E-Readers At The Beach

We’ve all tried it. You’re at the beach. It’s a beautiful sunny day, and the joy of reading a nice book in the sand while listening to the waves is calling your name. So you grab your refreshments, your umbrella, your chair, and your sunglasses and head for the sand. But you forgot one thing.

Your reading material is on an electronic device—your laptop, your tablet, your phone. So instead of seeing the words of whatever marvelous content you’re reading, you only see your own reflection on the screen. It’s frustrating. It’s cruel. It’s enough to make you want to bury your device in the sand.

There is an answer to the problem, though. Most E-readers now have the technology to allow you to read your material outside, even in the brightest sunlight.

But how do they work?

Brightness Enhancements

On an average sunny day, the illumination of ambient daylight is about 30,000 nits. In order to get a clear image outside, the brightness of a display should be over 900 nits. How is this done, you ask? By using the technology of various brightness enhancements.

Passive Enhancements

With this type of enhancement, special brightness enhancement films—or transmissive films—are placed in between the light source of the device and the LCD glass. These films adapt the light so that most of it passes through the LCD glass instead of being absorbed or reflected, therefore increasing the brightness.

It’s worth noting just how advanced these transmissive films are. They are extremely (extremely) thin sheets of polymer that not only help to make displays brighter, but also have the capability of making an LCD computer more private by only allowing the person at the keyboard to see what’s on the screen. Pretty impressive.

Anyway, some benefits of this type of enhancement are that it doesn’t require any additional power from the device, it’s more energy efficient, and the operating temperature of the device is not affected. Passive enhancements are also a less costly way to make the display brighter compared to other methods.

Active Enhancements

With this enhancement, an additional light source is added into the backlight system of the device. This can be in the form of CCFL (cold cathode fluorescent lamp) tubes, LEDs, or something else. However, LED backlights are becoming more common because of some shortcomings of CCFL tubes. LEDs require less power consumption and have lower heat emissions, along with other benefits.

This option, however, has a few downsides. Active brightness enhancements require additional power, and additional heat needs to be dissipated. So the operating temperature of the device might need to be lowered. Also, it’s possible that because the light sources will need more room inside the display, the look or outline of the display might change.

When looking to add brightness enhancement to a display you already have, it is suggested to start with passive and then only add active brightness enhancement where it’s needed.

So there you go—a little insight into how it’s possible to read electronic readers in the sunlight. So grab your sunscreen and refreshments and get back to that beach with your brightness-enhanced device. Now there’s nothing stopping you from getting your tan on while reading your favorite book.

Featured images:

•  License: Royalty Free or iStock source: www.shutterstock.com
•  License: Image author owned 

By Joshua Cranmer

Joshua Cranmer is a writer from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who has been published across the web.  He writes about a number of topics, ranging anywhere from marketing trends, to new technology discoveries for companies like General Digital and many others.