AFB Tech has launched the Small Visual Display (SVD) Database, which contains the data collected using the AFB Tech optics lab for over 200 products. This accomplishment marks the successful completion of the project's three-year grant from the Department of Education. In the future, AFB Tech will continue to seek funding to expand the optics lab's functionality, add new products to the database, and enhance the usability of the data collected for both consumers and industry.
Navigation Features
The SVD Database is an extension to the existing AFB Product Database, so if you have had any experience with the existing product database, the SVD Database will feel very familiar. The following link points to the homepage of the SVD Database, which has links to the different ways you can browse through the whole AFB Product Database: </not-found?url=http%3A//www.afb.org/prodmain.asp>. If you're interested only in the products with data from the SVD products, select the "Browse Products by Small Visual Display" link. After activating that link, you will be given a list of categories that contain SVD products. At this time, that list consists of the following categories:
- Mobile Phones and Related Software (both smart phones and feature phones),
- Personal Health Products (blood glucose meters, blood pressure monitors, heart rate monitors, etc.),
- E-Book Readers/Players (Amazon Kindle, Barnes and Noble Nook, etc.),
- Personal Media Players (mp3 players, iPod Touch, etc.),
- Home Appliances (microwaves, alarm clocks, GPS devices),
- Office Equipment (copiers, calculators, VOIP phones),
- and Digital Cameras.
Each category name is a link that will take you to a page with a list of products within that category, which I will call the category view.
Category View
This page contains a table of all of the devices with SVDs in a selected category. The top of the page contains a description of the category followed by the number of products it contains. Below the category description is the product table for the selected category, which is the easiest way to compare products in a category. The table contains the product name, which is also a link to the product profile view for that product (to be explained in the next section), and a list of important specifications about the device. These specifications include the following:
- Color Display: This indicates whether or not the display can produce different colors.
- Darkroom Contrast: For backlit or emissive displays, this is the contrast in a completely dark room. This is important for determining the highest possible contrast the display will have for the information it is displaying.
- Display Technology: Examples include Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) (the most common type), Light Emitting Diode (LED), Organic LED (OLED), or E-Paper.
- Main Font Height: This is the size of the font representing the information that we consider to be the most important on the display based on the device's purpose. For example, on a blood pressure monitor, this number would be the height of the blood pressure reading.
- Office Room Lighting Contrast, no Glare: This is a very important contrast measurement because it represents the amount of contrast that a display exhibits in typical office lighting conditions when there are no specular (or mirror-like) reflections. For purely reflective displays (displays that don't emit their own light), this number will be the same across all no-glare conditions.
- SVD Manufacturer: This is the company that designs and manufactures the device.
These columns in the table are sortable if you have JavaScript turned on. To sort the table, click the column headers to toggle between sorting by ascending or descending order for that column. If you're using Window Eyes or an older screen reader, you may need to use the link on the page for Window Eyes Users. This will open a list of links outside of the table that you can use to sort the table. If you still have issues with the table, there is a link to totally disable JavaScript in the table, but the table will no longer be sortable.
Product Profile View
Clicking on the name of the product in the table will take you to the product profile view for that product. This is a very simple page which lists all of the specifications available in the database for that particular product. In addition to the fields in the category view table, the product profile view also contains the following fields:
- Adjustable Brightness: This field reads "Yes" if a device can adjust the level of brightness output by the display.
- Reversible Polarity: This field reads "Yes" if a device can display a negative of the colors on screen or swap the color scheme from dark characters on a light background to light characters on a dark background.
- Touch Screen: This field reads "Yes" if the device has a touch screen interface.
- Display Height/Width: These two fields are the dimensions of the visible display (not the whole device) measured in inches.
Additionally, there is a set of contrast values corresponding to dim lighting, office room lighting, and sunlight conditions for both glare (specular included) and no glare (specular excluded) conditions. These values are to help give you an idea of how the display will perform in different lighting conditions. For example, if you have a mobile phone with 99% contrast in a dimly lit room but only 20% contrast in sunlight conditions, then it's safe to assume that the phone will be easy to read indoors and difficult to read outdoors.
Future additions
AFB Tech hopes to keep improving the database to make the information more relevant and easier to understand. There are plans to add photographs to the product profile pages, and there will continue to be updates as the optics lab develops new measurements.
Rating Scale
One particularly important piece of data that will be added to the database is a rating scale that the optics lab has developed and is currently testing. This rating scale, which will initially be applied only to blood glucose meters, will condense the contrast, reflection, and text size data collected into one (or possibly two) easy to understand ratings. These ratings will be closer to a holistic evaluation of a display's quality and performance instead of a series of complicated contrast values. Ideally, once the lab has finalized how the rating scale will work, the rating will be a number (potentially from 1 to 10) that represents how readable a display is for most people.
Disclaimer
These measurement methods have been developed using industry standards and tested extensively. The optics lab uses several methods of reducing errors in the measurements, such as the use of the replica-mask method to mitigate veiling glare errors within the instrumentation. We do acknowledge, however, that it is possible for mistakes to be made during the measurement process that can result in inaccurate measurements. Therefore, if you see a measurement that doesn't make sense or that you think is wrong, please let us know, and we will review the case. It is also possible that some data (font size information, for example) may be missing for some devices until we are able input that information into the database.
If you represent a company that makes a product in the database and are interested in how we did the measurements of your device(s), please contact us.
If you have any comments about the database, suggestions on how to make it better, or issues accessing the information, please e-mail William Reuschel (wreuschel@afb.net).
