In that case (rotating the screens) don't get a Twisted Nematic display. I have the Samsung 2443SW, which, like the Samsung panels in the link, has a TN display, and it is simply not usable rotated 90 degrees. The color and brightness gradient from top to bottom is bearable in panoramic mode, since both your eyes see the same color on each horizontal line. Rotated 90 degrees it's simply awful, because each eyes sees a different color/brightness, and the angle between top and bottom of the screen is so much larger.
The problem with rotating displays is that LCD pixels tend to be taller than wider ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pixel_geometry_01_Pengo.jp... ), hence if you rotate a display it degrades the image quality. Cleartype especially starts looking horrible.
This seems pretty cool. But is the viewing angle of an LCD an inherent property of the particular materials used or is it a side effect of uncertain manufacturing processes? I.e. could an LCD screen's viewing angle be changed if it was manufactured more precisely or calibrated better or something?
The backlight of an LCD isn't itself polarized. A TN LCD display is made of two orthogonal polarization filters with the liquid crystals in between. In their relaxed (twisted) state, the crystals rotate the polarization of the light so that it can pass the second filter. When a voltage is applied, the crystals straighten and the second filter blocks the light.
So after a little owl-like head twisting, I was able to perceive the brush on both of my Dell 24" LCDs. However, I noticed something interesting.
Even though they are fairly similar models with a year or two difference (U2410 vs 2408WFP), they have different polarizations. The U has a vertical brush/bowtie and the WFP has a horizontal brush.
In the past, I have noticed that the brightness of the two is different and has been hard to match. If I drag an application between the two screens, it is almost impossible to tune either monitor so the display is uniform.
Does the manufacturer explicitly determine the orientation of the polarization? Are there reasons for one versus the other? Reasons why a manufacturer might want to rotate it?
I have noticed in the past that some dashboard or nav screens in cars are hard to see with my sunglasses while others aren't, and I know that is due to the orientation of their polarization because if I twist my head 90 degrees, the effect reverses.
I played with the great grandfather of this device — a black & white ~4” LCD, the size of a pizza box, attached to a 286 luggable. It was cool … but the killer feature is being able to rotate the data — our eyes are still 2D.
Turns out, I can rotate data on a regular old monitor.
If there was a version with 180° FOV, on a table, it’d be a great gaming table, but the market is … niche?
Also, non-genuine display modules can utterly suck. The most obvious failure is linearly polarized light output. Bonus points for horizontally or vertically polarized light — diagonal is at least somewhat tolerable.
I like the idea.
But how about LCD screens where the angle changes everything?
Right now it's difficult to read from the side, but "a piece of cake" from above.
Dunno, I really hated Trinitron screens due to both horizontal strips as well as seeing individual pixel triplets and gaps between them (I guess my eyes are super sensitive to parallel/perpendicular lines; can't look happily at non-retina LCDs either). I found Samsung's Invar variants in their SyncMaster (757DFX and higher going up to 2048x1536) superior and much more natural (likely my eyes aren't that sensitive to diagonal non-perpendicular directions).
As the other day I was looking for a flexible OLED panel to replace a broken CRT (because CRTs are curved) in a Minitel terminal, I welcome any competition that could drive prices down.
A Trinitron like curvature would be nicer than an obviously flat LCD panel.
EDIT: Rereading and following your link, I think that link that you provided does offer a strong reason. Apple places appearance including the functional part of appearance near the top of a list of requirements. I imagine Jobs would quickly shoot down a product that would have users complaining about viewing angles and difficulty sharing the experience/use with (social / physically present) company. And good color reproduction also fits into this requirement.
LCD panels using TN tend to have a limited viewing angle relative to CRT and plasma displays. This reduces the number of people able to conveniently view the same image – laptop screens are a prime example. Usually when looking below the screen, it gets much darker; looking from above makes it look lighter. This distorts the colors and makes cheap LCD monitors unsuitable for work where color is important, such as in graphic design work, as the colors change when the eyes are moved slightly up or down, or when looking either at the top of the screen or at the bottom from a fixed position. Many displays based on thin film transistor variants such as IPS, MVA, or PVA, have much improved viewing angles; typically the color only becomes a little brighter when viewing at extreme angles, though much of the improvements on viewing angles has been done[citation needed] on lateral angles, not on vertical ones.
Nice. I remember doing this to my scientific calculator at school.
Modern colour LCDs are still polarised, so I can only view my phone and tablet in one orientation when wearing my polarised sunglasses. On the plus side, they make for an excellent real life ad-block to those annoying video billboards (which are just portrait LCD TVs).
I wonder how practical it would be to make a private display by removing the polarising film from it and then viewing with polarised glasses.
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