Backlight

Why was the HP 360LX the only unit to have a white backlight ? Or was there others I do not know about ?
To my eyes its night and day better compared to the green backlight of most.

Thoughts ?

-Walt B

That's easy to answer.

Think of a color display...it's made by mixing 3 primary colors. Red, Green, and Blue. In the early days of monochrome...Red was rejected right away. It is a difficult color for many men to see as we tend to be color deficient in the Red range of Light. Blue was considered too harsh. Studies show it could cause headaches with extended use. Green was right in the middle of the frequency range for human...hence Green became the right choice.

So why not white?

Green became the decacto standard background because it is because the natural color of the liquid crystal material used, at least at human-comfortable temperature ranges. In other words...it was cheaper to produce. Since LCD screens in that era used a single CCRT, normally side mounted, the light penetrated the liquid crystal display more evenly than the white did which caused a brighter screen closest to the tube and duller further out.

Some people even suggest that during this time...monochrome green computer monitors were the standard before Amber came into popularity...hence familiarity with existing displays.

By the way...I own 2 Aero 1500 pocketpcs. They are identical except in the LCD. One is greenish...one is grayish.

I love the gray scale device...detest the green scale device. I took them apart...both have standard white CCFL tubes of similar intensity.

But the lcds are different. The carry the same part number but one is labelled with a Taiwan mark...the other with a Hong Kong mark. Different suppliers perhaps? A change due to manufacturing date? Who knows...

Prolonged exposure to blue lights, as Rich mentions, is bad for your visual centre. It's higher power. Prolonged exposure to red light, especially at night can be equally problematic for melatonin production. As white light is RG and B light together, it is higher energy even still, thus likely to have an impact on battery life. My assumption is that for the 320 (not the 300 as it didn't have a backlight) the engineers were trying to save battery life. The 340 was just HP clearing inventory of the 320 units once CE 2 arrived. Meaning that the next product out of the gate was the 360. Consumer feedback on the 300 was poor due to the lacking backlight and the #1 complaint about the 320 was the poor contrast with the green backlight. So presumably they either sacrificed the battery life in the 360 or found lower power backlight options over those few months at a slightly higher price to throw in the 360.

A side by side battery life test could be interesting to see if someone was bored.

Yeah Id like to see a side by side of a 320LX and 360LX battery life. Im getting 12+ hours with these Lithium batteries I got in my 360LX. The white light is sooooo much easier to see for me and my 360 units (both even the broken one) do not make a high pitch noise like the green backlights do.

-Walt

Thanks folks, always interested to see how other people feel about some of these things ;-)