Introduction

Sun Vision Display is the new player in the space of Reflective LCD monitor. Some of you may know the Hisense Q5 which is a 10″ RLCD monochrome tablet without Google Mobile Services. While it may be use as a secondary monitor thanks to the Micro-HDMI port the small size make it difficult to use as a computer display.

So, my eyes are super happy that the range of RLCD products available get bigger.

What is a RLCD display?

Unlike regular LCD monitor, Reflective LCD doesn’t have a backlight, instead it has a mirror behind the pixel to reflect the ambient light.
That means that in a dark room the RLCD display will not be visible at all since it doesn’t emit any light.

Why you would want a RLCD? Well, like eink, RLCD are considered as “eyes friendly” or “eyes care” technology. The main eyestrain symptom and the Computer Vision Syndrome are mostly provoked by having a (LED) backlight that shine into you eyes. It’s like looking directly at a light!

The main downside of RLCD beside it costs is that since it doesn’t have any backlight, you need to have a lot of ambient light and or external light pointing at it to have enough contrast and clarity. We will talk more about it further into the review.

Below is a little table of the main advantages and disadvantages of RLCD

Advantages	Disavantages
Very good sunlight visibility	Need a lot of light to have enough contrast
Standard refresh rate (like a regular LCD)	Low DPI (at least on this monitor)
Low consumption (compare to LCD)	wash out colors (especially if not enough lighting)
No backlight shining into your eyes

The Sun Vision Display RLCD Color Monitor Specification

Unlike the small and monochrome 10″ Hisense Q5, the SVD RLCD computer display is BIG and with color!

Here is a few specs about it:

• 32 Inch reflective LCD display
• Color
• Full HD (1920*1080)
• 60 Hertz refresh rate
• No backlight

For the ports we have only two: One for the 12V DC power supply and a HDMI port to plug it to your computer.

Stand and VESA

The stand of the monitor is a kickstand type.

The first (or two, not sure) batch didn’t had VESA mounting which was a sad thing to hear. Thankfully, Creat3DLab, a company specialized in making 3D printed VESA adapter for monitor that don’t have one, made one for this monitor.
You can buy it here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1201105285/vesa-adapter-for-svd-32-color-rlcd
It uses the already present non-vesa standard holes to screw it.

My monitor, does have VESA standard hole, but I can’t guarantee that you will have them.
Never the less, since I bought the 3D adaptor before knowing it, so I will use it.

The Buying process

I bought this monitor from the official website for 1679$ USD. It was a sale, now it’s at 1799$ which is a very step price for a 1080P computer monitor but RLCD is still new and rare.

If, you are in USA you are very lucky because you won’t have outrageous shipping costs unlike others in the world. Also only people from the USA can order through the website. (or at least, at the time I bought it)

If you are not from USA you need to contact SVD by email to have a shipping quote.
I’m in France, and I had to pay 320$ USD for the shipping (From China to France) using DHL Express. Others persons, on reddit, had similar or even higher shipping cost!
I wonder if SVD took a shipping insurance, explaining why the price is so high?

Since I’m not in USA I exchanged a few emails with SVD salesman to get a quote to ship it to my address. When agreed I received a paypal invoice that I paid immediately, the 16 May 2022.
The 7 July I receive a message from DHL saying that my parcel was shipped from China.
I received it the 13 July.

DHL sent me a text with a link to pay the Customs tax which was mostly 20% of VAT.
The amount of tax / customs you need to pay will depend of your country.

So about 2400$ total to have this monitor in France! Which is more than what I paid for my car 😀

The packaging

When I saw the packaging I was very happy. It is made of a very strong and thick cardboard. This is very important as the price is very high and a monitor is very fragile.
They did a very good job at protecting it.

Inside there was an other box with the monitor inside it. I opened it and they use thick and strong foam to protect the monitor.

Inside the foam you can also find the HDMI cable and the power supply as well as some documentation about the monitor.

There is no EU/country specific plug adaptor in the box, the PSU is for US plug only so you need to buy your own plug adaptor to be able to use the monitor.

Setup

The setup is straightforward you need to adjust the kick stand to your liking to angle more or less the monitor. Then connect the HDMI cable on the right and the PSU on the left.
I would have love to have this two ports next to each other, to make cable management easier.
Also I used a 90° angle HDMI connector so that the cable go in the back of the monitor and not on the right side.

The PSU and HDMI cable are pretty short, so if your PC is far from the screen you will need to buy longer one! Personally I bought longer one, 4 meters, so I was able to move the screen in different place in my room to check where it was performing the best.

I you want to put the monitor on a stand or an arm then you need to use the 75 mm VESA holes if available or you can also use the 3D printed VESA adaptor like me.
The adaptor is very sturdy and won’t break.

I use this stand: https://www.amazon.fr/gp/product/B089GW8YJK
Which is strong and steady. Some people may prefer a monitor arm.

Dead pixel

I did have some quality problem on my monitor.
I have one dead green pixel on the top left of the monitor. It is a bit sad knowing the price of the monitor but you don’t notice it when using it.

Monitor Control

The monitor control is clumsy and very hard to use.
Unfortunately, there is no software to control it from Windows.
There is different picture mode as well a standard settings like contrast, Brightness, color, sharpness and tint.

I didn’t managed to get better result and I recommend leaving it in the standard mode, no need to mess with this clumsy inteface.

Display performance

Here we will see how this display perform, but first we will talk about light.

Light and how to light it

This will be the biggest struggle of owning this monitor!
Light is the number one factor of how usable and great the monitor will look.
If there is not enough light, it will feel like reading a book at nightfall, and it will strain you eyes.

I do have the Hisense Q5 which use a monochrome 10″ RLCD panel. I was very disappointed to see that the SVD need more light than the Q5 to have a decent / similar contrast. Maybe it is because of the color filter that filter more light than the monochrome filter?

Light is what will make the colors looks better, make the monitor bright with a good contrast.
Everyone is different concerning contrast and brightness. I’ve seen people on reddit that are okay with just having their ceiling light, and others that need a very bright light shining into it. Unfortunately I fall in the later case.

So I’ve tried a lot of different lighting

10 Watts Architect Desk Lamp

I first tried this one: https://www.amazon.fr/gp/product/B08P8KSS11/
This is a nice lamp that I used a lot with my other screens, both Dasung eink 13” and 25” and my RLCD Hisense Q5 as well;
For the SVD this lamp is completely useless as it is not powerful and wide enough.

24 Watts 1800 Lumens 80 centimeters wide desk lamp

Secondly, I bought this one: https://www.amazon.fr/gp/product/B09Q5W3S3F/
It is wide enough to cover the width of the monitor. The first third of the monitor is lit correctly, while the second third is so so, and the bottom third is not lit enough.
Also you can’t put the top of the lamp too low (usually it’s at the top of the monitor) because then you will have the reflection of the light on the monitor and into your eyes.

So, this is still not powerful enough to lit the monitor to my liking.

So, lets get the big guns!

The bigger guns: 100 Watts – 7950 Lumens LED Panel 40*28 centimeters on a tripod

Thank to this person from reddit, https://www.reddit.com/r/Reflective_LCD/comments/wd3ldp/svd_monitor_arrived_and_its_mountable_on_vesa/
I tried a way more powerful lamp.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003835309292.html

I bought it for 110€ including a 2 meters high tripod on Aliexpress.
The tripod is cheap and may not last very long, but is enough to use it for test.
The lamp is a 15.75 by 11.02 inch 100 Watts LED Panel with 7950 lumen!
It does have a remote so that you can try different brightness and color temperature from your chair.
I put the tripod at the maximum hight (about 1.90 – 2 meters) just behind my chair. The goal was to not have a reflection of it on the screen and not have the shadow of my head into the screen.
At the end it is still a bit weird, because the contrast is good, while still not uniform across the screen, particularly at the bottom BUT the desk and everything around is too bright for my liking.

Also having a 2 meters high, a bit unstable, tripod is not something that I like having in my one piece small flat, especially if I accidentally hit the tripod and it falls on the very costly SVD monitor 😀

The biggest guns: 72 Watts 10200 Lumens 90*30 centimeters

I’m picky and forever unsatisfied person 😀 So I was still looking for something else when I found this youtube video of someone doing a review of this monitor with his massive wide LED panel for the lighting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXxHk54RD4o

I knew that I had to try so I bought a similar model of him with a similar mic arm

• https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32877135943.html?spm=a2g0o.order_list.order_list_main.41.55685e5b09PSJF
• https://www.amazon.fr/gp/product/B09YRF39QY/

We are talking about 10200 lumens, and a very big and large panel, something very crazy.

Unfortunately the mic arm was not strong enough and was struggling to hold the LED panel.

With that much power contrast was good, but as always, with that big of a screen it is too hard/ impossible to light it evenly across the entire screen (something that I’m picky about). Also you can increase contrast by tilting it more, but I’m also picky and want it very straight and level.

Also depending how high the panel was, you could see the LED reflection on the screen, for me it’s bothering, but for the person on youtube for example, he said that it wasn’t bothering him. Like a lot of thing with this monitor, it really depend of the person.

Here is a few pictures of the setup:

I want to conclude this part that everyone is different and will like different type of contrast, prefer natural light or lamp etc…

Personally I didn’t find any lighting setup that fit my room and liking.

To end this parts, I would like everyone that read this post and have this monitor to post a comment with a picture of their setup. It’s always nice to see and give idea to everyone, to improve their setup.

Resolution, DPI and closed-up pixel pictures

The resolution for a 32” is quite low. It’s a standard 1920 * 1080 pixels.
Depending on how far you are from it you may see some pixels.
This is because the DPI (Dot Per Inch) is low. It show the amount of pixel for 1”.

The more you have, the crisper the text/image will be.
For reference here is a little table with DPI from different monitor:

Monitor	Size in inch	Horizontal Resolution	Vertical Resolution	DPI
SVD RLCD Display	32	1920	1080	68.84
Dasung Paperlike HD-F	13.3	2200	1650	206.77
Dasung Paperlike 253	25.3	3200	1800	145.12
Hisense Q5	10.5	1280	800	143.76
MacBook Pro M2 2022	13.3	2560	1600	226.98
Standard 24″ Full HD monitor	24	1920	1080	91.79

As you can see, the DPI of this monitor is low this is why you can see that the text is not super crisp, I notice it more since I come from a 24” 4k monitor with 183 DPI. Note that most Apple Retina display/computer have about 220 DPI.

I don’t find the text being not very crisp a problem, especially if you stand further from the screen, something that you will likely do as the screen is big. For movies, it feels fantastic, it looks super nice, it is not pixelated at all, but you do need a lot of light. If in the film there is dark scene it can be a problem as the monitor make everything dark darker to see.

Here you can see some closed up pixel comparison between the Hisense Q5, the Dasung Paperlike 253 and the SVD. You can click on the picture see a bigger one.

Color

If you want to choose this monitor to do color dependant work then you will be disappointed. The color are not really accurate, they are a bit washout.
Maximizing Light will help the color to be more vivid and accurate (while still not accurate)

Watching film or playing video game with dark environment can be tricky. For that you would need to increase gamma settings to be able to see things “in the dark”.

Reflection

Something important to talk beside lighting: reflection.

This monitor is glossy, so it does have a lot of reflection. Having a dark UI / game / video will make the reflection stronger thant with a white background.

Like lighting you will need to find the best spot in your room for maximizing light and minimizing reflection, which is easier said than done.

Advantages

• Very low to no eyestrain
• No backlight
• No ghosting
• Colors
• Standard refresh rate (unlike eink)

Disadvantages

• Lot of reflection / glossy
• Need a lot of ambient light (or a lamp setup)
• Huge, may not fit every desk
• Low DPI
• High price

Conclusion

Like many if not all of those very special monitors made for people with eyestrain (eink / rlcd) it comes with a lot of compromise.

But, for people like me that have a real eyestrain problem that prevent them to use a normal LCD monitor for their work or leisure, it is life saving and priceless.

For example you could be a software developer, or anything else since most jobs require sitting in front of a computer nowadays, that can’t support regular monitor and gets terrible migraine and eyestrain. This monitor could save your career and allows you to continue your job.

While having a few drawbacks, I want to thanks a lot Sun Vision Display for making this monitor and saving people lifes, enabling them to continue to be able to work on a computer without getting hammer by migraine and eyestrain.

Depending on your type of eyes problem, work environment (ambient light, desk…) it may or may not helps you. This is not a one size fit-all type of solution.

Eyestrain is so complex that you have to try different things and see what’s fitting you.

I recommend this monitor to people who have a big desk with a very bright room or are willing to make themselves a (custom) lamp setup that fit their need as light is the number one thing this monitor require to have a decent experience as well as the possibility to orient it in a way to minimize glare/reflection.