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
DisplayPort 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
their family plans make sharing and caring simple with their family account
management you can easily add multiple members ensuring personalized protection
for each person and make overseeing your family's privacy easier than ever their
privacy first design means that each family member gets their own data sheet
keeping their online footprint secure from kids to adults everyone's covered
reduced in the risk of exposure spam and
scams choose delete me for peace of mind for your entire family in the digital
world check them out using the link below today and use code LT at checkout
for 20% off thanks for watching if you guys liked this video go check out the
one we did on dung's E in monitor they have a second gen 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