26. Brightness And Contrast: Distribution Of Brightness And Contrast, Continued

Note the tunnel shape of the Acer Aspire's and Toshiba Qosmio's brightness plot and the more hill shaped plots of the other notebooks. The former plots signify lower brightness on the left and right of the display. The latter plots represent lower contrast at all edges of the display. Generally, if a display is going to show uneven contrast it is better that it show lower values on the left and right than on the left and right as well as the top and bottom. Tunnels are better than hills.

You'll remember that the HP Pavilion was the minimal brightness range champ with a score of 55. This and its somewhat tunnel shaped brightness plot give it one of the better uniformity of brightness scores. Finally, the Sony VAIO's hill shaped brightness plot is the most disturbing in that brightness drops off much more sharply on the left side of the display than the right side.

As for uniformity of contrast, even though its plot looks a bit like a paper airplane taking off, the Toshiba has the most even distribution of the five notebooks. The Acer, Fujitsu, HP and Sony all tend toward lower contrast at the top of their displays. The Acer and HP suffer a little less from this phenomenon.

So, based on our objective tests the Toshiba, HP and Acer take first, second and third place. We also did some subjective evaluations of the displays before the objective tests. Surprisingly findings from both sets of tests paralleled each other quite well. We ranked the Toshiba's display as the most viewable in our subjective tests. It rendered the best and most vibrant moving images from DVDs and TV feeds. Subjectively, the HP came in second and the Acer took third place. Despite its high resolution and more powerful graphics processor the Fujitsu failed to impress. The Sony XBrite coating is very glossy and manifested the most noticeable glare and reflections. The Toshiba's less glossy screen coating along with its decent brightness and contrast distributions helped it make a better showing than other, brighter displays.