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In regards to the two way mirror idea, I dont think that would work. Simply reflecting back the incoming sunlight is not good enough...you need to diffuse that light, or else you might just be seeing reflections on your screen. Maybe a sheet of 3M's ESR behind the diffuser panel in your LCD would work.
Thats exactly what I was afraid of, but I had not thought of that solution. As for now I am going to try just the LED upgrade.
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As for the LEDs, you can get small SMD leds from china on ebay very cheap. Like a bag of 100 of these for a very reasonable price. Quality wise I think they would be ok, but not sure if their brightness specs are realistic or not. I would just take out the ccfl tube and try to fit in as many leds as you can. Although a single led is bright, the light is very focused and not very diffused, so you might need to overdo it a bit. For a typical 7 inch screen, I think you can fit about 30 of these on the width of the screen.
Actually that is almost exactly what I was going to do, but the ones I had found were 1.2mm wide, the screen is about 185mm wide total, which means around 300 LEDs ($60 or so worth).
The LEDs I'm looking are rated at 2,500 mcds each, this is based off of the product spec sheet from the manufacture and I would like to hope this is correct.
Now heres the part where I bet that I am wrong. 300 LEDs times the 2500 mcd rating each is 750,000 mcds total. Assuming the bit about 1/10 the light of the panel being the end result is correct that means the end result is a 75,000 mcd bright display?!? That is MUCH brighter then my 800 to 1000 mcd target.
So either my 'math' is wrong, I forgot to factor something into the formula, or I need to get much dimmer LEDs.