Laptop screens torture end users

I'm sure many of you havel suffered the same experience, and are wondering why LCD makers seem unable to sort this fairly major problem out!

Well while many companies are working on it, so far the answers haven't been too good. The problem comes from the fact that the light transmitted through the LCD is frankly not bright compared to even five per cent of light reflected from the sun off the surface of the screen.

One answer is to stick a bright light behind the LCD and try to outgun the reflections - go up to 1000cd/m2 - compared to about 400 for a typical screen - and you'll notice the difference.

However, it's no good for a laptop. For starters the backlight's already one of the biggest users of power, so using a 20W one is not a plan if you want the battery to last longer than 10 minutes.

It also puts out a load of heat, so most of these displays need to have big cases on the back with cooling fans. Finally the extra light goes through the dark bits of the display too, so blacks become a nasty shade of grey.

So that's no use - what else can be done? Well you can put films on the surface to reduce the glare by destructive wave interference, and you can make the screen transflective so that sunlight passing into the screen gets bounced back, like on your PDA.

The problem with most transflective displays at the moment is that they're expensive, and they don't let much of the backlight through, so your screen will look much dimmer when you're playing WoW in the dark at 4am.

This is where something called TMR comes in - or Transmissive Micro-Reflective as boffins know it. Currently only used on very small screens, it's slowly starting to make its way up the LCD food chain, and will soon be available on 10.4-inch screens.

TMR doesn't rely on a reflective film behind the glass so it doesn't block the light. Instead it takes advantage of the fact that parts of your TFT - like the metal transistor - don't let light through anyway, so you can happily stick a reflective surface on top of that, and beam some sunlight back without losing any brightness.

One other thing you can do, if you're feeling really extravagant, is to build your LCD using nanotech manufactured films called "photon enhancement layers" that collimate the incoming sunlight so it all comes straight back to you. This gives you an uber-transflective screen that gets really bright in the sunlight, up to 1500cd/m2, without the need for any big backlights.

But whatever LCD makers do, I wish they'd get it sorted soon as I'm sure I'm not alone in being happy to pay another ten bucks to be able to sit in the garden in summer with a cold beer while using my laptop! When the famous British rain isn't pouring down, that is. µ

L'INQS
Samsung TMR screens
NEC Transflective screen
Ra-Tek photonic enhancement