Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Every Monitor Fails This Test… Except One – Sun Vision rE rLCD Display”.
Ah, the Sun, the Beloved Source of Life on our planet, but also deadly it causes cancer. Evaporates, our water and worst of all, makes it hard for me to read my screen, or at least it used to this monitor from Sun Vision. Display is the brightest. We have ever seen it has no backlight allowing it to draw just 6 watts of power and measuring over 2200 knits. Look at how it has Les direct sunlight compared to a traditional display. In fact the more sunlight there is, the more powerful it becomes. But there is a small catch because you see the less sunlight there is the uh less powerful it becomes.
But unlike your phone, it’s not using a sensor to adjust its output and the trick lies in the panel technology itself and I’ll tell you all about it. Right after this message from our sponsor MSI experience, stunningly color, accurate, visuals and blistering Fast Response times with msi’s new QD OLED monitors plus use their gaming intelligence app to fine-tune your experience so you’re, always locked loaded and ready to go check them out down below the Name of the brand sunvision display might give you your first clue as to how this monitor works, but it’s not solar powered, at least not in the way that you think I already said it doesn’t have a backlight. So all right, lus, it’s a self aiss of OLED, then no more, like no le. In fact, it uses an LCD panel, but, unlike the ones you’re used to it, has no backlight of any kind. It doesn’t even have a front light like this eink monitor from dasung, which seems kind of crazy in 2024, but it isn’t exactly new the Game, Boy, Color and Game Boy Advance both used LCD displays that weren’t lit. So how did we see anything on those? They were reflective just behind the display layer was a mirror likee layer that reflected ambient light back to you, and this monitor operates on the same principle. Overall I’d say: the specs are not the Highlight here: it’s 32 in 1080P, so the pixel density is a little on the low side for our Modern Display. It’S 60 HZ. It has curiously dual HDMI inputs, but no display port, and then it has a usba, a port for charging. That’S a little weird. I mean built-in hubs. We’Ve seen that before charging not so much, it has built-in speakers vase mounting holes old school behind the monitor. So you can’t see the labels, navigation and the pixel response times are rated at 10 milliseconds, really 2/3 of a frame just to finish the transition. Let’S give it a shot, but not here, let’s take it to its natural habitat.
Given we normally test displays in near blackness in order to prevent ambient light from affecting our measurements, we had to get a little creative in order to test this thing. Luckily, we were graced with a bright sunny day, so we brought the monitor outside to see it in its ideal environment at 100 % window size, meaning basically, the full screen is entirely white. This hits over 2200 nits. That is truly impressive, but here’s something to think about a white piece of paper in that same sunlight, measured nearly 24,000 nits, so there’s clearly a massive amount of light, that’s being lost before it’s reflected back to our eyes.
With that said, it’s still vastly more readable than pretty much any other display that we could bring outside. So is there a use case for this thing sure no, a boat, a boat that doesn’t get wet? It’S not IP rated, and while it does a great job of maintaining the readability of text under very challenging conditions, you’ll notice that, as soon as you bring up pretty much anything else, it um doesn’t look that good. It’S not because it uses a different panel technology. Like the e, in that we checked out recently, it’s an LCD like any other, so what is up with that? Well, for starters, the rated contrast is just 25 to1 and under our test conditions, we measured under that yikes for reference guys, even without any backlight dimming tricks, a typical IPS display these days would be rated to about a to one with VA being about five times.
That 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 your Peak brightness is well below the Environmental conditions, your eyes, which are adjusted for sunlight, are not going to 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, so the disadvantage for our rlcd is that it can’t really darken or boost its brightness relative to its environment, but kind of like a book. What it can do is reflect the conditions of its environment, which keeps it within a usable range for your eyes. So to illustrate this right here looks black, but when we measured it, we found that it was over 100 nits which, to put in perspective, is brighter than what would have been white on the CRT monitors in my school computer lab as a kid another disadvantage.
That stems from reflecting environmental light is that the display’s color performance is also impacted by factors like time of day and weather. If you were using the this on a patio, for instance, the color temperature of the display would change with the rising and setting of the sun. I mean you’re – probably not going to notice this since your eyes and your brain have god tier, Auto white balance. But this lack of consistency means that this thing is functionally useless for color sensitive work and even if it was accurate enough, the color gamut wouldn’t be.
It managed just 177 % of the srgb color space, which doesn’t make sense. I mean if you’re feeding it direct sunlight, which is you know all of the colors. Why doesn’t it all those colors back out into your eyes? Well, actually that’s kind of the problem.
It does here’s a keyboard towel from LTT store.com clean yourself up. The thing is: if you want to make specific colors, you don’t want a full spectrum light Cannon. You want fine control over specific wavelengths, so a normal mon spectral distribution has very acute Peaks for green red and blue, but the diffuse spectral power distribution of sunlight means. You can’t get pure green very easily combine that with the lack of brightness needed to create some colors and you’ve got a recipe for bad color accuracy, and I promise you guys digging around in the comically bad onscreen display is not going to fix it. Maybe gaming is good no well, you can certainly play games, they aren’t even sugar coating, how not ideal it is even for a 60hz display. The rated 10 milliseconds of pixel response time means that any fast-paced motion is going to be noticeably smear to the eye and we found the input.
Latency was best described as gnarly um. It wasn’t easy to get a number, that’s comparable to our other testing, because our latency tester needs to be mounted to the display and uh inconveniently blocked this one from outputting anything at all. So then, you’ve heard a lot of arguments for not buying the sunvision rlcd display, maybe you’re ready for why it exists. Well, it was a sign.
No not that kind. This kind sunvision display specializes in using this technology in applications like digital signage, where, honestly, it makes a ton of sense. I mean how cool would it be to have your food truck or your golf course. Weather report be readable in basically any real world conditions, and this is all while consuming a tiny fraction of the power of a regular display. That’S pretty cool and business seems to be going pretty good for them, so good, in fact that some folks started buying their signage products to use with their computers and well the customer’s always right right, so they made this except sometimes the customer isn’t right.
The re monitor is heavily marketed towards people who suffer from computer vision syndrome and while CVS does exist, it’s one of those things where the Nuggets of good information are often buried in mountains of marketing nonsense and pseudo science, for example, sunvision talks about blue light emissions, But as we mentioned in our eink monitor review, there isn’t strong evidence that blue light emitted from a screen is harmful at all. And when we look at a spectrogram, we can see that because this monitor’s back light is effectively a mirror. That is bouncing back broadspectrum.
Sunlight this thing reflects more blue light towards you. Then a regular monitor would emit uh just so you can actually see what we’re doing on the monitor we’re going to try and give it enough light to like look like anything unless happen to use lights. That are this bright. The re monitor is just not a good experience indoors, it’s usable in a typical office, but here go ahead and hit it. It’S really not bright and well. You probably won’t need dark mode if you happen to be a dark mode kind of person. The lack of contrast can make distinct Shades of Gray disappear faster than a book about gender in a Florida library – and this is a real problem in a 300 Lux office environment. This achieves just 5.2 nits, for contrast, pun intended.
A white sheet of paper is 90 nits, so why are we getting under 10 % of the amount of reflected light compared to this? It comes down to the way the panel is made. Each of the individual pixels consists of a mirror, a transistor and a 10 micromet surrounding Gap. The problem is that the Gap part is non-reflective and with their current manufacturing capabilities, it’s non shrinkable. So, under a microscope only about 80 % of the surface area of the display is reflective at all, and even the parts that are reflective have to deal with a lot of loss.
Have you ever taken apart a regular, Monitor and noticed how flipping bright the backlight is compared to the final image? Well, that’s because every layer of a display, including po izing filters, the glass, the diffusers there’s more layers than You’, think and all of them are lossy and in our reflective display, light, has to travel through all of those layers not once but twice so to even Achieve the brightness that they have sunvision had to compromise on pixel density, optimizing their mirror to Gap ratio and they had to go with a color filter that allows more light through, but compromises color saturation. We were curious if this was also the reason that they left off having a front light which might have improved indoor usability, but at the expense of probably needing yet another diffusion layer. When we asked sunvision, though it turns out that it was because their customers said they wouldn’t use it and didn’t want it, which is fair enough. I guess, since if I can afford one of these, I can also afford a waterfront property with floor to ceiling Windows.
To let the sun shine through on it even on special for $ 1,499, this thing ain’t, cheap, which would bother me less if it wasn’t for the budget feeling build quality, I mean. Admittedly, I have no idea what the margins are like on a niche product like this. Obviously they aren’t making that many of them, but even dasung, was able to produce what felt like a more complete package for their e in display. That being said, if you can afford it – and you absolutely must not have a backl in your monitor, I think I would recommend this one over an e in display thanks to its better Motion Performance, and that would be especially true if they do a V2.
That has some kind of flicker-free LED front light as it is now, though, I think I’ll stick to regular monitors. You can get some absolutely sick displays for this kind of money and we’re going to have this link down below, but we’re also going to put some stuff we’d actually recommend down there. Along with this link to our sponsor delete me, privacy isn’t just about individuals. It’S about families, that’s why delete me is expanding to offer coverage not just for yourself, but for your loved ones too.
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Now right uh they have the full color yeah oo, full color, we’re going to do a video on that soon, right sure, yeah .