Sony Vaio laptop screen, the other day I was sitting in a park on a sunny day and I noticed some interesting spectral reflections and such and then I looked closer, and in high light, it reminds me of the old transflective LCD displays that can be read in bright light. The background is not black, instead it has a silvered layer (probably aluminium) underneath that lets you see the pixels on the screen layer.

Here you can see the distance between the screen layer and the textured light spreader underneath and it makes nice shadows:

I have been wondering for some time why nobody is making proper transflective displays. They make it possible to read the screen without illumination with sufficient light (saving a lotta power), the only difference is really that silver mirror right at the back behind the lightspreader.

Of course the colours are not nearly as bright or accurate as a black-backed display but too often I look at screens on things and there is too much ambient light to read it easily.

I suppose someday soon someone will make a transflective layer that can turn black as well, and you can have fully lit or unlit transflective modes, it would just take a black panel between the light spreader layer and the silver background, and turn black to make it normal for dark and colour or transparent for transflective. There has been some interesting ones where they layer an e-paper layer behind the LCD. The e-paper could be made silverish/black colour pairs and it would also work as the black or silvery background.

Well, one can dream about better display technologies all day long I suppose. But TFT is dominating things too much for my taste and OLED, while potentially better than TFT, is not as bright, and older displays (I used to have a samsung with oled) too dim to read in daylght.

We want MOAR! display options pls :)

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