because the Terminal in OS X at the time (10.4, I think) made it really hard to switch colors--I had to download some sort of plugin to do something that X11 terminals have been capable of for years. Even with a light background, though, it was hard to do work if there was a lamp behind me and impossible to do work if there was a window behind me.
I complained of this, and some people said "well, just close the blinds" or "sit somewhere else." I now laugh when Steve Jobs said that if you phone is dropping calls when you hold it a certain way, don't hold it that way. Seems responses like that are common amongst the Apple set.
This was so bad that I sold the thing and now I won't buy a laptop with a glossy screen. That pretty much limits me to enterprise models as nearly all the consumer models have the glossy screen. I think Apple used to have a very expensive MacBook Pro that gave you a choice between glossy and matte but I don't think they have that choice anymore. No more Apple hardware for me.
Penny - plain text accounting
You don't own polarized sunglasses, do you? Nor does anyone who rated you up. LCDs are already polarized light -- that's how they are able to turn pixels on and off. Two polarizations 90 deg out of phase = no light transmission. Put on polarized (sun)glasses and suddenly you have a entirely black LCD from certain angles. Not every angle mind you -- I can see my landscape display just fine, but the portrait one next to it goes jet black with them on.
Now, I'll admit it lets you see dust and dirt on the display very clearly when you can't see the display itself. That's not really a great selling point...
Now on an OLED or plasma display you might have something -- problem is you have to match the polarization orientations. So if you tilt your head, suddenly you can't see your screen.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
You're an idiot. The window is six feet tall and has no shade - I live on the plains, and I get direct sunlight through it all morning. Likewise in the jeep - clear glass, no tinting, Bright as hell all around. Clear enough for you now, dimwit?
You're fixing the wrong problem.
Instead of switching to a screen that spreads the glare out over a larger percentage of the screen, why not move the screen to a place that isn't in blinding sunlight?
I like my glossy screens for coding, even in the sunlight I'll happily code on my macbook or take notes on my ipad.
Of course, if you own an iPad, you like shiny things - that's redundant ;-)
And that, dear children, is the reason why Capitalism does not find the optimal solution for the consumers of the world. Purchase process != usage process.
Consumerism is tailored for sales; user's needs is just but one factor in the equation (certainly influential but not decisive).
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Diminishing refraction requires a smooth surface (i learned something reading that amateur telescope making book)
Glossy surfaces reflect higher intensity light sources more readily.
Polarize or coat the damned things already, so the light inside can come out, but these exterior sources are diffused across the surface.
Matte has drawbacks, but deepness of black and 'poppy' RGB aren't why I bought my computer. Neither is HD video playback, dammit. If I wanted an entertainment device with a keyboard, I would invent one.
I have a 'laptop computer' which I use to 'compute' on my 'lap', and I want about 2 million gloss-free, color-accurate pixels to do it with.
Certainly some people prefer glossy screens. But nearly every poll on the subject I've found with Google shows matte being slightly or strongly preferred over glossy. The truth is, manufacturers are moving to glossy screens because they're cheaper, not because they're preferred.
"LCDs are already polarized light -- that's how they are able to turn pixels on and off. "
True so far, but...
"Two polarizations 90 deg out of phase = no light transmission."
Not completely true. There are 2 ways light can be polarized: planar or circular. In planar polarized light (which is what you are speaking of) the electric field will move in one fixed plane, and the magnetic field in a plane at 90 degrees. In circular polarized light, the E and H fields corkscrew through space in either a clockwise or counterclockwise direction.
Either form of polarization can be used to implement an LCD. Polarized sunglasses are vertical planar polarized, because the bulk of the reflections you get off things like roads and water are horizontally planar polarized. Looking at an LCD that uses either form of circular polarization with planar polarized glasses does NOT reduce the light transmission to zero at any angle (it does reduce it by a fixed amount, just as it reduces the amount of light transmission from a non-polarized source.)
LCDs are moving to the circular polarization form for that reason.
(BTW and semi-OT: the glasses used in movie theaters showing 3D movies use circular polarization (clockwise for one eye, counterclockwise for the other) for the same reason: with the old planar polarized lenses, if you tilted your head, you began to lose the separation of the views. You don't get that with circular polarization.)
www.eFax.com are spammers
An image is not accurate no matter how much you shake your stick when you have reflections super imposed on top of the image. It is a bit like you added a completely unrelated 20% visible layer on top of an image in Photoshop. It's the exact opposite of accuracy.
Now, I recently switched to a Matte screen from Glossy. I see no saturation difference with my present LED screen verses the old glossy. Marketing crap is marketing crap and it has to stop.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
After years of using matte screens, and suffering from periodic migraines, I asked my optometrist for some help, I was sure it was caused by vision since I almost always got a migraine when I went to a movie theatre. So he said try a glossy screen. Well, now instead of 30 or 40 migraines a year, it is more like 10 (theatre). Yes Glossy has its tradeoffs, but for me, it reduced the strain on my eyes. It appears that my eyes kept trying to focus on the fuzzy edges of fonts on the matte screen, where the glossy has sharp definition of fonts.
I work for an LCD manufacturer so let me give you some pointers:
First of all neither of them is best overall. It all depends on what you use it for. It is like having to decide on whether a fork, or a spoon is "best". Forks are great until you are served soup...
The original poster asked for a screen that works in sunny conditions. In that case matte screens are best.
Glossy is best in the dark.
Let me try to explain why.
Assume that you have a screen with 400 cd/m2 brightness and a 400:1 contrast ratio. That means that white shines with 400 cd/m2 and that the backlight bleeds through with 1 cd/m2 when showing black.
What manufacturers will not tell you is that you only get a 400:1 contrast ratio in a completely dark room. This is not the intended use case of the display. It is like buying a car that is advertised to make 1000 miles to the gallon... but only in a downhill.
If the room is even the slightest tiny bit dim your *viewing* contrast ratio will be degraded. The existing ambient light will be reflected from the display surface adding, lets say a mere 1 cd/m2 extra to both the white and black graphics. So now your viewing contrast ratio will be degraded to (white + reflected)/(black + reflected) = (400+1)/(1+1) = 200:1 even in a dimly lit room. When the brightness of the ambient reflected light is in the order of the display brightness itself, then your expensive 400:1 display is degraded to a (400+400)/(1+400) = 2:1 contrast ratio.
Yeah, you may say, that is why I spent a boatload of money to get the TV with the advertised 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio so I am safe... But all the manufacturer needs to do, is to lower the blackness of the display from 1 cd/m2 to 0.0004 cd/m2 so he gets 400/0.0004 = 1000000:1 CR.
But still... when the reflected ambient light reaches 400 cd/m2, your expensive 1000000:1 TV degrades to a measly (400+400)(0.0004+400) = 2:1 CR.
There are only 3 ways to solve the problem
1) Use only in a dark room
2) Use a higher brightness backlight
3) Get rid of the reflected light
(or 4, get a transflective display like the pixel-qi, but at the cost of poor color graphics reproduction)
Solution 1 does not apply to the original poster.
Solution 2 works fine for desktop screens and TVs where you have electrical power available. A high luminosity screen on a laptop will drain your batteries like crazy and will need a fan to cool the display.
Now to solution 3. There are actually 2 kinds of reflection: Specular and diffuse.
To reduce the diffuse reflection you use an AR (Anti Reflection) treatment. That is commonly applied to eyeglasses and binoculars.
To reduce the specular reflection you use an AG (Anti Glare) treatment
A really good quality (and expensive) AR/AG will reflect only 0.5% of the ambient light. Plain glass reflects about 30% I think. So AR/AG is about 60 times better than glass.
So comparing a hypothetical display with a plain glass surface, with a good AR/AG display we get the following calculations:
1) Reference glass display with 400:1 CR that under some hypothetical lighting conditions reflects 400 cd/m2:
CR = (400+400)/(1+400) = 2:1
2) AR/AG display that is 60 times better at avoiding reflections:
CR = (400+400/60)/(1+400/60) = 406.6/7.6 = 53:1
The difference can be seen here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Glossy-Matte-394-S1.png
***The conclusion is simple: To get best results in high ambient light conditions you must buy a matte display.***
The reason why laptop manufacturers use glossy screens is the following.
1) Good Anti Glare screens are more expensive to produce.
2) Anti Glare is a thin film applied to the screen. If you pick an anti glare film up and try to look through it, you will notice that it is hazy. This means that applying an AG/AR will lose you some Distinctness Of Image (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinctness_of_image)
This is the reason that manufacturers will claim, in order to justify the choice of glossy screen. Sure it *does