There's Now Another Reason Why Your iPad's So Hard To See In Direct Sunlight
April 10, 2012
One of the only drawbacks to Apple's widely-used LCD display technology is its ineffective out-of-doors capability. In direct sunlight, it's almost impossible to enjoy your iPhone or iPad screen in all its glory. It's doable, sure, but between the glare and the washed out pixels, you might have to wear sunglasses.
Unless you're using an iPad. Then, it's not so simple.
See, the new iPad is curiously polarized, with its so-called "extinction" point set at a very user-unfriendly 90 degrees. Says DisplayMate's Ray Soneira (via ZDNet):
Using polarized sunglasses all iPads go black in Portrait mode. Other displays go black in Landscape mode. Much better is for the manufacturer to set the extinction at 45 degrees so the display looks good in both Portrait and Landscape modes. The Motorola Xoom behaves this way. Best of all, with compensating films this effect can go away almost entirely. The iPhone 4 and Samsung Galaxy Tab have no extinction at any angle (just a small color shift). The effect should only apply to LCDs because they use polarized light internally. So OLEDs also should not show any such extinction effect.Don't believe him? See for yourself: Of course, as Soneira pointed out, this is an issue that affects all iPads, not just the newest iteration. So, since we're just now noticing this behavior some two years after the fact, it's probably not a big deal for 99.99 percent of Apple's user base. Still, it seems like those Cupertino engineers could've set the termination angle to the suggested (and obvious) 45 degrees instead of rendering portrait mode useless for the sunglasses-wearing elite. Think of the celebrities, won't you?
