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Once this technology http://www.brightsidetech.com/ becomes prevalent, the LCD will match the dynamic range of plasma with the reduced energy consumption of LCD. This along with the latest improved LCD refresh rates with yield amazing improvement in LCD picture quality.

or... wait for a better display medium

I feel compelled to share a fairly old link to BrightSide (http://brightsidetech.com/). They manufacture High Dynamic Range (HDR) TVs (and other related stuff), so here's the display medium.

Only really relevant if you have a lot of cash to spend, but it'll be interesting to see how long it will take for the big vendors to catch on and make this technology mainstream...

Normal LCDs are low dynamic range. You need $$$ to get a real HDR LCD.

http://www.brightsidetech.com/

And the demos are all simulated, since you can't view real HDR without an HDR monitor, AFAIK.

Don't know why you can't reach their network. The link works fine for me.

I'm not sure what you mean by "linking to an individual display isn't much help." Most readers actually like seeing some concrete information instead of handwaving conjectures (oh, wait, this is slashdot...). From the specs:

37" screen
physical dimensions: 46.5" x 33.5" x 5.5"
resolution: 1920x1080
IMLED - Individually Modulated Array of LED backlights
contrast ratio: 200,000:1

As for whether or not the technology has any future, how about we let the future decide. I personally find the appearance of high-dynamic range displays to be much more compelling and substantial improvement over the state of the art than merely adding more and more pixels of resolution.

>LED is not a good candidate for backlighting because it is a point source.

LEDs are actually used today as backlights for the really impressive-looking high dynamic range displays. Content for HDR displays is still a bit limited (mostly computer applications such as games and visualization), but lots of research is going into the technologies and algorithms for HDR image/video acquisition, compression, etc.

(Offtopic) I don't have enough information to comment on this new technology, but I can say high dynamic range displays mentioned by this parent post rock. Here are a few links if you want to know what/how they are: 1 2 3

HDR Monitor ($50k)

Review of HDR Monitor and an introduction to HDR

Actually, there are already 16-bit high dynamic range displays using LEDs plus LCD technology. I've seen them on the exhibition floor at SIGGRAPH, and they are extremely impressive. (No, please don't ask for a picture of one :-P )

A chain is only as strong as it's weakest link.

Too bad the BrightSide display is "a little costly"... (Think several small cars -costly.)

Personally, I'm much more interested in this technology. These guys vary the brightness of individual LEDs in their backlight array, which results in a vastly higher dynamic range. (Near-infinite contrast ratio, basically.)

-jcr

Is 25,000:1 with 3000 cd/m2 brightness on an ANSI checkerboard worht talking about? It's not the monitor in question, but the tech is real enough to have been shown at SIGGRAPH this year.

This, of course, is rather silly. We cannot see simultaneous contrast of a billion to one. Our retina is not black, so the light will scatter around in the eye, and give us a flare signal of about a percent or so. We are used to rejecting a low light level like that. That would give us a sensible contrast ratio of 100:1. But this is not the whole story either - if you have a scene on a monitor with only 100:1 contrast, it might look OK in office lighting, but the shadows will look very 'milky' in a darkened room.

In our experience, people using monitors or digital projectors to simulate film will need something like a 1500:1 contrast ratio. There seems to be a point somewhere a bit beneath 2000:1 where the blacks come convincing, and the viewer will accept the simulation. There is some point about 1200:1 where the blacks stop looking convincing, and start looking grey.

If you are trying to match a display to a projector, it is nice to have another factor of two, so you can match the absolute brightness without having to go to the display white. You may want to get this because you sometimes have to drive the RGB channels beyond the white point to get bright and clean looking pastel colours.

You will want to have a continuous tone curve. Field-emission devices will have a cube-type power law down to a point, and then they will cut off exponentially. This may give good-looking greys down to a point, and then plunge into black, crushing all the shadow detail. That does not look as nasty as 'milky' shadows, but it is not that much better.

So - about 3500:1 is good for simulating colour film. However, colour film is pretty dim - 16 ft-lamberts (50 cd/m2) is standard. Images look a lot more colourful if they are brighter. If you want really high-contrast images, you need something like a LCD monitor with a variable LED blacklight, which gives you your local 100:1 contrast and a huge overall contrast ratio. Have a look at http://www.brightsidetech.com/tech/bstech.php.