Some time ago I posted about wanting an outdoor laptop. The first option I listed was a panasonic toughbook. Recently (a year and a half later) I finally ordered one. I ordered from bobjohnson.com, because the people there are a class act who’ve been calmly answering my questions for a long time.
Some highlights:
* It has a transflective display. This means that it is emissive, but also uses reflected sunlight to boost brightness, up to 6000 nits. In comparison, my previous thinkpad was 350 nit (unusable sometimes even in shade), and my macbook was 500nit. With this laptop, I can leave the display on 25% brightness and move from a dark basement to hurt-my-skin bright sunlight.
* It’s ‘fully rugged’, so using it in rain or dust storms should not be an issue. (I lost 4G ram in my thinkpad to dust).
* It has a shoulder strap ($20 extra) screwed on solidly.
* It has a touchscreen with stylus. (To use this under ubuntu 18.04 I had to install xserver-xorg-input-evdev and remove xserver-xorg-input-libinput. Note just installing evdev was not enough) I may look like a dweeb, but I prefer this to smudging my screen.
The laptop I got is a CF-19 MK6. This is several years old and refurbished. The reason I went with this instead of a new toughbook (besides price) is because, as far as I can tell, only the CF-19 MK5 through MK8 have the transflective display. The replacement for the CF-19 (the CF-20) may have a better screen (i’ve not seen it), but it is not transflective and comes in at “only” 1000nit. Same with the slightly larger nonconvertable laptops.
Mind you, there is (I trust) a reason these screens did not take off – the colors are kind of washed out, and it’s low resolution. But for reading kernel code by the pool without draining the battery in 1 hr, the only thing I can imagine being better is an eink screen.
The CF-19 is compact: it’s a 10″ (convertible) netbook. This keyboard is more cramped than on my old s100 netbook. I do actually kind of like the keys – they have a good travel depth and a nice click. But it’s weird going back to a full-size keyboard.
The first time I measured the battery life, it shut down when battery listed 36% remaining, after a mere got 3 hours. Panasonic had advertised 10 hours for this laptop. 3 was unacceptable, and I was about ready to send it back. But, reading the powertop output, I noticed that the sound card was listed as taking tons of battery power. So for my next run I did a powertop –auto-tune, and got over 4 hours battery life. Then I noticed bluetooth radio doing the same, so I did rmmod btusb. These are now all done on startup by systemd. The battery still stops at 35%, which takes getting used to, but it’s acceptable.
4.5 hours is still limiting, so I picked up a second battery and an external charger. I can charge one battery while using the other, or take both batteries along for a longer trip.
In summary – i may have found my outdoors laptop. I’d still prefer it be thinner, with a slightly larger and mechanical keyboard, and have 12 hour battery life, delivered on a unicorn…
(Here is an attempt to show the screen in very bright sunlight. It’s hard to get a good photo, since the camera wants to play its own games) :
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Hello,
I have some questions about your toughbook though this is old and I’m not sure you will get them…
If you want to can you switch the backlight completely off? Can you do that in Linux?
Does it have noisey fans?
Many thanks
Hi,
Yes, the backlight can be turned off completely in linux, so that it’s completely reflective. It doesn’t seem to really affect battery life though – I mostly keep it 100% and put tape over the light sensor to keep it from lowering the backlight when sunlight hits hit π I get about 3.5h battery life regardless. I have 3 batteries and an external charger so i just quickly shut down and swap the batteries.
I’ve never noticed any noisy fan.
Sorry if you get these at all could you delete my other one as I used my real name and would prefer to have not done…
Hello,
I have some questions about your toughbook though this is old and Iβm not sure you will get themβ¦
If you want to can you switch the backlight completely off? Can you do that in Linux?
Does it have noisey fans?
Many thanks
Blast, I didn’t enable email comment notification for the replacement post. Could you please reply to this one so I know you have done?…
Thank you
I replied π
Hi,
Yes, the backlight can be turned off completely in linux, so that itβs completely reflective. It doesnβt seem to really affect battery life though β I mostly keep it 100% and put tape over the light sensor to keep it from lowering the backlight when sunlight hits hit π I get about 3.5h battery life regardless. I have 3 batteries and an external charger so i just quickly shut down and swap the batteries.
Iβve never noticed any noisy fan.
I’d been working for a few months in the middle of an orchard directly under the sun. I bought an MSI Creator 17 (1000 nits), and I’m happy with it, but it could be better. But the 1000 nits are enough.
I like even better the one you talked about, but there are some points that I don’t like:
– Nothing close to 17.3″
Things I don’t like from the MSI:
– It has an nvidia that I don’t use (I use Debian). I’d be better with an Intel Xe iGPU. I thought of buying a Dell, but I’m concerned that the brightness might not be enough.
– Durability might be worse than a rugged and waterproof laptop, but so far it’s working.
Neat. Do all the MSI Creator 17’s have 1000 nits, or is that a special model?
AFAIK, all of them. But there’s the Creator 17M which is older and doesn’t.
I’ve not bought this yet, but the pinenote (https://pine64.com/product-category/tablets/pinenote/) with a bluetooth keyboard could make for a great fully outdoor-viewable “laptop”.
Readers of this may consider this relevant on the topic:
I also wanted an outdoors laptop, but wanted a 17″ screen with which I don’t need a telescope to read the text.
A few years ago, the MSI Creator 17 with 1000 nits came out, and I gave it a try. It was quite good for outdoors, as 1000 nits is very bright, even in Spain. However, under Debian (Sid), probably due to drivers, the brightness was too bright: the minimum brightness was brighter than the maximum brightness of my other screens, which means I couldn’t use it indoors without burning my eyes. This problem might have been fixed, but I don’t recommend that anyone buy it. I gave mine to a friend, as it was unusable for me. (Under Windows, the minimum brightness was good for indoors, but I don’t use Windows.)
Then, I’ve tried Dell, a precision 7760. The brightness isn’t as the MSI, but it is enough for me. Especially since 99% of what I do is on a black terminal, and system dark theme (awaita-dark, IIRC), where text stands out easily; I also make the text a bit larger than default.
On the battery side, since I configured my laptop to have no dGPU, it consumes as little as possible. I also work offline most of the time, and only need to connect internet every now and then to git fetch/push, which works pretty good even in the mountains, as I’m only moving a few bytes of text; so one less source of draining the battery.
If I limit myself to that, mostly no internet, low brightness when I don’t need it, and no videos or anything fancy, just 2 xfce4-terminals side-by-side, this laptop has a very durable battery (I never measured properly, but passes 4h by far; I’ll update if some day I measure it).
And since it ships with Ubuntu, Debian is likely to work out-of-the-box (although you may need Sid, especially if the model is new, but I already use Sid for other reasons).
My main caveat to that laptop is weight (but still not a big problem; only a wish). I considered Dell’s XPS 17, but it has no option of removing the dGPU. π¦
First off, I wanna hear more about “in the mountains” π
Thanks for the detailed info on past laptops. It’s tough when you have to buy one of each to try them out. I’m a bit skeptical about your claim that 1k nits suffices, so I wish I could travel out (to the mountains) to try it on a bright day π
I’m also surprised at your use of dark mode, out doors. I find I can use much lower brightness with light mode. And despite some recent claims I’ve seen, for the moment I still believe that, at least on a laptop, at the same percentage brightness, all black uses as much power as all white. I’m going to have to test! So thanks again π
Re: “in the mountains”: I like going to the mountains as often as I can, and I bring the laptop to work in the train, or in other dead times. I also have an orchard, and bring the laptop to it, so I can switch working on programming and working on my plants/trees, or just watching the birds sing. π
Re: “readability of dark mode outdoors”: I’m rarely directly under the sun. Usually, I use the laptop under the shadow (heh!) of a tree. There, dark mode is readable, and I don’t even need to max the brightness most of the time.
Re: “battery consumption of dark mode”: It seems I had prematurely optimized! I didn’t even think too much about it: I like dark mode indoors, as it’s nicer for my eyes, and assumed it would consume less, so I continued using it outdoors. It seems I need to do a bit of science now. I’ll update soon, but I’m experimenting with my laptop, and the provisional results seem promising; for now, it seems that displaying a static white image consumes significantly less than displaying a static black image (I’m talking of more than an hour of battery difference). Let’s see if I can reproduce it or was just randomness.
Yes! Measurements! Excellent
Serge,
I posted the measurements some month ago, but it said the post was waiting to be reviewed by you. Did wordpress send it to you? Or was it lost in the internet limbo?
In any case, the results were that there was no significant difference. (I shared some data files and a gnuplot(1) script to see a graph; I hope it wasn’t lost. I don’t keep it anymore.)
The battery life was around 7 h, for both pure black and pure white images full-screen with maxed-out brightness, with no significant CPU workload. Real usage (that is, some vim(1), some mutt(1), some git(1), …) will probably be a bit less than that, but with no constant load nor internet conection, I don’t expect it to drop much from that.