Tablet and Smartphone Displays Under Bright Ambient Lighting Shoot-Out

Master Photo Grid for Viewing Screen Shots of all the Displays
Apple iPad 2  –  Amazon Kindle Fire  –  Motorola Xoom  –  Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1
Apple iPhone 4  –  HTC Desire  –  Motorola Droid X  –  Nokia Lumia 900  –  Samsung Galaxy S

Introduction
The visual performance and viewability of Tablet and Smartphone displays in high Ambient Lighting is a specification that most consumers are not yet aware of or concerned about. Unfortunately, the same appears to be true for many of the manufacturers as well. While the displays all look about the same in the dark, as the Ambient Lighting levels increase, particularly outdoors, there are dramatic differences in screen viewability, which depend on a combination of each display’s inherent screen Brightness and screen Reflectance. It’s important because mobile devices are seldom used in the dark…

The Master Photo Grid below visually demonstrates the differences in Tablet and Smartphone display screen viewability over a very wide range of Ambient Lighting levels from Absolute Darkness up through very bright Sunlight. We photographed 4 Tablets and 5 Smartphones inside an Integrating Hemisphere using a powerful light source that uniformly illuminates the displays from all directions from 0 lux (Absolute Darkness) up through 40,000 lux (Indirect Sunlight), which is very bright. Direct Sunlight at noon is a blinding 100,000 lux.

The Master Photo Grid combines the Screen Shots from our Tablet Displays Under Bright Ambient Lighting Shoot-Out and Smartphone Displays Under Bright Ambient Lighting Shoot-Out articles in a compact format that makes visual comparisons and spotting trends very easy. A good way to see all of the Screen Shots at once without the need for horizontal scrolling is with a widescreen display that has at least 1920 pixels. Better yet, the iPad, iPhone, Windows Phones, and most Android Tablets and Smartphones will display all (or almost all) of the 72 Screen Shots on a single page in Portrait mode – you may need to pinch in the image to see a single screen view. In some cases you may need to double-tap the article text for optimum reading. This is the best way to see the large scale trends and differences in how the Tablet and Smartphone displays degrade as the Ambient Lighting levels increase.

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