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Making LCD Displays Snappier
newSlashUser points out a very interesting article at ExtremeTech about a new means of more quickly
controlling LCD panel response, so the old complaint that LCD panels make poor displays for gaming and high-motion video may be whittled down a bit. As a bonus, the change is all in the controller, so it doesn't require any change in the way the panels are manufactured.
is the fixed resolution they come with. Many applications I use for 3D require at a minimum 1280X1024, but work best at 1600X1200. So I wouldn't say that slow draw is the only problem, as this site states.
I am Jack's HTTP Server
This would really be fun :) Imagine playing Quake, or Flight Sim, and not worrying about missing things because the display was too slow?
:)
I want one *drool*
Lemon curry?
Having just upgraded all my CRT monitors to LCD, The difference in refresh was only noticable after the first week or so. But the clarity of the LCD screen makes all the difference. I look forward to this coming forward and letting me spend more money :)
One Key question is how does microsoft's ClearType work with this, as is uses Aliasing across pixels, does it effect the the refresh rate as well?
`find / -name "*your_base*" -exec chown us:us {} \;`
Why is it that everything has to be measured in "how the hardware runs Quake 3"?
Scientific computing is the real hardware test!
The number of areas where CRTs were superior to LCD displays continues to dwindle. It used to be they were only smaller/lighter. But in exchange for that, you paid 4x as much, and if you typed faster than 40wpm all you'd see is a grey smudge for 15 seconds (I remember the monochrome, passive matrix screen on my Powerbook 145b). Now the prices are becoming dollar-for-dollar competitive with CRTs, they are still smaller/lighter, and now they might actually be able to handle Quake 3 Arena and look as good as my 20" monitor (and yeah -- they are pretty close to that now, especially with a still image, but...). I think the days of the CRT really are numbered this time around.
This might finally make LCD panels usable for action gamers. Those of us addicted to quake/CS/UT have put off upgrading to the spiffiness of LCD's for a while because they've been utterly useless for gaming. I really would like the sharpness of an LCD on my desktop, and now I may have a good reason to get one!
"No, no, no. Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."
the whole article struck me as a little bit "telemarket shopping"ish i think i will reserve judgement untill i see one in action :)
mind you, a monitor on the wall would be nice
The Borg assimilated my race & all I got was this lousy T-shirt
And this has something to do with LCDs? Get a clue.
If you can get your LCD controller to run at 60-80Hz, you should be able to implement this technique in software: compute change-corrected frames, where the ``feed-forward'' bits disappear faster than the human persistence rate. There's plenty of CPU for this, and the psychovisuals help: any reasonable transient errors in the LCD response are likely to be masked by the fact that the changing pixels are likely changing due to motion...
I had always just sort of assumed that controllers already did this, since it's so obvious. Even better would be to have the controller actually measure the pixel modulation (which it it should be able to do using the same mechanism it uses to change it) and use feedback, which would likely provide even faster response.
Sadly, at the end of the day, the 40Hz limit on skewing reasonably priced panels over the full range will continue to be a problem. With feedback and feedforward techniques, can one use higher pixel modulation voltages to improve this as well? I don't know, but I would guess one could...
Organic LEDs are on the way in probably about 5 years or so, and I am willing to wait for them. Cheaper to produce, no backlight, and flexible. Production screens for cell phones and camcorders are being produced, so it's only an engineering step to up-size them. They are also more durable and scaleable than LCDs.
It's nice that LCDs are getting better, but even better stuff is just down the pike.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
From the article: One key result to note, however, is that switching from any gray shade to black is the fastest of all. This is because switching to black simply requires that the voltage to the cell be set to maximum, and the cell responds quickly.
What the hell? Don't they mean the voltage is turned off to get black? Or maybe they're confusing it with white? I don't understand why you need power to produce black...
...unless they give it so much voltage that the thing responds quickly and pops - producing a gaping black hole in the cell's place.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
First, why the hell did this new item draw a flood of offtopic firstpost/trolls/flames/WTC-jewish-conspiracies?
Maybe I'm the smartest person on the planet. Or maybe this "new technology" is bloody obvious and should have been implemented ages ago. In my oppinion the technique is blantant once you see the response time graph. Large changes respond faster, so you overdrive the pixel and stop when you get to the desired brightness.
This obviously warrants many broad patents. Oddly, the word patent never appears in the article.
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
What do you mean, fixed resolution? Are you saying that you cannot change resolutions at all on LCD screens (which I seem to be able to)?
A 1600x1200 screen does 800x600 by using 2x2 block pixels, or 1024x768 by using 1x1,1x2,2x1,2x2 pixels (ugly).
I may be missing something, but wasn't the article talking about greyscale only? Looks like it's going to be even longer before we see the same thing in all 32k color shades.
Happiness is relative, Based upon the way we live.
http://www.panoramtech.com/
:D pretty close to it :D
The ultimate monitor
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
Apple's LCD displays are probably the best that exist, beating out SGI by a large margin. I've never had a moment's problem playing Quake or Unreal Tournament on my TiBook or G4, using either the Studio or Cinema display.
Perhaps the solution isn't more hacks, but better hardware. Sure, it comes at a price, but I'd rather drop an extra couple hundred for something that actually works.
Hippies smell.
I think LCDs could be improved a little bit in the dark color range. Unlike a CRT, which is a black surface on which color is added, LCDs are a white surface on which color is subtracted by blocking the light.
IMO, the image on LCDs already looks a lot better than that of CRTs, and doesn't fatigue me as much. In fact, no matter what refresh rate I was using with my CRT, I could always see the flicker for some reason. My eyes actually hurt after looking at the monitor for a few hours. This problem got worse proportionally with larger displays, so graphical work was always very tiring. The LCD fixed that. Yes, there is a refresh rate, but it works differently than that of a CRT, so I cannot see the LCD refresh.
I think the advantages of LCDs outweigh the disadvantage of slower animation. Most work I do is either textual (writing or coding) or graphical. There is rarely any fast action going on. (I occasionally play Quake II, the only game I ever bought, but with a CRT. I just don't play for very long. Why should I? There's so much to life that if I'm not working, I prefer to do things unrelated to computers.)
As for television (and this is a weak argument as I rarely watch TV), I think LCDs already accomodate that format quite well. The colors look great. Yeah, fast action isn't as good, but oh well. :-)
Like I said before, the only thing I would improve about the LCD is its reproduction of really dark colors--that is, better blocking of the light.
Why didn't I think of that first?
I mean, if you're merging your car onto the freeway, you floor it until it you catch up with traffic, then let off to maintain constant speed.
You wouldn't even think of going 0 to 60 by applying only the amount of throttle that sustains 60 mph; it would take ages.
My time spent with Philips Flat Displays in Philips Components allowed me time to see this and many other LCD-ish technologies. If you look here at the papers about Motion Compensation, that is the stuff I saw, and in fact, our group was working on the drive electronics to make it work. David Parker, one of the authors on a couple of those papers, is a very cool guy, as were all of the guys at PRL in Redhill, England.
Unfortunately, the LCD panel business slipped into commodity mode too quickly, where 15-inch panels and the displays containing them had to be super-cheap, and that was where Philips wanted to be, so we tabled the project. The simulations, though, showed a drastic difference is clarity and response time, resulting in sharp images suitable for television or video gaming.
As an aside, someone asked about applying voltage to get black. This works best with active matrix displays, while passives use the normally-black approach (apply voltage to get white). If you remember your old laptop displays from back then, dark vertical lines in dialog boxes and the like created vertical lines that ran the height of the screen thanks to voltage leaking to all of the dots in a column, which is not a big problem for actives.
There is a lot of cool stuff in the future of displays. LCD tech of today sorta sucks/ Look for some very cool stuff in multidomain displays and OLED/PolyLED displays.
Parent post claims another NYC attack and mentions anthrax. I live just outside NYC and I can state that this story is FALSE.
Sorry for this off-topic post, but I felt a post claiming ANTHRAX to warrant specific disproof.
SYSOP - I reccommend to blackhole the IP of the anonymous coward. False bioattack posts are pretty serious.
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
LTPS (low temperature polycrystalline silicon)is a new technology that improves the quality of small LCDs (e.g., for handhelds). Supposedly Sony, Toshiba (watch out for the fonts), and Sanyo are early adopters and should start mass production in 2002. Palm-3D-games anyone?
The effects achieved by exposing people to close range low frequency CRT radiation, while slightly different, are more than made up for by the effects of the much higher frequency delivery system portable phones facilitate. Shorter exposure durations are required for the desired effects, and individuals who were left out of the 'computer revolution' are now included, not just through the popularity of hand set use, but also as a result of the proliferation of the microwave broadcast towers used throughout urbane areas.
Ask yourself what is achieved by this, (research is required), and who benefits. Hint: It has nothing to do with cancer.
-Fantastic Lad
Does anyone have any insight into whether some of the issues surrounding different hemispheres affect LCDs the same way as CRTs? Or do they retain 100% functionality when the same unit is used in either hemisphere? Do they have their own unique issues when used in another hemisphere?
I came across this tidbit (scroll waaay down to B3.5.2 TV Info) which I shall excerpt:
Slashdot: Everything in Moderation, including Moderation itself.
The effects achieved by exposing people to close range low frequency CRT radiation, while slightly different, are more than made up for by the effects of the much higher frequency delivery system portable phones facilitate. Shorter exposure durations are required for the desired effects, and individuals who were left out of the 'computer revolution' are now included, not just through the popularity of hand set use, but also as a result of the proliferation of the microwave broadcast towers used throughout urbane areas.
Ask yourself what is achieved by this, (research is required), and who benefits. Hint: It has nothing to do with cancer.
Just curious, did you cut and paste this text from the ads for those tin-foil hats that block out the alien mind control beams?
In answer to your "ask who benefits" I only see three possible beneficiaries of this sort of babble: people who run call-in talk shows, lawyers who want to stir up doubt till it's thick enough to sue someone with deep pockets, and paranoids who are going to be afraid of something and might as well be afraid of this.
In short, bah humbug.
-- MarkusQ
I just wanted to add that this technique while very nice is not entirely free.
The "voltage spike" used to lower the response time means that there is an increase in power consumption (sp?).
So laptop users may not want this feature enabled while they are traveling..
Of course it depends it the increase of power consumption is large or not..
My oh-so-beautiful T22's LCD is at a wonderful 1400x1050, 14.1". The biggest problem is getting nice wallpaper for it
Will I retire or break 10K?
ala Farenheit 451?
Put them in the fridge?
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Does anyone know why 1400x1050 and 1600x1200 displays, which are now commonplace in mid and high end laptops, can't be found anywhere as stand-alone monitors? You can pay through the nose for the best in lcd displays and still be stuck with a 1280x1024 monitor (with good angle, bright image, dadada...) Why???
I never paid any attention to >18" displays, since they are out of my price range, but I see that even something like the 20.1" NEC LCD2010x has only a 1280x1024 panel.
I'm sorry to add nothing other than agreement, but, well... you're right.
The SGI displays you are comparing the Apple displays to are several year old designs; of course, Apple's displays are better, as are many other LCD monitors on the market. In fact, the 17" PC LCD I'm sitting at has a better contrast ratio than any of the Apple LCDs and costs around $630. The Apple LCD monitors are beautiful designs, but you still pay a premium for the brand, style, convenience, and the non-standard connectors.
Palm-3D-games anyone
No, but Quake is available for PocketPCs.
I work in this area... actually, just about all the big panel makers (including LG/Philips!) are looking at this. The research is most definately still going on, though its now moved on to the "Development" stage. All I can say is people I know in Philips are funding quite a bit of R&D in around "front of display" image processing (addressing essentially all the points people have mentioned here).
The improvement is pretty drastic in older panels but unfortunately the newer panels reduce the gains a *lot* (they're faster anyway). Combine this with big cost hits (you currently need a custom chip with a frame buffer between scaler and timing control or a new timing controller) and this simply won't appear in manstream priced panels.
It will go mainstream, but when it does it will be integrated earlier in the pipeline where you *already* have a frame buffer anyway - in the graphics controller or for LCD/TV capable monitors in an integrated scaler/timing controller.
Andrew
I NEVER Troll.
Honestly; I am willing to bet that if you have done any research at all into the subject, (which I strongly doubt), that it consists of listening to the advertising and 'studies' funded by the telecommunications industry and its affiliates in the hopes that they will brush away any concerns you may have nagging in the back of your mind. Cuz, Cell phones are just too 'cool' for there to be any danger. Denial is a sweet drug indeed.
Please. Use what's left of your mind for a second to consider the following: The human brain, body and nervous system are electrochemical in nature. This is why EEG machines work. It is why stun guns work. To think that bathing the body in electromagnetic radiation has NO effect whatsoever is entirely naive.
So what are the effects?
Do the damned research. The multi-billion dollar telecommunications industry certainly isn't going to tell you. (The industry which has fingers in media and everywhere else!) All the information is out there, and it is not quack science. The research has been performed by many private labs. --And labs run by foriegn governments. Look at the Polish studies from the sixties to present. Look at the Swedish studies. (Though theirs have been tamed; they only admit to significantly higher levels of miscarriages in female CRT users.) Heck, look at the American studies during the same time period. Look up, "Alan Frey", a fellow funded by the U.S. military no less, to work on EM weapons and espionage devices from the sixties to present. Some of his work is on public record, and it is extremely revealing. There are dozens upon dozens of examples, but you will not see any of them on the "Learning" Channel. (The Indoctrination Station).
--There are also plenty of labs funded by telecommunications and military interests who will say different. The U.S. Air Force openly funds a lab which has specifically gone to the effort of discounting ALL claims made by private science groups which have come forth with troublesome findings regarding EM radiation. Massive P.R. bullshit. And why the heck does the military care? And who is funding the military? --Like killing flies with cannon.
Honestly.
This stuff is out there in verifiable form for those who aren't scared to dig. Go through the U.S. Air Force websites. Go through Google. Just do the damn research for crying out loud! --Do it before making any more asinine comments and generally displaying the embarrassing levels to which you have been programmed by those agencies who are clearly a lot smarter than you think you are.
Or don't.
You can always go back to your Playstation or tune into the soothing voice of CNN. Your level of awareness is entirely up to you.
-Fantastic Lad Oh, please! Mod me down again! Prove to me the fear you have of open discussion regarding 'taboo' subjects. Damned children.
as in liquid crystal Display Display?
This might not seem important, but if you (read:
-- for undocumented cisco commands, take a peek @ dotu
One of the big problems with "TV" on flat panels comes not from the flat panel response time, but the conversion from 24 FPS film to 30Hz video, often followed by some kind of compression. All the fooling around to accomodate interlaced displays adds artifacts. Movies transmitted by television or stored on DVD ought to be sent at 24FPS 1080p HDTV, then shown on a flat panel at 24FPS. That's rarely the case today, but we're getting there.
What's needed are some good, simple 21" flat panel HDTV sets that cost about $450. Then HDTV will take off. But we're probably five years away from that price point.
Just got my hands on a new Sony M61 DVI TFT, sitting alongside my Vision Master Pro410 CRT. Lets just say that under all circumstances (games as well) the sony TFT is a million times better - its clearer, perfect colour matching (DVI works a treat) and perfect geometry. For the money (£500) this Sony is smashing. All those people who think TFT sucks, just keep thinking that way, I'm going to buy shares in an opticians ASAP!
So get a Dell Inspiron 8x00 or a high-end IBM Thinkpad. That's what I did. A 1600x1200 LCD screen is great! And its not super-expensive, through Dell at least. (Fonts are small but I don't care.)
About 3-6 months ago I went looking for notebooks with 1600x1200 screens (and built-in CD-RW drives) and after noticing that Dell had em, I checked to find out who else did. HP, Compaq, Gateway, and Sony didn't, but IBM (and Dell) did.
Check out the Dell Inspiron 8100 (also sold with Linux on it through Emporer Linux.) And IBM has a somewhat more expensive ThinkPad A Series A22p.
While the font size is small, it is configurable and I appreciate the greater screen real estate.
--LP
All they showed was that women sitting on a chair for long periods were more likely to mis-carry. It was the seating position rather than the EM radiation that was most likely the culprit.
I'm out of my tree just now but please feel free to leave a banana.
It isn't dificult if you have a half-way decent math background, just very tedious. And, as it turns out, pointless. Unless the cell phone companies are conspiring to change the laws of physics (which I strongly doubt), the fears over cell phone useage are nothing more than ludite humbug.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. I however agree with one point you made:
You can generally measure the degree of somebody's programming by the violence of their knee-jerk response when you point the fact out to them.