polarized glasses and your PPC

[discordian]

Have you ever had any trouble reading your display while wearing polarized (sun)glasses?

Just curious as I bought my first pair in many years this weekend - I've been wearing non-polarized Oakleys for better than 10 years. Got a pair of Ray Bans.

I lose some color but it's perfectly readable.
turn it on its side and it's normal.

cool effect.

[tzirbel]

No problems with my pair of bolle sunglasses. My watch and mp3 player are almost unreadable though. The colours seem to be a tad bleached out but it's ok.

[Damion Chaplin]

Yeah, you will notice this effect with almost every LCD you may look at, including digital watches, calculators, cell phones and PDAs. This is because polarization cancels the vertical light wavelengths hitting your eye (this reduces road glare and reflection on water). Turning your head to the side makes the glasses cancel the horizontal waves, so the vertical wavelengths are let in. Try it next time your looking at water.

Just in case you were wondering. :wink:

[JustinGTP]

Polarized sunglasses were created to stop the glare whilst driving. When in a downtown situation, the light rays reflect off the high-rise buildings and now become horizontal light rays (they were originally vertical light rays).

They tried creating polarized sunglasses that blocked out both Vertical and Horizontal light rays. Do you know what they created?

Sunglasses in which no light came through the lenses. You couldn't see a thing. Smart! :roll:

Just in case you were wondering.

[Dave Beauvais]

I don't notice any problems viewing my hx4700 in the car while wearing my polarized sunglasses, but the LCD odometer and clock in the car's dashboard are solid black unless I tilt my head slightly to the side. My previous car had a mechanical odometer and an LED clock, so this wasn't a problem. It's still annoying to not be able to simply glance down, but I've gotten used to it by now. Certainly not worth the effort to tear down the dash and remove the polarizing filter from the LCDs. ;)

[M_R]

Another aside:

The tinting of many windshields is also polarized, put on the glasses and tilt your head and you will notice that as the axis of the glasses approaches the axis of the windshield it gets noticably darker (as your head approaches sideways).

You can also use polarized lenses to observe stress and strain locations in materials, this is an emerging area but now being used as a quick check in buildings and bridges.