One of our hardware partners, Fairchild SDS, have just got hold of an extremely bright LED backlit LCD panel. Taking advantage of some rare winter sunshine, we took it outside to see if it really is any better than a normal LCD panel.

The quick answer is yes! If you look at the pictures (click on thumbnails for larger versions), you can easily see how much brighter the 10 inch high brightness panel is than a standard desktop screen - and we didn't even have a chance to turn the brightness all the way up on the new screen before the sun went in!

Indoors, the desktop screen is more than bright enough and with brightness set to 100% the display looks completely washed out. Take the desktop screen outside and even under cloud the screen is barely visible - as soon as the sun comes out, the display completely disappears. With the high brightness, sun-readable panel, the colours stand out without looking too washed out when indoors. When outside under clound, the screen really shines, with high colour moving content jumping out at you.

Once the sun is out, if you are standing directly in front of the screen it does tend to disappear in glare due to the matt finish on the top layer of the LCD panel - a 'shiny' covering might help with this. Moving slightly to either side and the display re-appears and is easily visible and it has a good viewing angle too, with no colour skewing through the whole 180 degrees.

A normal desktop LCD panel emits somewhere in the region of 250-300 nits (or one candela per square meter). This high brightness panel emits well over 1000 nits and by using high efficiency LEDs for the backlight, it only draws twice as much power, despite being four times brighter.

This panel isn't cheap - it's 2-3 times the price of a standard 10inch LCD panel. But for outdoor Digital Signage these panels give an outstanding, vibrant picture, visible from virtually all angles even in bright sunshine. Whilst the price is still way too high for these panels to become common place in consumer laptop/netops, in the Digital Signage market, being able to advertise to customers outdoors is a real bonus, so expect to see these in a shop window or even on a street corner in the very near future.