It's very hard to achieve even 2:1 real contrast ratios with color LCDs, because "white" light passing through color filters loses 80-90% of visible luminance (

It's very hard to achieve even 2:1 real contrast ratios with color LCDs, because "white" light passing through color filters loses 80-90% of visible luminance (eg each green filter only covers ~30% of the area and passes <50% of lambertian daylight). This means the reflections off the front of the screen need to be less than 5-10% of ambient light. It's even worse for anything other than white or for specular light. Almost all LCDs are made trans-flective for this reason. If you went with B/W LCDs you can improve this by ~3x and might achieve 5:1 contrast with good antireflective surfaces. That's what you see in car LCDs.