I totally agree with this.
The matte display is favorable to a reflective one. And the weight is also a very large concern. Those are the two most important things for me when i get a laptop. It needs to be light weight so i don’t get a back injury when carrying it and the screen needs to work in many environments. It wont do if you can’t work on your laptop in the train, because the view outside the train is reflecting in the screen. It might look nice when the laptop is turned off, but that is just not smart.
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While I obviously agree, I can also see the point of glass + optical bonding, I have seen displays with it and yes, contrast and brightness is better, clearly, since of course the matte structure on the top glass of the LCD, by purpose, works against both. But weighing the options and having worked with a glare screen laptop for a while, well, no, sorry, I don’t like it. In a dark room it’s great! Brilliant picture, great contrast, vibrant colors, it really makes a difference! But as soon as there are other light sources around you it quickly gets super annoying unless you crank up the screen brightness to compete with the other light sources - which of course has its limits.
For a work machine and especially a laptop I want to carry around into different environments I am also in favor of matte displays. And from experience I can also tell that we (at Purism) only see broken (cracked) displays very seldomly I also think that protecting the display with an additional glass is trying to solve a problem that does not exist.
So for now I am pretty happy with the choice of display we made for the L14 along with the increased brightness and pretty good color gamut it should be nice to work with.
Cheers
nicole
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can’t wait to inspect the L14 display since i haven’t had a laptop for a few years now (sold my surface in 2017 and didn’t look back)
Apple came with some pretty advanced solutions with glass ONLY and nano-etching as anti-glare coating with upto 1600 nits > https://www.apple.com/pro-display-xdr/
but that’s for workstation and dark-room/studio type scenarios so the application/translation for a portable ‘warior’ scenario can be far-fetched …
Displays are a total pain in the b*!
Making them isn’t actually super complicated, if you look at regular TFTs. What makes the situation so complicated and frustrating is that there are no real standards. Most displays are custom made for some consumer product, in very high quantities, tailored for this one product. For high volume device this is not an issue, the one time setup cost and following minimum order quantities (MOQs) are a no brainer for higher volume products - like an Apple or Dell or Lenovo or HP. Then there are a couple of high volume ODMs that make devices for OEMs. Also for them higher volume LCD orders are no big deal.
For custom developments for smaller projects like ours we can not afford a custom LCD design. At MOQs barely starting in the ballpark of 20k for small displays and going up quickly the larger the display glass gets, this is out of reach. So we (and many others) have to live from the knock offs trickling down, this is the common way it works. This means a large one creates a new custom display and uses that exclusively for a year or two. Then the tooling for that, which is the expensive part, is sold to second tier LCD makers which continue to make the same display for the first tear original customer but also starts to sell them to the general market. These are the displays you can find in the open market. If the volume drops below a certain amount the manufacturer then just stops making them and a next order incurs a pretty hefty MOQ again (this 20k and above figure).
So that’s the situation we are facing right now, we have to use what we can find on the market and believe me when I tell you that we do the best we can to choose the best displays we can source - but our choices are simply very very limited. And our quantities are still way too small to go for a custom display of our dreams. We are getting there one fine day! We are already a lot better off concerning our numbers than we were, say, two years ago! Which is great and gives us a bit more flexibility already on the hardware side like the PCB / mainboard design. But we are still pretty far away from full custom design e.g. for a display.
Cheers
nicole
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