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Historically, traditional matte screen finishes exhibited poor optical qualities by scattering ambient light, which tended to wash out colors. This scattering p
by LeoPanthera 1y ago
Historically, traditional matte screen finishes exhibited poor optical qualities by scattering ambient light, which tended to wash out colors. This scattering process also affected the light from individual pixels, causing it to refract into neighboring pixels.
This reduced overall image quality and caused pixel-fine details, such as small text, to appear smeary on high-density LCDs. In contrast, well-designed glossy displays provide a superior visual experience by minimizing internal refraction and reflecting ambient light at high angles, which reduces display pollution. Consequently, glossy screens often appear much brighter, blacks appear blacker without being washed out, colors show a higher dynamic range, and small details remain crisper. High-quality glass glossy displays are often easy to use even in full daylight, and reflections are manageable because they are full optical reflections with correct depth, allowing the user to focus on the screen content.
Apple's "nano texture" matte screens were engineered to solve the specific optical problems of traditional matte finishes, the washed-out colors and smeary details. But they cost more to make. The glossy option is still available, and still good.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago[flagged]
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- kergonath 1y ago> What exactly are they "engineering" here? The coatings, which do matter quite a bit when you are optimising for some durability/optical quality tradeoff. Glass covers make screens more durable, but imply internal and external reflections. Laminated screens on glass panes solves the internal reflections and improve transmission, but do not help with glare and external reflections. Those can be improved by texturing the glass, but at the cost of diffraction and smearing, leading to a decrease in effective resolution. Unless the texture becomes small enough, but then you need it to be durable enough to avoid being wiped or damaged by things that might come into contact with the screen. It turns out that there is a lot more than the bottom layers that matter in a display. You can see all these problems being solved in succession when looking at the evolution of Apple’s displays over the years (and others’, but it is much easier to find information about the good and bad sides of any Apple product). It’s fascinating, actually. [edit] add the issue of oils on the human skin and you have do deal with oleophobic coatings for touch screens, which is another very important factor to consider. In addition to how the touch sensors are integrated.
- kakacik 1y agoSomebody drank its portion of cool aid for sure. There is that little detail that glossy screens needed absolutely perfect conditions in front of them to not reflect literally whole world, making resulting visuals often subpar to matte. I have never, ever been in work conditions in past 20 years that didn't manifest this in annoying and distracting way. I haven't seen a single display that ever overcame that properly for long term work. Sure, phones use it but they increased luminosity to absurd level to be readable, not a solution I prefer for daily long work. I admit there are corner cases of pro graphics where it made sense (with corresponding changes to environment) but I am not discussing this here.
- seemaze 1y agoDo you prefer glossy paper work? glossy book pages? glossy construction documents? The preference for a non-reflective surface for the relaying of dense information has been established for decades. You know what's glossy? Movie posters and postcards.
- dmitrygr 1y agonon-reflective surfaces you cite have pigments on TOP. screens have depth causing parallax and light spreading. Your point would be valid if screens were paper-thin and image pixels came out the very surface
- asdff 1y agoYou'd need a jewelers loupe to appreciate parallax and spreading. Not a real problem in general use.
- dmitrygr 1y agoi use a matte screen protector on my iphone. without it, i can see pixels. with it, i cannot. no loupe, just my nearsighted eyes
- asdff 1y agoYou can see actual pixels on a retina iphone? That is remarkable eyesight. I could do it on old non retina iphones but not on retina models.
- dmitrygr 1y agoKind of a cool thing about being nearsighted. Without glasses, I can get very close to things and still focus on them, i get to see very small details.
- elliottkember 1y agoPaper, books, and construction documents all use reflected and not refracted light.
- zdragnar 1y ago> High-quality glass glossy displays are often easy to use even in full daylight, I guess Apple cheaped out on their glossy displays, because I definitely didn't care for mine in full daylight
- BoorishBears 1y agoGlossy vs matte has started to matter less as the peak brightness goes up. When your screen can do 1,600 nits, daylight isn't as much of a problem
- asdff 1y agoYeah this m3 pro isn't really doing 1600 nits. Marginally brighter than my 2012. To get to actual 1600 nits you need to use scripts. https://github.com/SerjoschDuering/macbook_1600nits https://github.com/SerjoschDuering/macbook_1600nits Not sure the impacts to display health or battery running the screen full bore like this.
- BoorishBears 1y agoI use Lunar and have used it on my Pro Display XDR and every MBP with XDR I've owned with 0 issues.
- heavyset_go 1y agoI'd rather not blow my battery budget on fighting the sun for visibility.
- BoorishBears 1y agoI tend to do outdoor things outdoors, so occasionally cranking up brightness is not an issue. I'd much rather do that than to have a granier screen with worse viewing angles all the time I'm not in direct sunlight, so next time around I'll be back on glossy.
- asdff 1y agoI used to have a 2006 macbook pro with the matte screen. It was glorious. None of these issues were present or really noticeable. Maybe you'd notice it in lab setting but not irl. Kind of like 120hz and 4k; just useless to most peoples eyes at the distances people actually use these devices. I've only owned matte external monitors as well and again, no issues there. The glossy era macbooks otoh have been a disaster in comparison imo. Unless your room is pitch black it is so easy to get external reflections. Using it outside sucks, you often see yourself more clearly than the actual contents on the screen. Little piece of dust on the screen you flick off becomes a fingerprint smear. The actual opening of the lid on the new thin bezel models means the top edge is never free of fingerprints. I'm inside right now and this M3 pro is on max brightness setting just to make it you know, usable, inside. I'm not sure if my screen is actually defectively dim or this is just how it is. Outside it is just barely bright enough to make out the screen. Really not much better than my old 2012 non retina model in terms of outdoor viewing which is a bit of a disappointment because the marketing material lead me to believe these new macbooks are extremely bright. I guess for HDR content maybe that is true but not for 99% of use cases.
- BoorishBears 1y agoTo each their own but I have a matte M4 Pro and I don't like it, and the screen is noticeably worse than my glossy M2 Pro. There's a graininess to the screen that makes it feel a little worse at all times, meanwhile I never had a problem in daylight just cranking brightness into the XDR range using Lunar. It's especially noticeable on light UIs, where empty space gets an RGB "sparkle" to it. I noticed the same thing when picking out my XDR years ago, so it seems like they never figured out how to solve it.
- daymanstep 1y ago120Hz is absolutely a noticeable improvement over 60Hz. I have a 60Hz iPhone and a 120Hz iPhone and the 60Hz one is just annoying to use. Everything feels so choppy.
- dontlaugh 1y ago4K too, at anything over 15” or so. I’m always baffled people insist otherwise.
- Keyframe 1y agoYou make it sound like what they, according to you, tried to do was a success. One look at nano texture screen is enough for a resounding no.
- andrei_says_ 1y ago> High-quality glass glossy displays are often easy to use even in full daylight… Not my experience in lit environments. Looking at a mirror-like surface trying to distinguish content from reflections is exhausting. Unless I blast my eyes at full brightness which is more exhausting.
- christophilus 1y agoTo each their own. Matte screens always have a massive smudge in bright light and look terrible and grainy in the dark. I can’t stand them.
- amluto 1y agoAll of what you say is kind of sort of true in the sense that, if you are in a room with lots of off-axis light hitting your screen and darkness behind you and you yourself are not brightly lit, then the glossy screen is better. And the glossy screen is certainly sharper. But if there’s a window or something bright behind you, the specular reflection from the glossy and generally not anti reflective coated screen can be so bright and so full of high frequency details that it almost completely obscures the image. And since I might be trying to work involving text in a cafe as opposed to doing detailed artistic work in a studio, I would much prefer the matte surface.
- lobochrome 1y ago[flagged]
- galagawinkle489 1y agoIt is well written and that makes you think it was written by AI? AI doesn't write as well as that anyway.
- LeoPanthera 1y agoHi! I don't think I have any way of convincing you, but I'm not an AI. Also, randomly accusing people of being an AI is fairly offensive, in case that's not obvious.
- tomhow 1y agoPlease don't do this here. If a comment seems unfit for HN, please flag it and email us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can have a look.
- LtWorf 1y agoI have a feeling that you've never actually seen a matte screen.
- cycomanic 1y agoIf all that is true, why do professional photography monitors pretty much exclusively have matte finishes. Same for monitor used by video, CAD or 3d professionals. You guys need to stop reading apple advertisement material and take it for gospel just because it has some fancy scientific words in it.
- zenmac 1y agoMatte is always being the fancier option in Photography paper, glossy photograph just looks cheap.
- WesolyKubeczek 1y agoInteresting, given that in the older days of analog dark room development, you had to use a special kind of paper and heat-press it against a polished surface when drying to get a glossy photo. I always thought matte photos were more readable, but glossy used to be more wow and have “deeper blacks”.
- DANmode 1y agoColor distortion and/or glare not worth marginal gains that cheap displays rely on the gloss for.
- aqula 1y agoIs there any write up on the tech behind nano texture? What makes them better than traditional matte screens?