Recently I’ve been flying the FSR500 again, which obviously has a glass cockpit, and tried to delve deeper into why I dislike glass cockpits so much. Some reasons I already mentioned a few times:
- garish oversaturated colors which are just bad to look at. They really seem to use a 100% saturation for the blues, which never looks good or real.
- too cluttered with too much information with tiny numbers crammed into a tight space
But then it hit me: the content of the screens just looks superimposed on the cockpit instead of being a part of it, because there are zero reflections when the screens are on. This makes the screen look super fake and kinda ruins the immersion.
I’m aware that these screens are equipped with antiglare coating in real life, but that stuff never works a 100% on bright, sunny days. Just watch a number of videos with glass cockpits and you will see that there are plenty of reflections, which would help marry the image with the cockpit and sell the illusion that we are looking at actual screens. Here is an example at 8:12 with plenty of reflections:
TL;DR please add reflections to glass cockpit screens when they are turned on (there are reflections when they are off, which looks good!) to increase the realism of glass cockpit aircraft.