Appeal No. 2002-1042
Application No. 09/262,102
IBM fails to teach the claimed user-adjustable means of claim 1
[reply brief].
We will not sustain the examiner’s rejection of independent
claim 1 for essentially the reasons argued by appellants in the
briefs. We agree with appellants that IBM fails to teach or
suggest a user adjustable means for adjusting different drive
modes of the display device to set a viewing angle at which a
given contrast ratio is observable. The examiner’s assertion
that a user could adjust the applied voltages in the IBM display
to adjust the viewing angle is nothing more than the mere opinion
of the examiner, and is unsupported by any disclosure within the
reference. The only rationale for adjusting drive modes of the
display device to set a user variable viewing angle comes from
appellants’ own disclosure. Therefore, the record before us
supports nothing more than a hindsight reconstruction of the
invention.
Since the record before us does not support the examiner’s
rejection of independent claim 1, the record also does not
support the rejection of claims 2-9 which depend from claim 1.
Therefore, we also do not sustain the examiner’s rejection of
-6–
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