While a good balance between performance and long battery life makes the GD8000 an efficient companion for work in the field, it's the computer's display that makes it suitable for outdoor duty and a pleasure to use. Like all General Dynamics Itronix machines, the GD8000 uses the patent-pending DynaVue display technology that combines a number of optical properties to minimize reflection while preserving contrast, facilitating exceptional viewability under almost all lighting conditions. With DynaVue, users can work outdoors and even in the brightest sunshine and direct sunlight. The display takes on a bit of a greenish tint, but you can easily see the screen and you can use it for work. In the past, working outdoors with a notebook computer meant hunting for a shady spot in the hopes of being able to see the screen well enough. That is just not a problem with the GD8000. You get full outdoor viewability and you can use the computer anywhere and anyplace.
DynaVue makes clever use of optics and physics that affects the way light is reflected or absorbed. When I first saw DynaVue I was blown away by how well it works. The unretouched picture on the right, taken with a 14.5-megapixel Canon G10 digital camera, shows the GD8000 directly facing the California morning sun. The screen does not wash out and remains clearly visible, with excellent contrast. Digital cameras often have problems duplicating what the human eye sees when it comes to polarized and optically treated displays, and they also tend to over-emphasize blue; in reality the GD8000 screen looked even better to the eye than what the camera captured. It was also very sharp and rendered colors far better than in the picture.
The pictures below are a side-by-side comparison between the 13.3-inch DynaVue GD8000 screen on the left and the standard 12.1-inch display used in the "Hummer" version of an older GD-Itronix GoBook VR-1. Both have touch-screens and both screens work very well indoors, but outdoors you can clearly see the difference DynaVue makes. Again, the GD8000 screen actually looks better, more vibrant, and far less blueish than what the camera captured, but the images accurately depict the difference in glare, reflection and contrast between the older model's display and the GD8000's DynaVue screen. For a detailed description of DynaVue, click here.
Comparison: Conventional Display Versus DynaVue
The first picture below compares the two displays in bright early afternoon daylight, mid-May, in a shaded location. The GD8000 display with DynaVue is perfectly readable with some minor reflections on its glossy surface. The older non-DynaVue display's anti-glare coating shows almost no reflections, but the anti-glare coating diffuses the light and turns the display milky.
In the picture below, the two machines are in direct sunlight, but the image was taken from an angle so that the sun would not directly reflect into the camera. The GD8000's DynaVue display remains very readable and now looks like a reflective TFT. The older display's matte surface diffuses the light so much that the screen becomes virtually unreadable.
Some three years after its 2006 introduction, the General Dynamics Itronix DynaVue is still about as good as it currently gets. DynaVue is no longer alone in facilitating sunlight-viewable displays, but we haven't seen anything better either. There is room for improvement as in bright sunlight even DynaVue is still not close to looking like a magazine or book page, and at times you need to move or tilt the display to avoid reflections. It is still remarkable that DynaVue makes such good outdoor viewability possible even with a touchscreen. Touchscreens usually add reflection and degrade the image, something General Dynamics Itronix successfully warded off by treating and optimizing every single surface separately.
While DynaVue impresses, the LCD's vertical viewing angle doesn't. It is wide horizontally, albeit with a change in colors (gray turns sort of yellow), but quite narrow vertically, with the chromatic shifts that hopefully will be gone from all LCDs soon and forever.
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