Don’t Try To Use Your iPad In Portrait Mode While Wearing Polarized Sunglasses

Forget trying to wear your polarized glasses while trying to use your iPad in portrait mode.

Do you wear polarized sunglasses? If so, you can go ahead and forget trying to use your iPad in portrait mode while wearing them. You think we’re kidding? No.. when wearing polarized sunglasses the iPad’s screen turns black when using it in portait mode — rendering it useless until you flip it over in landscape. Devastating, we know.

Don’t believe us? Check it out on video:

Crazy right? Apparently this is only happening on the iPad, as other manufacturers have overcome it by setting the “extinction” of the screen to 45 degrees or putting in new compensating films. Screen expert Ray Soneira from DisplayMate explains it to ZDNet:

Using polarized sunglasses all iPads go black in Portrait mode. Other displays go black in Landscape mode. Much better is for the manufacturer to set the extinction at 45 degrees so the display looks good in both Portrait and Landscape modes. The Motorola Xoom behaves this way. Best of all, with compensating films this effect can go away almost entirely.

The iPhone 4 and Samsung Galaxy Tab have no extinction at any angle (just a small color shift). The effect should only apply to LCDs because they use polarized light internally. So OLEDs also should not show any such extinction effect.

Really this isn’t that big of a deal, because you can’t really see the iPad outside anyways. But hey, if you’re one of those tools that wears your sunglasses inside you’ve got problems.