For the last 10 days I was sailing in the British Virgin Islands (east of Puerto Rico), one of the premier sailing grounds for the sailors of the world. With latitude of roughly 18 degrees N, the weather is tropical by nature, meaning sunshine 365 days a year (with the exceptions of hurricanes) and a 20% chance of rain. Being on a boat reduces the contact with day-to-day life, however, the modern world has already infiltrated the boating world and no modern sailboat is without its fair share of electronic displays.

Norbert Hildebrand
Insight Media Analyst

While my primary concern was relaxation, I couldn’t miss noticing the performance of the various displays on the boat during day and night time. This was a great opportunity to not only see several display types side by side, but also compare their performance through the eyes of various users in an extreme and very bright environment.

First of all there were several navigational instruments installed on the boat. These were comprised of various STN-LCD and TFT-LCD displays installed inside and outside. The outside displays were segmented STN displays with a very large character size to provide easy to read feedback in the cockpit while sailing. The inside displays included a roughly 9" full color TFT (GPS chart plotter) and a few smaller STN displays. The intense sunshine requires wearing dark sunglasses while outside. With full sunshine on the instruments the STN displays were quite readable with the sunglasses on, however, if the instruments were in the shade (from the sail for example) the readability dropped significantly requiring removing the sunglasses for better readability. While we were not sailing at night for safety reasons, the displays are still needed and are all backlit allowing for comfortable viewing at night.

The indoor displays were of course protected from direct sunlight, but all required removing the sunglasses for better readability. The full color TFT display was very similar to a normal laptop computer display in performance. Viewing angle issues are not on the top list of concerns as the positioning of the display itself naturally limits the viewing angle. The TFT also had a night mode to prevent a blinding effect from the display.

The next type of display used by everyone on the boat were a variety of cell phone displays ranging from Apple and Blackberry to Samsung and Sony. While all of the displays were of the transflective TFT type, the outdoor readability was abysmal at best. Everyone had to take off the sunglasses and shade the display to have any chance to use the device at all. The Smartphones might have had a slightly better display, but the higher information content on the display (for example in e-mail or Internet mode) offset the effect and made the device pretty useless in direct sunlight.

In many local restaurants and bars, walls are optional allowing plenty of sunshine to flood the place with a high ambient light level. In places with TVs on the wall, display types ranged from LCD, PDP to CRT. During daytime all types suffered from a high loss of contrast and washed out colors although at night could see that the TVs were actually cranked up to very high settings for brightness and contrast.

One of my friends brought his newest toy, an Amazon Kindle 2 with several books loaded and subscriptions for newspapers. This electrophoretic display actually outperformed all other display types in direct sunlight. With the very intense sunlight shining directly on the display it looked better than I have ever seen one before. The appearance was more like a laser printer page on good white paper, rather than the typical newspaper appearance (dark gray on light gray). The white reflectance was so high that one had to actually wear sunglasses or move to a shaded place for a more pleasant reading experience. This display type might be also a good choice for some other display applications as mentioned above.

With the limited availability of data networks around the islands and exorbitant roaming and data charges, Internet access on the Smartphone was not the best way of staying in touch with world events. It turned out that the Kindle actually delivered the newspaper subscriptions in some WiFi enabled places and became the best source for staying in touch with the world news.

With this personal view of electronic display performance in the Caribbean I want to wish all of the readers a peaceful holiday season and great start into the next decade.

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