Panasonic's OLED-fighting LCD is meant for professionals
It's designed for video production and medical uses, though -- not playing 'Overwatch.'
Panasonic's salad days in the consumer TV space are in its past, but today the company announced a new IPS display technology that might help it win back some of the professional market. Essentially, it's making an LCD panel with the precision backlighting capabilities of an OLED. Thanks to a new backlight technology, these panels can turn off the backlight on a per-pixel basis, granting them an advertised " over 1,000,000:1" contrast ratio. Meaning that blacks will be absolutely black while whites could be eye-searingly bright — within the same image — and HDR and colors should look incredibly life-like.
The company says that these are perfect for use in video production work, while one of the provided sample images shows a 31-inch panel being used to display an x-ray image. Sony has dabbled in the medical display space, as well. What's more, the new light-modulating cells help the screens hit a maximum (and stable) brightness of 1,000 cd/m2. For context, Samsung's KS8000 TV hits 137 cd/m2, and 766 cd/m2 with HDR on, out of the box. So yeah, this could be pretty impressive.
Whether we see this tech hit a TV you can grab from Best Buy is anyone's guess. These types of panels are usually incredibly expensive and not meant for folks like you and me.
