Tablet PC's in Bright Sunlight? 37
chadma asks: "I'm developing a program to be used on a Tablet PC; the unit will be used outdoors >80% of the time. I've seen some tablets from ViewSonic and MotionComputing and wondered if anyone had any experience or suggestions in the best screen for high sunlight conditions. Has there been any study or anyone with experience that could suggest the colors we use in the design? Would a white background with black text be most appropriate?"
The Brightest Color (Score:5, Informative)
You'll get the higest contrast with the brightest and darkest color. Black is, of course, the darkest. The brightest is that slightly chartruse yellow you see on some emergency vehicles and safety gear. It's the brightest because it stimulates the most receptors in the eye (the maximum overlap between the red receptors and green receptors). For the same reason, it'd also be the most efficient for a given visual level.
Higher contrast is harder on the eyes, but you'll be fighting sunlight so the contrast of the screen will be relatively much less than that of the environment.
To keep the glare from the screen down, wear polarized sun glasses You might even be abloe to combine them with a polarizing filter on the screen to make it more visible while the environment appears darker.
Trans-Reflective (Score:2, Informative)
These work best in bright sunlight, although can appear washed out in dim indoor use.
Places to ask... (Score:4, Informative)
Advice from a user (Score:5, Informative)
The TabletPC is a wonderful tool. I wouldn't give mine up for anything in the world. Well, maybe something with a greater monetary value that I really wanted, as I would then go and buy myself another TabletPC - they're not in short supply.
Regardless of that, there's really a couple solutions:
a) If your application is a commercial app, designed to be run by just about anyone that chooses to purchase it, I'd suggest creating a "skins" menu for it, similar to the option within Franklin Covey's [franklincovey.com] tabletplanner 3.0. This will allow your outdoor mostly users to pick a high contrast scheme, whereas the indoor users (or users who avoid using it until they are indoors) will pick a different one. Heck, even allow some form of button mapping to different schemes, mapped by default to your presets that test best under different conditions.
b) If you're targeting a vertical market and intend to design the whole solution, start to finish, I recall someone designed a TabletPC designed specifically for use outdoors. You could work that particular model into your design specs, and test your app out with the PC in question and the best looking/working colors, etc.
I apologize, as I do no recall what the specific model or maker was - I suggest you ask your question in the general forums at TabletPCBuzz [tabletpcbuzz.com]. They will be able to provide you with further information.
Best of luck,
-Jack Ash
Re:The Brightest Color (Score:3, Informative)
The eye IS most sensitive (ie. has lowest threshhold to fire) to green. There are more green receptors or the green receptors are more sensitive than the red, and definitely more so than the blue.
But yellow (slightly to the green side) is the brightest apparent color, because of the overlap of red and green cones. It sounds like it contradicts what you said, but it doesn't. Yellow can be from yellow (wavelength) photons that stimulate either red or green cones, or from a mix of red and green photons stimulating those cones. Either way, it's a more efficient process because more receptors are available for stimulation.
Look at it this way: What color becomes closest to white (ie lightest grey) when the color is turned all the way down to plain black-and-white (like the color control on a TV)? Green is definitely grey, yellow is lighter, most like white.
And he sez: "From my experience, the polarization of LCD monitors is usually at a 45 degree angle to the polarization of most sunglasses."
Excellent. I didn't know that they had polarized output. Doing a polarization mod and others not being able to see it, now that sounds like a cool hack.
LCDs in Sunlight conditions. (Score:3, Informative)
For LCD viewing in sunlight conditions, you want to have a brightness of at least 150 foot Lamberts. Generally the CCFTs will degrade over time, so derate that by 50 foot Lamberts. You are looking at a spec of 200 foot Lamberts in your backlight brightness. Not common in off the shelf laptops.
The contrast ratio needs to be greater than 200:1. The higher the better.
You also want Anti Reflective coating applied to the front of the LCD. This causes reflections in the screen to be diffused and blurry, instead of sharp and clear.
Re:Monochrome LCD (Score:2, Informative)
That said, there's been some great work done on making daylight-viewable displays for the newer TabletPCs, Fujitsu has them as an option for their Stylistic systems, and www.infocater.com offers an optional upgrade w/ the Motion (possibly other) systems which they sell for a special glass screen replacement &c. for daylight viewable displays.
I don't think a high-contrast colour scheme is going to help much though --- either your display backlight and filter is able to display decently in daylight or it's not.
William
Re:Monochrome LCD (Score:3, Informative)
The screen is not the best screen in the universe, but it uses an LCD technology called 'transflective' or 'trans-reflective' display which combines the reflective backplane used in older LCD displays (think digital watch) with a backlight. Color saturation is somewhat lessened in direct sunlight, but that's life.
This technology is becoming more common in Tablet PCs, but is still in the very experimental stage in laptops. I have seen a grand total of two laptops with transflective screens. They were moderately priced and otherwise pretty much indistinguishable from the rest of the laptops on display. I don't remember the model number, but it was a Toshiba of some sort. They stood out like a sore thumb though because the screen looked so much brighter and glossier than the other laptops.
Motion Computing M1300 (Score:2, Informative)