[quote name='Chrissi']Oh, but the rainbowy thing for mine isn't -reflective- or anything. It just looks like water marks. It's there no matter what angle you set it at. Like I said.. it looks like dried up water on the screen, but no matter how much I scrub and no matter what I scrub with, it doesn't come off.
Yeah - the backing isn't reflective like most handhelds. I don't know about the regular DS, as I've never held one before, but, one thing I've noticed..
With other handhelds like the GBA and GBC (old stuff), there is no backlight, right? This is made up for with a screen backing that reflects the light in the room. This often means you either have to play outside, or hold your unit in just the right angle so that the light reflects off it in the most ideal position. You can't play in the dark.
But the DS Lite has a screen more like an LCD monitor, where, if you turn off the backlight, the screen is black or so very nearly black that you can't tell the difference. I tested this out for myself. In Super Mario 64 DS, there is an option in the game to turn the backlight off. Curious, I tried it on my DS Lite... the screen went pitch black. I tried turning on a lamp and holding it in all sorts of angles, but it wouldn't reflect any light.
This is why people complain how the DS Lite doesn't work as well in the sunlight as the normal DS, I think. I think that the regular DS has a reflective backing, so that when you play in the light, it lights up the screen. But if you were to play in the dark, you'd need a backlight. Very nice setup, I think.
But the DS Lite doesn't have a reflective back in the screen.[/QUOTE]
You're of course right to some degree about the original DS screen technology. It was a transflective screen, which indeed is capable of using external light sources while still providing decent images on screen. Unfortunately, starting with the GBA, for one reason or another, the screen technology, even with a fairly strong and direct light source hitting it, looked washed out and never as sharp or colorful as a truely backlit screen. There is indeed a tradeoff, because a transflectve screen still has some ability to use direct sunlight and be playable without internal lighting, but the screen brightness, contrast, and color saturation can never be as good.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transflective#Transmissive_and_reflective_displays