He explains that “a good example of that is
the Navico plotters, like Simrad NSE and the
Lowrance HDS, as well as the Raymarine E-
Series plotters. They all have TurboView,
Navionics’ newly developed charting software
engine. They’re extremely fast, like Furuno’s
TimeZero.”
When Furuno’s MaxSea TimeZero was
introduced late last year, it made quite a stir.
Marine electronics expert and editor of the
popular blog, Panbo.com, Ben Ellison called it
“the most dramatic chart display advance”
and remarked that it “eliminates the screen
redraw.” Another authoritative source, the
ActiveCaptain.com online cruising guide
reported that, “You’ve never seen zooming
and panning like this anywhere on any plat-
form.” High praise indeed.
LCD Displays
But what about the other key element, the
LCD display? Some very significant advances
have been made in LCD displays in terms of
sunlight viewability, response times and backlighting technology in just the last couple of
years. Let’s take sunlight viewability first.
Sunlight Readability
The problem of sunlight viewability is not
so much a problem of brightness as it is one of
contrast, the difference in light intensity
between the brightest white pixel and the
darkest black pixel. LCDs do not emit any
light at all. They only regulate the light generated by their backlighting source, and this
light is subject to reflective losses on its way
through the LCD panel’s several layers—rear
polarizing layer, TFT substrate, common electrode layer, etc. Typically these reflective losses
are about 4% and occur at each surface. These
losses, while significant, are not the major
cause of poor, or no, sunlight readability.
The backlighting source can be designed to
generate enough luminance (referred to as
nits, or candelas per millimeter squared) to
overcome these losses with enough left over to
produce a clearly readable image on the display, in normal wheelhouse or nav station
Chartplotters with non-sunlight-viewable
LCD screens must be placed in shaded locations. Here, the boater mounted his plotter
on a hinged shelf so it could be swung out
and viewed from the helm station.
