After several years
high dynamic range LCD technology is finally ready for market, now that
SIM2 and Dolby are showing off this Solar Series 47-inch screen at the 2009 Integrated Systems Europe show. Just like
last year's prototype, it's both brighter (4,000 cd/m2) and has a greater contrast ratio than any flat panel currently available. The 2,206 LEDs can provide up to an infinite contrast ratio and supposedly match real world visuals thanks to 16 bit color processing. The only bad news is that even with a name change to Dolby Vision, that ugly wide bezel from the
BrightSide days still remains. We'll have to wait until closer to the Q2 shipping date to find out the price, but with SIM2's high end reputation it won't be cheap.
Update: SIM2 pinged us to say that only the professional version will be available in Q2. The "consumer unit" won't be formally launched in the US until CEDIA this September.
posted Feb 3rd 2009 1:46PM
infinite contrast ratio?! er...
Infinite contrast here refers to the notion that the blacks produce no light at all, which results in a contrast ratio of:
infinity : 1
This is possible because, rather than having a single LED/fluorescent lamp behind the LCD (the LCD masks light rather than producing it), the backlighting is itself broken up into 'pixels'. This means that the black areas of the screen will have no lighting at all.
Once you get past the point where your black levels are so good that black areas of the screen look the same as they do when the screen is off.
While in some sense the contrast really is something like infinity : 1, that only applies when comparing areas of the screen where in one of the areas the backlighting pixel is off. If you compare two pixels that cover the same backlighting pixel (of which there are only 2k), then you'll be back in the world of normal contrast ratios. Similarly, if some of the front pixels covered by the same backlighting pixel are not black, then none of them will be totally black. The result is that large-ish areas of the screen that are black will be really, really black, but areas that border with lighter areas (or things like small black dots on a white background) will only be sort of black.
jd.junk1 - good analysis. I'll add two things.
1. The extra contrast will come at the cost of a slight "halo" artifact around bright objects (where there is a normal contrast instead of the infinite contrast).
2. Manufacturers have been playing this contrast game forever... the big mistake is that they discount room lighting - that low light from the hallway will kill your contrast. Even if you were in a black-painted room (and I was in the one at NIST where they measure monitor contrast), if any part of your image is lit up, then that light will be reflected back on to the dark areas of the picture, and, again, kill the contrast. Anything over 1000:1 is hard to measure, even in laboratory conditions.
Ok - so based on the artible it sound like this thing consists of an HD LCD backlit by seperate leds behind every few pixels - and they turn up or down as needed. SO, I doubt a black and a white NEXT TO EACH OTHER could ahve that constrast ratio. But across the screen, yes.
I'm not sure one picture qualifies as a gallery
but Tower Bridge is pretty
mmmm infinity.
haha
my math may be screwy, but wouldn't 4,000 cd/m2 be like looking directly at a 250 watt lighbulb??? that's bright.
Would you rather go blind any other way?
Define infinite. Because I'm kinda confused here. I thought that the world "infinity" was banned from tech dictionary at least until the year 2070. How do you explain the mechanics that allow "infinite contrast"?!
My guess is that you can make your definite contingent upon the limits of human perception. I might as well call 200 fps infinite, because no human could perceive a higher number.
This is so lame. I hear Samsung has "Infinity +1" displays on the way.
Um, doesn't this TV break physics?
I'd like one in 24" size for my workstation. That would be one nice display to do photo editing and design on.
The problem is the brightness 4,000 cd/m2 is enough to sear your eyes. I'd be blind in a few days.
Really 1,000 cd/m2 is enough brightness for any display. We don't have a problem making whites, it is the darker areas that need help.
Wow, thats a bright ass screen, I want
She be like "Honey why are you crying? I didnt know you were so sensitive"
Me: "Im not, its just that..."
Her: "What is it honey?"
Me: "The screen...its just so bright"
surprised this hasn't come up more often, but...
what about the concept of backlighting an LCD panel using DLP projection? You may not get the same contrast resulting from on/off LEDs, but the granularity of control would more than make up for this fact. You could also forgo all the circuitry & mechanical bits of a standard DLP television and simply have, say, 8 bits to control the brightness. Then it would just be a matter of alignment, no more difficult than doing so with 3 old-school CRTs, but without the worry of things getting out-of-whack over time!