Its interesting to watch brilliantly engineered avionics grow stale.Two years is middle aged for panel gizmos and four years is geriatric. Avidynes popular and feature-rich EX500 is trickle-down technology from the grander EX5000 Entegra MFD. Pilots now demanded more from an MFD than EX500 can offer. Avidynes answer is the EX600. Call it an EX500 on steroids if you want, but we call it a much-needed improvement and a lease on life, perhaps for a year or two. Upgrade pricing from an EX500 is fair, but buying a new EX600 is pricey and installation could be a challenge in tight radio stacks as the bigger EX600 demands more vertical space. Heres a closer look.
Pursuing the Perfect MFD
The EX600 is big but not huge. It stands 4.93 inches high and fits the standard 6.24-inch rack-width. Weighing 4.75 pounds and fairly deep at 11 inches, the box feels substantial and sturdy. There’s a lot of display area at 5.8 inches diagonal.
Lets get this out of the way: From our evaluation, the new display-that sports 25 percent more viewable area than the smaller EX500-is actually dimmer (or at least appears dimmer) than the EX500. Brightness is controlled with a single brightness button on the bezel. There’s also a soft key for putting the display in day or night mode with a single button push. Bezel keys are wired to the aircrafts avionics dimming system.
When we griped to Avidyne engineers about our display findings (the test unit was actually installed in a customer aircraft after upgrading from an EX500 and isn’t viewable while he wears his sunglasses). They told us the newly designed transflective display could appear dimmer than some other displays that are collocated in the same area in the panel even though it is designed for better sunlight readability.
Another engineer went on to explain that transflective displays work exceptionally we’ll in both low- and high-lighting