I fly the 777, which has fairly similar EFIS.
I think that ‘tapes’ are not an ideal way of presenting data that has to be understood rapidly and are a bit of a ‘cop out’ from the manufacturers.
I find the altitude and airspeed strips much less easy to interpret than their round cousins, especially in a dynamic situation.
The problem stems, I think, from having a static pointer on a moving scale that is many times larger than the display itself. Compare this to having a pointer on a dial (or even a strip) that shows the whole scale. The absolute position of the pointer always has meaning, as does the direction of its motion, and these parameters can be quickly assessed without having to mentally process a load of numbers.
A while back I flew the 737 and would regularly step from a –200 (analogue dials) to a –400 (glass cockpit with tapes) and vice-versa during a single day. There were many faults with both styles of presentation: the –200, for example, suffering from ‘shotgun’ placement of instruments. However, I found the –200 easier to fly accurately, especially on the latter stages of the (visual) approach when most of your attention was directed outside the cockpit.
I feel we are in a temporary situation, in that EFIS is now cheaper and more reliable than ‘analogue’ instrumentation but system integration and ‘legacy’ requirements do not allow us (as yet) to be given the ‘path through the sky’ or ‘synthetic visual’ presentations. I fear this has left us with the worst of both worlds (the company I work for found, from real-life data, that situational awareness was much more likely to be compromised in a glass cockpit than a conventional one).
Back to the speed-tape issue. I think an enhancement to current displays would be to have the whole speed range displayed at once with the pointer moving up and down. This would still be combined with trend vectors, manoeuvring margins etc. and if the scale ended up too compressed, the area in which you were operating could be magnified and made to move in the opposite sense to the pointer. Personally I find most electronic airspeed displays far too sensitive (I can’t fly to within a knot, five maybe on a good day), especially on approach where they bounce all over the place. On the 777 this interacts badly with the autothrottle (although I realise this has nothing to do with the display, rather the rapidly changing airspeed data) and makes the power go up and down like a yo-yo. The 777 is 200ft wide, about as long and weighs c.200t on approach. Rapid, small, local variations of air movement make hardly any difference to the overall performance of the airframe, yet they are displayed with great fidelity. This unfortunately distresses some people!
In summary, I would say that I am unhappy with the present style of EFIS presentation in large transport aeroplanes, and I think we should be looking closely at what is happening in the bizjet/GA/military sectors, as they are less constrained by what has gone before.