Polarized sunglasses affects how the iPad is viewed in portrait mode

Are you a fan of polarized sunglasses? If you are, we’re not sure if you’ve noticed this but apparently the new iPad’s display turns black when viewed in portrait mode with polarized sunglasses. This was discovered and reported by Jason D. O’Grady of ZDNet and apparently he is not the only one to experience this oddity. According to DisplayMate’s Ray Soneira, this is due to the “extinction” set by the display’s manufacturer and is supposedly present in all of Apple’s iPad. Oddly enough Apple chose to address this issue on the iPhone, and supposedly other manufacturers have also addressed this issue on their tablets.

Granted it’s not a make-or-break situation when considering Apple’s new iPad, but it should be noted that you could experience such an issue should you wear polarized sunglasses. According to Ray Soneira:

“Using polarized sunglasses all iPads go black in Portrait mode. Other displays go black in Landscape mode. Much better is for the manufacturer to set the extinction at 45 degrees so the display looks good in both Portrait and Landscape modes. The Motorola Xoom behaves this way. Best of all, with compensating films this effect can go away almost entirely.

The iPhone 4 and Samsung Galaxy Tab have no extinction at any angle (just a small color shift). The effect should only apply to LCDs because they use polarized light internally. So OLEDs also should not show any such extinction effect.

The Nokia Lumia 900 behaves this way, which is very nice, but the Samsung Galaxy S has a surprising 45 degree extinction. Of course all of this should only matter outdoors, although movie stars and other people also wear sunglasses indoors, so be careful…”

Pretty interesting. Any iPad owners out there experience this particular issue? In the mean time check out the video below for the rather fascinating demonstration.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Tablets
Tags: iPad