Hanover, April 23:

More and more glossy laptops are being released into the market, and many of them suffer from distracting glare.

“That is a development that we have been observing for around a year,” says Joerg Wirtgen from the Hanover-based computer magazine ‘c’t’. The flaw is particularly prevalent in laptops for private users. These monitors have not shown up in the business realm as yet. “These displays offer powerful, eye-popping colours. This means they look very good at first glance,” says Wirtgen, but are difficult to see in some lighting conditions.

Glossy laptop monitors that lack sufficiently powerful background lighting are only usable in darkened rooms. There are a few tricks to identify mirroring displays. One warning sign is if light reflections are distinctly visible on the screen, instead of appearing only diffusely.

The trend is particularly visible in the magazine’s recent test of laptops with new dual-core processors. These stand out particularly for their comparably low energy consumption.

The advantages of the second processor core were particularly visible when several programmes were running simultaneously.