Sony's XBRITE vs Fujitsu's Crystal View Compared

do people really need ULTRA bright screens? i have the asus M6 and i have my brightness at 25% cuz it hurts my eyes when its at 100%. maybe my eyes are just sensitive to light?

That's why ultra bright screens are on consumer laptops. They are made to increase the eye candy..more vibrant colors and brightnesss. I use mine daily for more than 4 hrs and I really cannot go back to normal screens..There is a big difference between these and my CRT desktop which just looks dull.

Ofcourse one drawback being the reflection when looking at black screens and if you are sitting opposite to a window, you just cannot see anything..but this is a small fault which I can adjust by just changing the angle of the screen.

I'm afraid I'll have to disagree.

The important specification is not maximum brightness, but maximum contrast ratio.

'Brightness', as it is constructed on computer displays, is not about a bright shiny screen. When you adjust the the 'brightness' on your monitor, you are actually adjusting black levels. You can test it yourself by using a black screen and turning brightness up and down. Why we call it 'brightness' when it is the opposite escapes me.

By the same token, the 'contrast' adjustment actually controls white levels.

What the new enhanced screens really do is allow you to keep 'brightness' low, while increasing 'contrast'. In other words, black levels are kept low while white levels are higher. Hence better contrast ratio.

Your TV or any other CRT display has a potential contrast ratio of many thousands to one. DLP projectors and plasma monitors get up to 2000:1, with fudging. Most LCDs have a crappy C/R, especially those in laptops. It is usually 200:1 or so. The new ones are much better, but still not great.

People comment on the Brightness of enhanced screens, but what they really means is the contrast is able to be kept high while the black levels can be kept low.

ZBerk,

0.75 is about right for gamma, especially if you have an ATI video card.

Cheers

Steve

Yes I agree with you...But the end result is that your eyes see that change as an increase/decrease in brightness.

Nope. An increase in brightness alone washes out the blacks. The problem is that the brightness setting on laptops (that you access via Fn keys or whatever) sucks and is usually a universal one that affects contrast too.

If you want to get color fidelity, brightness and contrast right, you have to do it via the display setting of the video card.

Cheers

Steve

Because Apple will put a spin on it saying they have new XDark technology which keeps the screen dimmed to prevent eye strain. It's hip, it's cool it's Apple.

And Dell is just dumb.

Me: *snicker*
Girlfriend, sitting next to me playing a Tetris clone: "What?"
Me: "People on forums making fun of Apple."
Her: "Isn't that fairly traditional?"

Anyway, responding to sfdoddsy:

It is indeed contrast ratio that matters, but there is an external aspect of that also: ambient light reflected toward your eyes by the screen.

For people unfamiliar with the technology, a contrast ratio of 300:1 (which is probably what my screen has--it's not that great (eMachines M6811)) means that a completely white pixel gives off 300 times as much light as a completely black pixel (which should give off none at all).

Let's say that, in arbitrary units, we have the following numbers:

Black pixel, minimum brightness: 1
White pixel, minimum brightness: 300
Black pixel, max brightness: 10
White pixel, max brightness: 3000

In a dark room, there is no ambient light, and either setting preserves the full contrast ratio of the screen.

In a bright room, the ambient light might result in 10 "units" of light off the screen. Then we have the following numbers:


Black pixel, minimum brightness: 11
White pixel, minimum brightness: 310
Black pixel, max brightness: 20
White pixel, max brightness: 3010

The low screen brightness contrast ratio plummeted to around 29:1, while the high brightness ratio is still over 150:1.

Outdoors, the ambient reflected light might be 100 units, or even more; sunlight is bright. This makes even my brightest screen setting a little difficult to read if the machine is in direct sunlight.

Thus there are really three components of improving contrast on screens:

1) Improve the innate contrast ratio by making the black pixels pass less light from the backlight (this is the "contrast ratio" that's advertised)

2) Increase the brightness on the max setting, so the screen can overpower reflected light

3) Decrease the reflectivity of the screen

The problem with the shiny-screens is that they gain lower reflectivity in most directions (diffuse reflectivity) at the expense of higher reflectivity in one direction (specular reflectivity). This makes them better in environments with bright but diffuse ambient light (like a cloudy day, or a showroom), but makes them horrible in environments with light sources coming from specific directions. Then you get bright glary-bits in specific parts of your screen, which are horrible for a bunch of reasons.