Matte vs Glossy - midenok/hardware GitHub Wiki

Source: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/07/20/1336246/

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 look quantifyably better in the dark, but it is altogether unusable when there is a light source nearby.

So how do find a good laptop with a matte display?? Tip of the day:

  1. Nearly all consumer laptops come with a glossy screen.
  2. Nearly all business laptops will give you a choice of either matte or glossy. The reason is that while a home user can turn off his ceiling lights, the office worker will always have fluorescent lamps turned on in the office.

Advice to the original poster: Go to the homepage of your favorite laptop manufacturer and click on the business line of models.