At 06:45 PM 2/3/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>I have just tested a small instrumentation project (which Sid is familiar
>with) that uses individual 1" tall 7 seg LED's from Lumex. I did all I could
>to maximize the brightness - even cheating with the current to the point of
>knowingly having shortened the part's life span.
>Indoors, in any lighting condition I can reasonably produce, the brightness
>is fantastic.
>Outdoors, it's a real dog, only clearly readable in shade or indirect
>sunlight.
>I have tried tinted plastic of various densities and at varying distances
>from the display surface - all to no avail.
>The only thing I have left to try is to increase the mux freq a bit, but am
>now questioning how much difference this CAN make.
>
>I have seen LED displays in outdoor environments, and with the latest
>generation of ultrabrights available I would expect more...
>Am I missing something, or should I just ditch the LED idea and go to a
>different display technolgy???

Chris- there's a *filter* technology that uses what are effectively
louvers to permit light to only enter the display when it is close to normal
to the filter surface. This is in addition to the color filtering, which
cuts out another whole bunch of light. The end result is fantastically
good, but unfortunately the price is fantastically high- maybe $50+ for
a front panel graphic overlay using it. It's aimed at cockpit displays
and such like. I think I saw it at an SID conference some years back,
can't recall the name of the company, sorry.

Best regards,

Spehro Pefhany --"it's the network..."            "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

--
http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different
ways.  See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.