Some years ago there was this „paperlike kindle“ that was advertised with: „you can read it in bright daylight!“ and then we never heard about this invention again.
Edit: thanks for your input. I think I understand now.
In: Technology
In ancient times, Nokia made phones that could be read in full sunlight. They called it “transflective”, but sadly the technology has been lost in the mists of time.
There are plenty of e-ink screens and some that are phone sized. They have limited color, it’s like looking at a picture in a newspaper. They even play videos. But to get a truly vibrant experience you need the LED style display
It’s because the glass screens on phones is reflective, like a mirror. You can add a Matte screen protector and your visibility in the sun increases greatly.
E-ink screens are still used a lot, but they don’t have any good color output and updates really slowly. I dunno what it is you want to “hear” about e-ink? They are not suitable for what you generally use your phone for. Yet anyways. Maybe sometime in the future.
Am I out of my mind? My phone is quite usable in sunlight, and new phones are like over 2x the nits.
I haven’t tried one of the new 2000+ nit phones in person, but I have no issues using my 2+ year old phone on the sunniest of days, even if the screen appears a bit dimmer then.
It isn’t 2010 with phones with 400nit screens.
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Edit: Since this is a top level comment and has also become popular, I will also address the E-Ink screen portion of the OP. E-Ink screens have not gone anywhere, new Kindles have been made, there’s even an E-Ink phone, and a couple E-Ink monitors now.
The weakness of E-Ink is it’s response time and fidelity, it works by using an electrical signal to change the crystal structure within the screen, and it doesn’t require power to continue displaying the same image, only to refresh the image to something else this makes them very power efficient. This process is also slow and not well suited to moving images, so it does not work very well for anything that requires motion like scrolling phone screens, video media, or games.
Classically they are also only able to do Black and White and possibly shades of Grey, recently some new E-Ink displays have been able to do colors, as well as faster refresh rates, but the colors are still a very far cry from what LCD or LED panels can produce, while the refresh rates are still to low to be realistically usable quality for everything you would do on a phone or computer.
Which is why they have largely stayed relegated to “reading only” devices like Ebooks.
1. Most glare free screens sacrifice hardness (inability to scratch) for their glare free qualities. Kindle screens scratch hella easy.
2. E-ink has really bad refresh rates and the colour simply isn’t quite there yet.
Full sunlight is about 200 times stronger than the light coming from your phone. Plain glass reflects about 4% of incident light, so the reflected light is 8 times brighter than the screen. Even with anti-reflective coatings, you can’t get much below 1% for white light, so the reflected light is still double the maximum output of your phone.
That’s a basic problem with a smooth glass screen, and it isn’t going away. Paper-like screens, as other people have commented, have problems with refresh rates and resolution that make them unsuitable for normal smartphones.
Does the TCL NXTPAPER phone count?
Why do we still have no phone screens that don’t suck if my finger is wet?
Literally just turn up your brightness. It sounds counterintuitive but it’s actually better to turn your brightness up when you’re in an equally bright environment
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