Nokia's Wicked Cool Screen Technology

Nokia makes amazing hardware - their new phones (the Lumia 800/900) have a certain solidity to them not unlike Mercedes doors, and they've always managed to get the weight to size ration just right. (Ignore the whole WM8 / Symbian / whatever controversy.  I'm talking about the hardware).

One of the things that I noticed without noticing was how *good* the display looks outdoors, without the washed out look so typical of pretty much every phone out there.  OLED-Info reveals the secret - its all done through the magic of polarization.  The essential description is below, and it fits my definition of genius - its blindingly (heh) obvious once you know how, but you'd never have thought of it beforehand!.
Note:  CBD is Clear Black Display, Nokia-ese for "wicked cool screen that looks great"

A CBD filter includes both a linear polariser and retardation layers between the surface of your phone and the display. When light hits your screen, this is what happens:

1. It hits the linear polariser, this vertically polarises the light. (Polarising means – roughly – aligning the wave vibration in a particular direction).
2. Then it hits the circular polariser retardation layer. This converts the light again, making it right-circularly polarised.
3. Then it hits the screen and bounces off it, switching the rotation of the light to leftist.
4. It goes back through the retardation layer. When this happens, the light becomes horizontally polarised.
5. Finally, it hits the linear polariser, since the light is horizontally polarised at this point it can be blocked entirely by this optical solution.

So why doesn't the light from your phone’s display get blocked? Because it only goes through the second half of this journey so the light is unpolarised when it hits the final filter and goes through. In the photo below, we can see a normal C6-01 phone with a CBD display (on the left) and the same phone without the CBD layer (on the right):