There’s a small but vocal subset of laptop users who can’t stand glossy displays. While they look bright and vibrant on a store shelf, these screens tend to reflect glare and turn into mirrors when you try to use them outdoors or even in an office or coffee shop too close to a window. But over the past few years only a handful of notebook makers have consistently produced computers with matte displays.
Samsung has put out a number of netbooks with matte screens in recent years. Now it looks like Asus is committing to using matte screens in most of its upcoming netbooks. Les Numeriques reports that the company’s upcoming Eee PC 1025C and 1025CE netbooks will have matte displays. Asus won’t replace the glossy screens in all of its existing netbooks, but as they reach the end of their product life cycle it looks like they may be replaced with mini-laptops with matte screens.
This won’t be the first time Asus has dabbled with matte displays. The Eee PC 1001P, for instance, had a non-glossy display as well as some Eee PC 1005 models such as the 1005PX and 1005HA-M. But most of the company’s recent 10 inch laptops have had glossy screens.
Interestingly, while Les Numeriques reports that all of the upcoming Asus netbooks will have matte screens, the $200 Eee PC X101 I got to play with recently appears to have a glossy screen.
I should also point out that while matte displays don’t reflect as much glare as glossy screens, they can still be difficult to view outdoors in direct sunlight. They’re no replacement for a Pixel Qi or Liquavista sunlight readable display which can use ambient lighting.
via Netbook News
wise move! Asus is trying hard to keep the momentum of the netbook market they created almost four years ago. There is still space for the original idea: cheap and little machines for keep on compunting everywhere.
In these years many things have been tried, like glossy displays, great Hard Disks, bigger sizes,… but, apart from the 10′ display and more efficent processors, things come back where my old eee901 (matte display, tiny SSD) is.
Pixel Qi display may be the best for outdoor viewing, but until that company manages to produce enough units of its transflexive displays, PC makers will have to make tablets and laptops with other available options.
I wonder why no big name companies are interested in building sunlight readable displays.
Nice, I can finally find a replacement for my old eee 1000!!!
They don’t have to be… but I suspect they will be. The demo units I saw in January had glossy displays.
At last! Any chance of this on the Slider do you reckon, or do touch screens need to be glossy for some reason?
Because of the glass layer capacitive screens tend to be glossy and making them matte raises the cost. So unlikely to see matte screens for capacitive touch screen systems.