Glossy vs matte screens: why the PC industry’s out of touch | Hacker News Reader

Glossy vs matte screens: why the PC industry’s out of touch

pcpro.co.uk

146 pointsjseliger95 comments

The only valid argument that I'd find for glossy screens is that you can build them more robust than matte screens. For example, it's much easier to clean the glass on the new Macbooks compared to a matte screen, which you wouldn't clean with a normal towel. Another example is Lenovo's new X1 laptop that uses Gorilla Glass which should be even much more robust than Apple's screens. Still, I prefer matte screens, as the reflections on glossy screens are too much of a distraction for me.

Speaking of "out of touch" another issue with new screens is the format: On my old IBM/Lenovo X41 and X61s laptops the 4:3 screen format was perfect for the 12" screen. Although the screen was small I used the X41 as my main laptop for about half a year (without an external monitor). On my current X201 the 16:10 format is much worse: I'm a programmer, I don't need horizontal space, but vertical space. Even for non-programmers I guess that for reading web pages or other documents vertical space is also more important than horizontal space. With Lenovo's new X210 they've introduced a further step in the wrong direction by switching from 16:10 to 16:9.

I did not understand seriously what kind of robustness you are talking about? Do glossy screens last longer than the matte ones? At least from the look of it, matte looks less fragile compared to glossy, although I am not sure if either of them is less fragile than other. Looking at matte is much easier to eyes. And as far as cleaning goes, cleaning the glossy one with towel will leave scratch everywhere! Isn't it?

It depends on the screen. A cheap glossy screen might scratch easy, but something like a macbook screen probably has a pretty good anti-scratch layer. Glossy screens tend to get dirty easier, but also clean a bit easier with readily available materials (e.g. paper towel + water).

It’s glass – not easy to scratch, at least compared to plastic. That’s at least true for all of Apple’s laptops except the Air.

I think glass is appropriate for touch screens – I wouldn’t really want to touch a plastic screen. I would never want a glossy laptop screen.

With a matte screen you have your thin matte layer directly over the screen. The matte layer itself offers no protection. So if something hits a little bit too hard against the screen, your screen will look like this: http://goo.gl/qSQxl

Cheap glossy screens have exactly the same issue, but more expensive glossy screens such as the ones in Apple's Macbooks or Lenovo's X1 laptop are basically a glass board right in front of the screen. So they are much more resistant against scratches and against other types of physical abuse.

Oh I get it. You meant the screen/cover which goes till the edges, as in MBP. Yeah, compared to that, matte sounds more touchable.

Though I believe it's been covered here before, and a little off topic, I totally agree that screen proportion is another huge issue.

It's for this reason that I can't bring myself to upgrade my Lenovo X61t. A 4:3 1440x1050 12.1" screen is vastly superior to anything available today. God, how I wish the new Lenovo tablets came in 4:3.

I am still running a Toshiba Portege m200 for the same reasons: a 4:3 1440x1050 12.1" screen, a discrete gfx card (32M Geforce 5200). It's getting a bit long in the tooth, as it is a 2005 computer, but two keyboards and three batteries later, it still runs as new.

God, how I wish there were new 12" laptops in 4:3.

The question this brings to mind for me: When will we be able to rotate laptop screens?

Obviously it's not a tech problem, and instead a matter of convincing someone this is a wanted feature. How do you go about such a campaign?

It's called "tablet convertible" and been there forever.

Amazingly, I hadn't heard of that... Thank you!

I love my X201 tablet. It's the first laptop I've been physically attracted to. It's my first ThinkPad, and Lenovo totally won me over. At $2000 retail, I was hoping they'd keep such a professional work tablet going. But alas, no, the X220 tablet is a massive loss:

- Glossy screens (choose between touch and reflections, or less reflections but no touch) - Loss of 32 pixels vertically, for even wider display. No thanks. - Wider body. The keyboard was already full-size, a wider body helps nothing. - New battery that pops the laptop up in the back, instead of the nice flush battery that gave you a spine to grab onto in tablet mode. - Loses backcompat with the X201 UltraBase docking station - And still no HDMI.

And yet, if I want Sandy Bridge (instant gain of 20% clock speed), what're my options?

I was really looking forward to buying an X220 when they came out. Now, I'll sit and wait for some other vendor to get a proper lightweight work tablet out.

I have the x220 tablet (arch linux on it) with the multitouch option and it's definitely matte. I can't compare it to the build quality of the x201, but I'm pleased with the performance and display. 10W power consumption with wifi on after a bit of powertop2.

I've had some questions about the matte screen and will post this here for reference. I've compared it to my matte cinema display and my glossy cinema display. It's not as matte as the 'actual' matte display, but the x220 with multitouch layer would definitely count as a matte screen in my book. I'll try to get a picture up on the arch wiki.

In my experience colours look more vivid on glossy screens than on matte ones. Although usually, especially for laptops that move around, I'd rather have the matte one. I wish every manufacturer offered both.

> I'm a programmer, I don't need horizontal space, but vertical space

Mostly agree, but my opinion on this matter was somewhat swayed after I started using :vsp in Vim on my 13" widescreen notebook (combined with a full-screen mode in iTerm). Not only had splitting the screen vertically right in the middle helped me recover the "lost" space, but it also forced me to wrap my code consistently to 80 characters, so now it looks/prints better. I guess the moral is that sometimes a bad thing can lead to something good.

On my 1920x1080 laptop screen, I can comfortably fit 3 emacs sessions side by side, all windows on the same process, all frequently further split one level horizontally. This is a lot of code. I generally only use 2 and have a shell on the left, which also comfortably fits, but if I need 3 I have it.

(I would generally consider the need to have 6 views of your source to get your job done a code smell, but it isn't always my code, and lately we've been doing some client/message-bus/server code where 6 starts to feel a bit constraining.)

Technically I'm still neutral on the emacs v. vim wars and they're both good editors. But looking around me, the vim users in my office really need to get better about buffer management. I'm sure vim can technically do everything emacs can do with buffers and splitting and windowing, but "nobody" seems to do it.

Ah! Another Emacs user who likes to spread 6 windows across a 1920-wide display. I knew I couldn't be the only one :-)

I use XEmacs with the 6x10 font, and can get three windows across, each 100 characters wide, all in the same frame (it takes a little fiddling to set up, but then I keep the session around a long time).

I use some revive mode code a friend wrote to revive my frame config.

Just like desktop-save, I do C-x S instead, and it saves all open frames, and the buffers they contain (no frame size or position though, afair).

C-x F to load in the rare event I need to restart emacs.

The code is at https://github.com/nunb/revive-mode-config

Run your shell inside emacs and you get the best of both worlds. I invariably have my third column running two to five terminals.

And when they show up in #vim, we try our best to help them. ;)

Same here (but C-x 3 in Emacs) - I am working on some code that mixes OCaml and C and it's nice to have the corresponding parts side-by side.

The problem with all these horizontal setups is that when looking at a screen for long periods of time, neck cricks are inevitable, and what's worse is that those cricks are just harbingers of future woe.

I strive to stay vertically and horizontally aligned to both my keyboard and my screen.

Even though I have a 1920x1080 monitor, I keep windows stacked in the center, and use multiple emacs frames rather than one frame C-x 3'd into multiple columns.

1440 pixels wide is about what I think is ideal at 1.5 feet of separation.

It seems to me that the reason for this shift is the same reason manufacturers ship their TVs set to overblown saturation and brightness: it looks good in the showroom.

As someone who has no office and works every day either from home or from a coffee shop on a laptop, the glossy screen is pretty annoying. It's not impossible to work on it and you do get used to it, but my next MacBook Pro will be the matte finish. It's more annoying that a matte finish costs $50 more.

The matte screen also comes with a grey bezel and not the sweet looking black one, FYI. Not a huge deal but it was a shock when I pulled it out of the box.

edit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/inju/3184631310/

I love it, the black/glass shows fingerprints like the devil. And it seems like it's of an impossibly small relevancy. I bought my MBP for the power, matte high-res screen and durability. The appearance of the bezel is probably the least important thing on the device.

What year/model MacBook Pro is that?

Mine is second to newest, officially the MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2010)

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4132

Isn't it brilliant how the process of selling a product has such negative impacts on the product itself.

Reminds me of the loudness wars...and then I become sad.

i think technically it is $150 more, since the only way to get the antiglare is with the hi-res option. definitely annoying.

Annoying? Unsurprising is appropriate too. Remember the $100 'black' tax? "Same model, specs, just in black, for only $100 more!" Apple knows that their fans might moan a little, but in the end will hand over their credit card regardless.

I don't remember that, and I owned a black MacBook.

hi-res version is TOTALLY worth it, however. Best $150 I spent, seriously, was the matte+hires screen

I don't really care about the price, but the fact that you can't get the 13" version with the antiglare option. I have my laptop in the backback all the time and the 15" and 17" versions are just too large and too heavy.

Indeed. Even more annoying is that adding high-res, anti-glare makes it a custom order for the 15". Apple Stores only stock the overkill $2599 15" version with the high-res matte screen.

> Indeed. Even more annoying is that adding high-res, anti-glare makes it a custom order for the 15". Apple Stores only stock the overkill $2599 15" version with the high-res matte screen.

Not true. Apple's retail stores often stock the high-end (high-res matte with the top-end i7) 15" model, so they can upsell. Not all stores will have it, and there's no guarantee (they typically only stock just a few at a time), but it's not online BTO only.

At least in the TV market, less glare is considered a feature. Modern plasmas are vastly better at toning down reflections that the old ones.

It is sad they didn't ask the manufacturers why they do that. One reason is that 'glossy' screens have higher contrast than 'matte' screens because off-axis light is reflected mostly off screen, but on a matte finish off axis light adds a 'glow' to the screen (which is a diffuse reflection rather than a specular reflection) and that glow gets counted against the 'black level' and the contrast.

Glossy screens in a darkened room perform demonstrably better in terms of contrast than matte screens.

Matte films are easy to come by and I'm rather surprised that given this sort of market research there isn't someone out there selling them by the boat load.

I've looked into getting one but all of the matte films I have seen have a 'shimmery' appearance to them. It looks like the surface grain of the film is not fine enough. Does anyone know of a good brand of film to use?

I used some 3M anti-glare film which I believe was this:

http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/Vikuiti1/BrandPr...

On a 44" LCD television. I got it through a window tinting contractor who had a relationship with 3M (they bought their window tinting film from them).

TVs have much larger pixel sizes than laptops, so it may not work on a laptop.

as aidenn0 mentions, I don't think a film that works well with a TV would necessarily work well with a laptop. The pixel sizes are different but also the viewing distance is much greater.

This 3M product says:

Anti-glare film, for example, incorporates a special roughened surface. When external light is reflected on this surface light is scattered across many different angles, giving the appearance of reduced reflection. Anti-reflection film takes a different approach and actually reduce the magnitude of the reflection by passing the light through specially engineered thin layers that reduce the amount of reflection, not just scatter it.

I'm not sure that makes any sense but it sounds like it's the right direction. I assume they mean they reduce the reflected light by absorbing it?

Anyway, thanks for the pointer.

It's commodity hardware. All the profit is in the add-ons, so to make money selling matte screens you'd probably be charging twice as much as Best Buy et al.

At twice the price, even the matte-lovers are going to choose glossy.

People who love matte tend to be the bargain shopping type already, only buying stuff on sale. The retail giants don't want those customers anyway, they want the people who get dazzled by the high contrast and will buy anything you tell them to.

Based on the title, I was hoping to learn from this article why the PC industry was out of touch, but I only learned that it was, which I already knew.

See also the almost complete takeover of 16:9 aspect ratios from 16:10 or 4:3, often with horrible 1366x768 resolution.

This. It kills me that the new top-of-the-line Thinkpad ultraportables have the same vertical resolution as my x40 from 5+ years ago. Not much incentive to upgrade...

This is because Lenovo has some obsession with buying the worst LCD panels available. Something about them not liking Korea or Japan suppliers, since the Chinese government is their largest shareholder.

I ordered a T61 back in the day, expecting a 1920x1200 LCD as specified. After decades of delay, I got my laptop, and they substituted a shitty 1440x900 screen instead. Not as ordered.

Thinkpads are still my favorite model of laptop for a variety of reasons, but their shitty fulfillment system and their shitty displays make a new Thinkpad purchase very unlikely. (In retrospect, they were just as bad when IBM owned them. Remember how the DVI ports couldn't do more than 1280x1024 because that is the maximum resolution that DVI is spec'd to handle. SIGH.)

I poked around and found a W500 thinkpad on the lenovo outlet site earlier this year. Too used to 16:10, 1920x1200 and do not to lug around a 17" laptop.

Kills me that business tools are being spec'ed for entertainment consumption.

Yes. Why will nobody listen to these complaints? Reiterating the point I made above, this is a big issue for me. Lawyers don't need horizontal resolution. They need vertical resolution. Hell, almost every lawyer in my office (a few hundred attorneys) has dual 4:3 screens ROTATED 90 DEGREES (3:4). 16:9 is going in exactly the wrong direction.

Why not take 16:9 and do portrait orientation?

Ever viewed one from more than 15 degrees off-axis? It starts looking strange really quickly.

(I realise these guys would get the same problem with the 3:4 arrangement, but let this at least be a warning to anybody eyeing up a potential vertical 16:9 setup.)

Get IPS panels. They have much better viewing angles and look fine when rotated 90 degrees.

The desktop setup was just an example, and you're right that we could rotate any screen, as long as the horizontal resolution (vertical resolution at 0 degrees) is at least 1024.

In the laptop world (per the article), it's difficult to do portrait orientation and still type. :)

This. Glossy I can deal with, but it's very annoying that it's difficult to find an affordable portable with good vertical resolution. Time I spend viewing web pages, coding, editing docs, using a terminal, etc and would benefit from increased vertical resolution: a lot. Time I spend watching movies or TV shows on my laptop: almost never.

It's all about what makes The Incredibles look the best on the showroom floor.

People don't buy the steak they buy the sizzle.

I don't care what the aspect ratio is, I can't move back from 1200 vertical lines. Dell offers some nice laptops in the 1920x1200, but they are expensive.

I also find 16:9 to be way more common than 16:10, such that all the high resolution 27" monitors I found were all 16:9!!! I prefer 16:10 fir the extra vertical space. More lines of code

Here's the blog post from Lenovo/Thinkpad as to why they switched to 16:9 screens: http://www.lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/2009/04/display-rati...

They say that PC makers have no say in the issue, screen manufacturers are all wide-screen these days.

Yet Apple had no problem sourcing 4:3 displays for their iPad? I guess when there's a will there's a way.

Apple has the money and volume to get whatever size they want.

Aren't iPads 16:10? Honestly curious, I can't tell if 4:3 was a typo or if there's something I'm missuing.

iPads are 4:3 (1024x768). Apple's laptops are still 16:10, but iMacs have unfortunately moved to 16:9.

Funnily enough, Daring Fireball just had a bit on the 4:3 aspect ratio today: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/05/24/tall-and-narrow

I don't think PC Pro readers count as an accurate sampling of people who buy PCs. And I must be in the minority that I like glossy screens. Colors are more vibrant, and it's not hard for me to avoid situations which cause glare.

Am I the only person here who doesn't care? I've used both a ThinkPad T61p (matte) and 15" MBP (glossy) regularly in the past 5 years. The only time I've had an issue with the glossy screen on my MBP is in full on sunshine. Even a matte screen would have been terribly washed out in that situation.

It's really not a big deal to most consumers. Most people don't even notice and will never use a laptop in direct sunlight.

PCPro is out of touch that their readers are not the average computer buyer.

Who is a more important market? 5 people that buy a laptop every 5 years, or 1 person that buys 1 laptop a year?

The person that goes to Best Buy to buy an "ultra value" laptop is not the same person that buys a $2000 laptop. And my guess is that $2000 laptops are more profitable to make than $100 laptops.

Individual enthusiast consumers are an incredibly small portion of the people who buy computers.

You're lucky if you can interest a computer manufacturer with the concerns of the consumer market as a whole, much less the tiny fraction known as enthusiasts. Most companies in hardware make their money on selling to people who buy a lot more than one machine at a time.

People always assume this and I can't help but wonder why? Just because the price is higher doesn't really say anything about the value of the spread between cost and price

I think that the visceral reaction to the terms "glossy" and "matte" could be a factor here. Glossy, by itself, is associated with cheap and shiny. Matte sounds understated and elegant.

If the survey had been done with a picture of a glossy screen, and a matte screen, and readers would have been asked to choose, I suspect the results could have been closer.

Personally, I much prefer glossy screens, both the glass-covered screen on my Macbook Pro as well as the polished LCD on my old Aspire netbook. In general, the higher contrast and more vibrant colours are a net win, and I find my eyes less strained looking at the display.

Video and computer games arguably look better on a glossy screen. A lot of people play games on their computers.

Even in the mac world, I can see why Apple have gone glossy even though for the HN-type crowd matte makes more sense.

I play FPSs very often, and a glossy screen really has no merits unless you are playing in the dark with no other light sources to reflect. I'd much prefer a matte display with good color reproduction.

Apparently PC Pro has a little trouble with the term "selection bias."

I dunno i really like the glass screen on my macbook pro. I dont mind the gloss at all. I would say I prefer it even. Offering a choice would be nice though.

I would prefer a choice for the same price, no matte surcharge

What I don't get is, on a display like an iMac where the front surface of the display is glass, why doesn't Apple offer an optical coating (i.e., anti-reflection coating) option?

Optical coating used to be standard on high-end CRT monitors. It seems like the right solution here as well. I wouldn't miss the matte finish nearly so much if I could get the glossy screen coated.

I was looking at an HP laptop online last night and saw it has a "Brightview" screen. This description of it, apparently from the company that makes the screens, suggests that, while glossy, it is also anti-reflective.

Does anyone know if that means it is more like a matte screen than a regular glossy screen or not really? http://www.screentekinc.com/hp-compaq-brightview-lcd-screens...

It doesn't seem to be a PC problem, it seems to be a laptop problem. My lcds at home (and my TV) are all matte, its only my laptop (mac) that is glossy.

Isn't laptop a PC? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_computer

Bonus irony considering Apple basically mainstreamed the personal computer revolution. Now they're trying as hard as they can to distance themselves from the term.

I don't know about y'all but I got the glossy screen on purpose, it's damn near impossible to use a laptop in sunlight with a matte screen.

My last (windows) laptop purchase, in February 2011, was actually made easier by the fact that only two manufacturers (Dell and Lenovo) offered matte/anti-glare screens on high-end developer laptops. It was actually the default on the Lenovo W701DS I ended up buying.

Yes, I had pretty much the same situation. I finally got a T510.

Previously I had been using an antiglare filter, which works OK but is impossible to apply without leaving bubbles in.

I hate glossy finishes :(

I've used both on a Mac. When Apple started offering both, I agonized but finally opted for glossy and haven't looked back. My preference on most things is matte - I always opted for matte when people printed photos from something called "film."

Here's why glossy screens are better, for me anyway:

1) It's better in sunlight. Counterintuitive I know, but it's far, far better. Matte screens diffract light and render the screen unreadable. Glossy screens can be made visible either passively (in very strong light) or actively if the screen is bright enough (as many now are.)

2) Glare is controllable and not diffused on a glossy screen. With a matte screen, glare manifests as blobs, and spread across the screen. With a glossy screen, glare is localized and easily defeated by repositioning the screen.

3) Matte makes screens less bright. It's a translucent filter, so of course it reflects and absorbs light.

4) Matte filters can be added, but a matte screen can't be made glossy.

The real solution: get rid of awful overhead florescent lighting. Ok, not that easy for most of you, but I think Steve Jobs probably wants those gone as much as he wants Flash gone. Any word on lighting at Apple?

It's better in sunlight.

I was initially skeptical; after using an iPad outdoors I found it hard to believe matte could be worse! But some quick research seems to confirm your point.

Does anyone know of a solution to using screens outdoors? I hear the Kindle is good, but I'm thinking color screen.

http://www.mirasoldisplays.com/ Interferometric Modulator MEMS screens are about to enter mass production.

A related patent: sun-lit screens: http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/03/25/apple-patent-watch-sun-...

My friend recently got a Sunbook, which he loves to use outdoors: http://www.cloversystems.com/SunBook.htm (their website is horrific, but the product is decent).

It's essentially a netbook with a special screen that can can work in both daylight and indoor light. In the sun, most of the colors wash away and it becomes a mostly black&white screen. But you can read it perfectly easily (similar to eink, but I don't think it actually uses eink, despite what their PR claims).

Re: #3... This is not an issue if your screen has sufficient brightness. I got a Dell u2410 and it's matte and seriously bright

Same with my HP LP2475w.

Even if your screen is sufficiently bright, it's still a waste of power and dimmer than it otherwise would be. But sure, this can be mitigated with a brighter screen.

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