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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.
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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 {} \;`
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.
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
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.
The buffer lag should be less than the transition lag. The silicon buffers should have a quicker response than the LCD components, but this is just an educated guess.
Also feel free to correct if wrong.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
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.
teh way lcd screens work is (through magic) they seperate the white backlight into vertical bands of red, green, and blue (not necessarily in that order).... so you have three sub pixels per pixel, each one is individually controlled.
(that is what microsoft's cleartype(tm) leverages... since, the order of the subpixels are known, you can render to individual subpixels by using color values... and stuff)
(grc.com has a better explination of cleartype)
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I'd say that price is still a more important factor; I play UT on my laptop (15" UXGA panel) all the time, and I don't have any blurring problems.
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
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?
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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..
Get It here. [Apple Store]
Price: $2499. To run this on a PC you will also need a 3dlabs card with the ADC connector. I think those are over $1k as well.
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.
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.
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
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.