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?"

Comments

It probably depends on where you use them

[jfoobaz]

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.

Glossy looks cool in the display line in the store

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Almost all the TVs and Laptop screens and monitors are all use factory defaults that make it look brighter and more colorful than the monitor sitting next to it in the display line in the stores. True color rendition is secondary to them. Ability to work staring at that thing is not in their list of priorities.

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.

3M

[Philip K Dickhead]

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.

Re:3M

[epp_b]

Isn't it ironic that we now buy products, specifically to reduce the LCD viewing angle to nearly zero degrees, after all this time spent on developing LCDs with greater viewing angles?

Re:3M

[Bigjeff5]

The 2010's called, they said fuck you.

(Man this decade is a real asshole already, and it's not even 7 months old yet!)

Re:Glossy is a bad name

[TarMil]

So really it should be "Good-looking-screen-but-with-reflections vs. Not-as-good-looking-without-as-many-reflections"

Which can be efficiently summarized as "Glossy vs Matte".

Re:Yes

[trum4n]

i freaking HATE the glossy screen on my netbook. i dont want to look at the lights on the ceiling, i want to see my screen.

Re:Yes

[no1home]

But I love being able to see the hot girl at the table behind me without looking like I'm staring!

Re:Yes

[TheLink]

> No idea if they did something with them to make them less mirrory,

Yes, they've been exposed to The Steve's Reality Distortion Field[1]. The recent iphone 4s clearly have not been exposed long enough and need "booster shots", or The Steve was having an "off day"...

I appear to be immune, as I have a MacBook on my desk and I don't like the glossy screen and their chiclet keyboard (the ctrl key is in the wrong place!). I mostly ssh to it from a Windows 7 machine (horrors! :) ).

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tn-YesqzvNk

Won't work -- LCD's output is polarized already!

[Rhys]

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.

Re:Yes

[Trelane]

buy some steal wool

I think there's a bit of a disconnect between the first and third words here... ;)

I work for an LCD manufacturer

[Anonymous Coward]

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