The BRIGHTEST Monitor We've EVER Seen - Sun Vision rE rLCD Display

Ah, the sun, a beloved source of life on our planet, but also deadly. It causes cancer, it evaporates our water, and worst of all, it makes it difficult for me to read the screen. Or at least that's how it used to be. This

monitor

from Sun Vision Display is the

brightest

we've

ever

seen

. It has no backlight, allowing it to consume just six watts of power and measure over 2,200 nits. Look at how it handles direct sunlight compared to a traditional screen. In fact, the more sunlight there is, the more powerful it becomes. But there is a small problem because the less sunlight there is, the less powerful it becomes.

But unlike your phone, it doesn't use a sensor to adjust its output and the trick is in the panel technology itself. And I will tell you

ever

ything. Right after this message from our sponsor. MSI, experience images with stunningly accurate colors and incredibly fast response times with MSI's new QD OLED

monitor

s. Plus, use its Game Intelligence app to fine-tune your experience so you're always locked, loaded, and ready to go. Check them out below. The brand name, SunVision Display, may give you a first clue as to how this monitor works, but it is not solar powered. At least not in the way you think.

I already said it doesn't have a backlight, so okay Linus, so it's a self-emissive OLED? No. More like without LED. In fact, it uses an LCD panel but, unlike the ones you are used to, it has no backlight of any kind. It doesn't even have a front light like this Dasung e-ink monitor, which seems crazy in 2024, but isn't exactly new. Both the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance used LCD screens that weren't illuminated, so how did we see anything on them? They were thoughtful. Just behind the

display

layer was a mirror-like layer that reflected ambient light and this monitor works on the same principle.

Overall, I'd say the specs aren't the highlight here - it's 32 inches and 1080p, so the pixel density is a little low for our modern

display

. It's 60 hertz, curiously it has dual HDMI inputs but no DisplayPort and then it has a USB A port for charging? That's a little strange, I'm referring to the integrated hubs we've

seen

that didn't load as much before. It has built-in speakers, VESA mounting holes, old school behind the monitor so you can't see navigation labels, and pixel response times are 10 milliseconds. Actually. Two thirds of the frame just to finish the transition. Let's try it, but not here.

Let's take it to its natural habitat. Since we typically test displays in near-darkness to prevent ambient light from affecting our measurements, we had to get a little creative to test this. Fortunately, we had a bright, sunny day, so we took the monitor outside to see it in its ideal setting. At one hundred percent window size, meaning basically the entire screen is completely white, this reaches over 2200 nits. This is really impressive, but there is something to think about. A white sheet of paper exposed to that same sunlight measured almost 24,000 nits. So clearly a lot of light is lost before being reflected back into our eyes.

That said, it's still much more readable than virtually any other screen we can take outside. So is there a use case for this? Sure. No. A boat, a boat that doesn't get wet. It has no IP rating. And while it does a great job of maintaining text readability in very difficult conditions, you'll notice that as soon as you mention almost anything else, it doesn't look as good. It's not because it uses a different panel technology like the e-ink we recently reviewed. It is an LCD like any other. So what's up with that? Well, for starters, the nominal contrast is only 25 to one.

And under our testing conditions, we measure under that. Oh. For reference, even without any backlight dimming tricks, a typical IPS display today would be rated a thousand to one. With VA being about five times larger and OLED panels more like a million to one. However, it's worth noting that you can have the best contrast ratio in the world. But if its maximum brightness is far below ambient conditions, your eyes, which are adapted to sunlight, will not be able to perceive that contrast. I mean, okay, here, here, this is a perfect example. Look at my OLED phone, right?

A million to one my ass. So the downside to our RLCD is that it can't really get darker or brighter relative to its surroundings, but, like a book, what it can do is reflect the conditions of its surroundings, which keeps it within a usable range. for your eyes. So to illustrate, this here looks black, but when we measured it we found it was over 100 nits, which, to put it in perspective, is brighter than what white would have been on the CRT monitors in my computer lab. school when I was a child. Another disadvantage that arises from ambient light reflection is that the color performance of the screen is also affected by factors such as time of day and weather.

If you were using this on a patio, for example, the color temperature of the screen would change with the sunrise and sunset. I mean, you probably won't notice this since your eyes and brain have god-level automatic white balance. But this lack of consistency means this is functionally useless for color-sensitive work. And even if it were accurate enough, the color gamut wouldn't be. It managed only 17% of the sRGB color space, which makes no sense. I mean, if you feed it direct sunlight, which is, you know, all the colors, why doesn't it put all those colors back into your eyes?

Well, actually, that's the problem. He does it. Here is a keyboard towel from LTTstore.com. Clean yourself. The thing is, if you want to create specific colors, you don't want a full spectrum light gun. You want precise control over specific wavelengths. Therefore, the spectral distribution of a normal monitor has very sharp peaks for green, red and blue, but the diffuse distribution of the spectral power of sunlight means that you can't get pure green very easily. Combine that with the lack of brightness needed to create some colors and you have a recipe for poor color accuracy. And I promise you, digging into the comically bad screen won't solve the problem.

Maybe playing is good? No. Well, you can certainly play. They're not even sugarcoating how unideal it is. Even for a 60 Hertz display, the 10 millisecond pixel response time means that any fast movement will be noticeably blurry to the eye. And we found that the input latency was best described as twisted. It wasn't easy to get a number comparable to our other tests because our latency tester needs to be mounted on the screen and inconveniently blocks the screen from outputting anything. Ha ha! So, you have heard many arguments for not purchasing the SunVision RLCD display. Maybe you are ready to know why it exists?

Well, it was a sign. No, not that kind. This type. SunVision Display specializes in using this technology in applications like digital signage where, honestly, it makes a lot of sense. I mean, how cool would it be if your food truck or your... ...golf course weather report could be read in basically any real-world conditions? And all this while consuming a small fraction of the power of a normal display. That's great and business seems to be going pretty well for them. In fact, it's so good that some people started buying their signage products to use with their computers and... ...well, the customer is always right, right?

So they did... ...this. Except... Sometimes the customer is not right. The RE monitor is heavily marketed to people who suffer from computer

vision

syndrome. And while CVS exists, it's one of those things where nuggets of good information often get buried in mountains of pseudoscience and marketing nonsense. For example, SunVision talks about blue light emissions, but as we mentioned in our E-Ink monitor review, there is no solid evidence that the blue light emitted by a display is harmful at all. And, when we look at a spectrogram, we can see that because the backlight of this monitor is effectively a mirror that reflects broad-spectrum sunlight, this reflects more blue light back to you than a normal monitor would emit.

So that they can see what we're doing on the monitor, we'll try to give it enough light to... ...look like anything. Unless you use lights this bright, the RE monitor simply isn't a good indoor experience. It can be used in a typical office, but go ahead and do it. It's really not brilliant. And, well, you probably won't need dark mode if you're a dark mode type of person. Lack of contrast can make different shades of gray disappear faster than a book on gender in a Florida library. And this is a real problem. In a 300 lux office environment, this reaches only 5.2 nits.

In contrast, a white sheet of paper has 90 nits. So why do we receive less than 10% of the amount of reflected light compared to this? It all comes down to the way the panel is manufactured. Each of the individual pixels consists of a mirror, a transistor and a surrounding space of 10 micrometers. The problem is that the space part is not reflective and, with its current manufacturing capabilities, cannot be contracted. So, under a microscope, only about 80% of the screen surface is reflective. And even the reflective parts have to face a lot of losses. Have you ever taken apart a regular monitor and noticed how bright the backlight is compared to the final image?

Well, that's because every layer of a screen, including polarizing filters, glass, diffusers, there are more layers than you think and they're all lossy. And in our reflective screen, light has to pass through all of those layers not once but twice. So even to achieve the brightness that Sun Vision has, it had to compromise on pixel density. When optimizing their mirror-to-space ratio, they had to opt for a color filter that allows more light through but compromises color saturation. We were curious if this was also the reason they stopped having a front light which could have improved usability indoors, but at the same time however, at the cost of probably needing another layer of diffusion when we asked Sun Vision , turns out it was because their clients said they wouldn't use it and didn't want it.

Which is fair enough, I suppose, since if I can afford one of these, I can also afford a beachfront property with floor-to-ceiling windows to let the sun shine. Even on special, at $1,499, this isn't cheap. Which would bother me less if it weren't for the cheap build quality. I mean, I admit I have no idea what the margins are on a niche product like this. They're obviously not making many of them, but even Dasung was able to produce what looked like a more complete package for their e-ink display. That said, if you can afford it and don't MUST have a backlight on your monitor, I think I would recommend this over an e-ink display thanks to its better motion performance.

And that would be especially true if they made a V2 that had some kind of flicker-free LED front light. As it is now, although I think I'll stick to the usual monitors. You can get some absolutely incredible screens for this amount of money. And we'll have this link below, but we'll also put some things that we would really recommend in there, along with this link to our sponsor. Delete me. Privacy is not just about individuals, but also about families. That's why Delete Me is expanding to offer coverage not only for you, but also for your loved ones.

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If you liked this video, check out the one we made on the Dasung E-Ink Monitor. Now they have a second generation, right? They have all color, yes. Oh, in full color. We'll make a video about that soon, right? Sure. Yeah.