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Ninety percent of the
time the only advantage I get from my laptop computer’s compact
size is extra space on my desk for added clutter. But not long ago on
a motoryacht off the Florida coast, the combination of fine weather and
a looming deadline urged me to exploit its portability. Seated comfortably
on the flying bridge under a cloudless sky, I flipped open the screen
and waited as it chirped to life.
And
I waited. And waited.
Minutes
went by, and still it didn’t boot up. Or so I thought. In fact,
the unit was ready and willing as usual (it’s actually a fine computer
by a reputable company), but the sun was so bright that the screen looked
utterly black. The only way I would have been able to get any work done
up there was if I had cloaked my head, shoulders, and computer in a black
velvet hood, like a 19th century photographer.
Defeated,
I headed below with a new respect for the engineers in the marine electronics
industry who are developing sunlight-viewable LCDs. These new screens
are so bright that at recent boat shows I could tell them from non-sunlight-viewable
displays even indoors. That they’re hard to miss may also be due
to the fact that a number of the new ultra-bright screens are large, conspicuous,
nondedicated displays. Including OceanPC’s Sunlite, Digital View’s
SeaView, and Laser Plot’s BriteChart, among others, these series
of monitors are designed to display PC-based and “black box”
navigational systems such as radar, chartplotter, and depthfinder, plus
in some cases, video images.
Their
versatility alone bespeaks technological accomplishment. But I wanted
to know about the challenges posed by sunshine. So I called Kerry Crozier,
an applications engineer at Computer Dynamics, the Greenville, South Carolina,
firm that developed the 15-inch BriteChart with Auburn, Massachusetts-based
Laser Plot. I learned that much of Computer Dynamics’ experience
came through developing ultra-bright flat-panel displays for oil companies
to use in the field. On those LCDs it managed to coax out 1,000 nits of
light (an average laptop LCD puts out about 400 nits). In marine applications
these wits are getting even more nits.
In describing the hurdles
faced by those developing bright displays, Crozier kindly kept it in terms
a regular nitwit like me could understand. Liquid crystals don’t
generate light, he says, they filter it. So you have to have a light source
behind all the layers of polarizers, diffusers, guides, liquid crystals,
transistors, films, and coatings that make up an LCD. What Laser Plot
calls an “ultra-high-bright” display can use eight, 10, 12,
or even 16 backlights, as opposed to the one or two lighting standard
displays. The kind of lights used—Cold Cathode Fluorescent Tubes
(CCFTs)—are direct descendants of the long white tubes that have
illuminated most offices for decades, but they are unusually bright and
small, and their chromaticity (i.e. color purity) is precisely defined
in order to meet the specific color output of the screen.
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Bright Ideas continued > Page 1, 2
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