Sunglasses for the HD500X

My band plays a number of outdoor gigs every year, and I usually need to wear sunglasses to survive the gig.

Aside from the sunlight-triggered-wah-freakout issue I wrote about last year, the HD500X works fairly well in the sun. The light rings around the footswitches tend to disappear in bright light, but the main display seems to maintain reasonable visibility.

However, I usually wear sunglasses (and a hat!) at sunny gigs.  My sunglasses are polarized, and this causes the HD500X display to show weird discolored bands, obscuring the display.

The picture at right was taken holding my sunglasses in front of the camera lens.  As you can see, weird stuff happens in the corners of the display.

It occurred to me that an anti-glare iPhone screen protector may work well over the HD500X screen to avoid this banding issue.

In this picture, I laid a screen protector over the HD500X screen and took another picture through my sunglasses.  It’s maybe a bit better, but still shows some distortion.

Next, I experimented by rotating the screen protector over the HD500X screen. While standing in a playing  position and looking at it through my sunglasses, I continued rotating until it looked the best, while still covering the whole screen.

You can see in this picture (again through my sunglasses) that I ended up with the screen protector rotated just a bit counter-clockwise.  It’s not perfect, but it’s much better.

Next, in preparation for cutting, with the screen protector in its final position over the HD500 screen, I marked the some black dots onto the plastic where it needs to be trimmed.  I wasn’t sure if cutting would cause the screen protector to crack or delaminate, so I covered it with a layer of plastic wrap. Not sure if this was necessary.

I used my rotary trimmer to cut straight lines, but scissors would’ve also worked fine.  The end result wasn’t a perfect rectangle, but it’s close enough.

Then I removed the plastic backing and applied the screen protector over the HD500X screen. Unfortunately, I ended up with a couple little bubbles – probably caused by dust. I didn’t really want to take the HD500X into a steamy bathroom, as is recommended when applying screen protectors.

As you can see in this final picture, you can’t really see the bubbles when the unit is powered on.

And it seems to be a nice improvement when wearing sunglasses outdoors. Mission accomplished!