You should upgrade your phones and laptops then: Apple just released a phone that does 2000 nits outdoors, and similarly the MBP can dip into its 1000 nit sustained HDR brightness rating for SDR content if in direct sunlight
In reality this is one of those slow burn deals where the improvements in anti-glare coatings, bonding between digitizer and displays, and brightness come slowly enough that it's easy to take for granted just how awful old displays used to be.
We've come a long way from the days of hazy plastic suspended millimeters above the actual display, which in turn had its own coating with a different refractive index leaving two layers of reflections to deal with
Oh, I thought there was some revolutionary coating I missed out on...
I actually have a M2 MacBook Pro and a Pixel 7, both of which get decently bright, but neither of which is really usable under direct glare. And in XDR mode, the SDR colors get super washed out. HDR is a gimmick as far as I can tell.
I'd trade either for a usable transflective display or a regular matte screen from early 2000s Dell. I don't think the answer to glare is to just make the display brighter. That's liking shining a flashlight into your eyes so the sun doesn't seem as bright...
I tried a 3m anti glare coating, and that worked well for keeping out direct light, but it darkened the screen so much it was barely visible at max brightness.
The Steam Deck had some etched glass thing that seemed a little better (maybe the iMac too?) but I still wasn't able to use it in direct sun.
The only display I've used so far that was actually comfortable outside in the sun are e-ink ones, with matte screens also somewhat usable in shade on a sunny day. My M2 MacBook? Useless outside and barely usable under office florescent light. I hate the Apple glare. Makes movies look nice in the dark but useless for day to day office work, IMO.
What you described is EDR: where non HDR content is artificially limited to allow HDR content to contrast better. In sunlight the screen will stay in SDR and use HDR brightness levels without any tweaks, which doesn't result in washing anything out
> That's liking shining a flashlight into your eyes so the sun doesn't seem as bright...
... that's exactly the point of e-Ink: with minimal power you get brightness that rivals the sunlight you're holding the device in.
With infinitely efficient OLEDs, we'd just crank the brightness on the lit pixels high enough to match the brightness of a white piece of paper in sunlight and have a better e-ink: unfortunately in the real world that'd generate more heat and take more power than mobile devices can afford right now.
At the end of the day we have both matte and glossy displays with reflective characteristics that rival old school matte displays because of improvements made across the stack... but nostalgia makes us assume things were very different than they were.
> What you described is EDR: where non HDR content is artificially limited to allow HDR content to contrast better. In sunlight the screen will stay in SDR and use HDR brightness levels without any tweaks, which doesn't result in washing anything out
What do you mean by this? Are you saying the Macbook has a special display mode that only activates when it detects sunlight (as in lumens? or?)?
> With infinitely efficient OLEDs, we'd just crank the brightness on the lit pixels high enough to match the brightness of a white piece of paper in sunlight and have a better e-ink: unfortunately in the real world that'd generate more heat and take more power than mobile devices can afford right now.
Are you talking about the contrast ratio? I meant more that high brightness with a direct light source into the eyes can be pretty uncomfortable compared to reflected diffuse sunlight. If there's a way to get the contrast of LEDs to a similar readability of paper & e-ink without needing to blast my eyes, that'd be great. The few OLED displays I've used seem to have that more of that effect (still not as nice as e-ink), but I don't have a monitor that size either.
> At the end of the day we have both matte and glossy displays with reflective characteristics that rival old school matte displays because of improvements made across the stack... but nostalgia makes us assume things were very different than they were.
Like what? Are you saying my current Macbook is actually more readable in sunlight than old matte displays, I just don't realize it...? If so, hmm, I'm dubious but I will take it out again and try to compare it again without nostalgia, as much as I can. Or is there an objective measure of sunlight readability I can refer to?
> What do you mean by this? Are you saying the Macbook has a special display mode that only activates when it detects sunlight (as in lumens? or?)?
Yes, if automatic brightness is on, the screen will exceed its standard SDR range in daylight, just like the iPhone. Otherwise you need special software to manually increase the SDR brightness into that higher range, maxing out at 1600 nits.
> I meant more that high brightness with a direct light source into the eyes can be pretty uncomfortable compared to reflected diffuse sunlight
The discomfort would come from a mismatch in brightness: a 2000 nit screen sounds incredibly painful to look at because in normal conditions your pupils are adjusted to an indoor room and you're looking at a 2,000 nit screen, which is terrible.
But ambient light on a clear day is something like 30,000 nits, so your pupils are already significantly narrowed: a "mere" 2000 nit screen will still look kind of dim if anything.
e-Ink sits around 40%-50% reflectivity and still looks fine in those conditions.
(Blue light, contrast, and the nature of the reflections themselves also play a role so it's not as simple as "more nits is better", but you need to be in a certain ballpark of brightness to even play, which is why I'm saying old devices aren't in the running here.)
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> Like what? Are you saying my current Macbook is actually more readable in sunlight than old matte displays, I just don't realize it...? If so, hmm, I'm dubious but I will take it out again and try to compare it again without nostalgia, as much as I can. Or is there an objective measure of sunlight readability I can refer to?
It's hard to capture in a single measure because there's two parts to the equation:
- reflections from the surface
- being bright enough for your eyes to make out details at all
Back in the day the brightness would be roughly equal for both a glossy and a matte option, so matte would be strictly better.
Now brightness has advanced enough that a newer glossy panel + modern anti-glare coating + modern bonding techniques are. enough to overcome the difference in reflections vs the old screens.
You should look at even the glossy non-Retina (which was almost universally hated) vs the glossy Retina to see how dramatic the changes in anti-glare tech were at some points in the last decade: https://cdtobie.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/reduced-reflectance...
A modern matte screen would have the advantage if it had the same brightness, but afaik no one actually makes a matte screen that gets as bright as the new XDR Macbooks do: the closest are all glossy displays too.
Hmm, this is new to me, thanks for the explanation! I never used automatic brightness, and the manual adjustment never let me set it high enough. I'll have to try it outdoors again with the automatic on (or find that special software that lets me go up to 1600 nit). I'll also bring a last-gen Windows matte laptop out again just for comparison :)
Brightness aside, though, a huge thing for me and glossy screens is the specular reflection. Even when it's not the sun, having a tree or a sign or the person behind me reflected in my screen is very distracting.
> Apple just released a phone that does 2000 nits outdoors, and similarly the MBP can dip into its 1000 nit sustained HDR brightness rating for SDR content if in direct sunlight
I imagine that the goal is to have the sunlight itself provide the lighting for the screen, not just making the existing screen brighter, no? I don't want to be staring at something that's competing with sunlight, I want it to reflect the existing sunlight that's already hitting the display. Granted this may not make much difference in practice but... that's a huge range of luminance to compete with for a theoretically low-power device.
Can you talk more about this? My phones and laptops are still as bad as ever in direct sun. Did I miss some major development...?