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Sharp LCD Display with 1,000,000:1 Contrast Ratio
i4u writes "Sharp announces in Japan that it has developed a LCD display with the world's highest contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1.
The Sharp ASV Premium LCD display panel has a size of 37 inch, 1920x1080 pixel resolution and a brightness of 500cd/m2.
Sharp aims the Mega Contrast LCD display at the professional TV and movie production industry. For comparison the Canon and Toshiba developed SED TV has 100,000:1 contrast ratio."
Do not look into the Sharp LCD Display with your remaining eye.
liqbase
I don't think my eyes are good enough for that...I'll have to have another talk with my lasik surgeon that cheap rat bastard...
Insinct is stronger than Upbringing - Irish Proverb
Sharp announces that it has developed a LCD display with the world's highest contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1.
The Sharp ASV Premium LCD display panel has a size of 37 inch, 1920x1080 pixel resolution and a brightness of 500cd/m2.
Sharp aims the Mega Contrast LCD display at the professional TV and movie production industry. Message to Sharp: I also want a LCD display that works well in bright rooms. No word on when this new Sharp ASV Premium LCD displays will be available.
The highest contrast ratio we reported so far about was 100,000:1 reached by a SED TV developed by Canon and Toshiba.
More details in this Sharp press-release (Japanese).
110 words, the rest is ads. What an absolutely useless website.
Doesn't this start to become meaningless at a certain point? I mean, is 1,000,000:1 really any noticeably better than 100,000:1?
Bradley Holt
I wonder if this thing can do black that actually looks black, or if it just gets the high contrast ratio by being able to produce whites brighter than the sun?
Cmdr Taco misread, the actual ratio was 1,000,000:1,000.
"#000000" = black hole; do not touch screen or you'll lose a finger as not even light can escape a black pixel on this display
"#ffffff" = surface of sun; again, do not touch. In fact, wear these protective goggles.
...to put it on the outside of Hotblack Desiato's ship.
How about "manufacturer releases LCD display where pixels don't commit suicide as soon as you look at the screen sideways"
:P
Or "manufacturer releases LCD display where black is black, not grayish"
Or "manufacturer releases LCD display that is actually usable in a heavily lit environment"
Even for movie professionals I'd guess that this is at least as important as being able to see sweat pores on an actress' skin
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Yes, blacks will be very black ... but it is not a HDR display outside of a darkroom.
(HDR displays need much higher max brightness when there is ambient light, couple of thousand cd/m2.)
(1) 1x10^6:1 LCD screen + (1) monkey holding a magnifying glass = "Tartar Word Domination!!!"
You could frickin' blow up the moon with that laser.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
I think they meant to indicate how many people will be able to afford this stupid thing.
Will we finally know Michael Jackson's true color?
Talking about LCD technology
/. crowd will be happy to learn that According to Planar, future imaging applications for its new device may include medical imaging, molecular modeling, CAD/architecture, and computer gaming.
GIS Monitor has an excellent article about new planar 3D monitors (picture included), they are stereoscopic 3D LCD monitors based on an entirely new stereoscopic technology. From the article: The device is particularly well-suited for geospatial image analysts and photogrammetrists, who require 3D viewing to discern depth in the imagery and interpret spatial details.
In addition to this (posted on http://slashgisrs.org/ ), the
Animoog.org
Sharp blew everyone away at CES way back in 1982 with their 4 inch LCD, its not surprising at all that their leading the way still with cutting edge LCD's
Maybe not for the average gaming home application.
...
But in medecine/radiology it can be really useful : makes it easier to spot small subtle differences between to shades of gray on a X-ray pic, when these are located on a larger scale.
i.e.: when an X-ray image has ~1000 shades of gray, and clinically significant information lies in features that are only 2 or 3 levels appart.
You must either use a high contrast display (like this one, or "special for radiology high contrast CRT", or "printed on transparent film and then displayed with ultra-bright backlight")
Or play a lot with contrast & lightning parameters until selected window makes the differences less subtle.
Or even better, use both technique at once.
Also, I'm sure the pr0n industy will find a way to do something useful out of such screens.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
http://sharp-world.com/corporate/news/051003.html
This is a bullshit spec, as are 90% of all specifications given with LCD, Plasma, and any other non-CRT display technology in existence. (The CRT guys woulds lie too if their tech weren't so mature.)
Contrast ratio, brightness, and screen-performance information are generated by suing highly tailored test patterns and performance benchmarks that have little to do with the real image, but a lot to do with published specs.
For example, depending on how the technology responds, the contrast ratio test may consist of a white square, box, or dot on a black field, or a measured sequence of black-to-white screens, with the measured difference in brightness given as the contrast ratio.
The best analogy is speaker specs, which unless they are linked to recognized performance specifications (like frequency response given as plus/minus decibel variance from 20 to 20,000 Hz), are completely misleading. A speaker advertised as delivering 500 Watts may only be able to handle that much power as a transient, and even then a speaker can only "deliver" the power fed into it, which means you also need a 500-W amplifier.
A very good example was at the latest Society for Information Display (www.sid.org) show. Samsung had both the largest LCD and the largest Plasma in existence at the show, and although the brightness and contrast "specs" for the Plasma was greater, the LCD obviously had a brighter and sharper image in operation. True, the blacks were better in the Plasma, but that was the only visible distinction to the discerning viewer and only shows how little a guarantor of performance a high contrast rating is.
This news is certainly encouraging information, and will certainly result in a better-performing display appearing on our shelves soon. But to look at any given spec and shout "halleluia!" is being overly generous.
Read a preview of my novel CYBERCHILD at www.smartalix.com/cyberchild
I have _never_ seen a display that was both big enough to be useful _and_ accurate.
Well, if a panel can display a truly black pixel next to a moderately bright one, doesn't it mean that its contrast ratio is infinite?
How useful is this measure, really?
Sharp LCD Display with 1,000,000:1 Contrast Ratio
Yeah, but does it got better resolution than the real world?
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Actually, this article is about one of the points you raised. The display has fairly high pixel dimensions, but since it's a very large display it's not actually that high resolution. It's nothing fancy in that regard - no pores on skin here.
/at the same time/.
What it *does* do, according to the spec, is solve the greyish blacks and muddy whites problem. Comprehensively. That's what a contrast ratio means - it's the ratio in brightness between the brightest white and darkest black the display can produce
A "Mega Advanced Super Premium" LCD that defies, delivers and is unprecedented, all in the first small paragraph.
I wouldn't want to be in a buzzword drinking game where a sharp marking droid was reading out this press release...
I saw a photo of the screen on a website and the contrast looks exactly like my current screen. Where's the improvement?
"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid, it is true that most stupid people are conservative."
That must use dilithium crystals to push warp plasma through etched conduits to cause a graviton compression wave creating a warp field bubble at each black pixel, forming a microscopic black hole ensuring the pixel is perfectly black.
Seriously though, I close my eyes and things aren't perfectly black, so I'm not sure 10^6:1 is all that useful.
While the different gray shades are all well and good if you have to push your picture down to 72 to 100 dpi then don't you lose the advantage of that color differentiation by filtering out the subtle objects? (I guess you could zoom in but that has its own problems.)
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
Does any else get the mental image of turning on this monitor and suddenly having every square inch of one's face pierced by tiny little pixel-sized laser beams?
You don't care about the min and max here, because the amount of brightness your eye can discern depends on the dialation of your pupil. What matters is the amount you can discern at any given pupil dialation, which is much mushc smaller.
For example, Go into a brightly lit room and try to differentiate between 10 subtle shades of black. Or go into a dimly lit room and try to discern between 10 subtle shades of white.
It should be duely noted that the projector-LCD system presented in the link has a measured ratio of about 54,000:1 as opposed to the theoretical 200,000:1 ratio. However, I plan to build a $3000 display with a ratio of about 70,000:1. The projector-LCD systems have the advantage of being able to take high precision illumination values. You effectively double the amount of information that can be fed into the display by having two "screens" (the projector and the LCD). Perhaps those who want to experiment with HDR imaging and do not mind a bit of bluring should consider building one of these $1500-$5000 setups, as opposed to those 100,000:1 or 1,000,000:1 displays.
For those who have sunglasses, happy hacking.
*I would have given a HTML link if the Authors' links were functional.
I hope so. I really get irked when I walk by a thinly-poled picket fence (is that what you call it) where I can see another part of the fence through it. As I walk down the street I get a very distorting effect of there being a completely solid barrier followed by there being no barrier as the pickets pass between and infront of eachother. Really, it's the closest thing I've seen in real life to pixelation. I demand an upgrade.
Hmm, "LCD Display"...that must be something like a "GUI User Interface". Can we mod the original story as "Redundant"? :-)
Matthew Jeppsen
www.FresHDV.com
do I have to spell out my joke for you?!? sheesh.
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.
It depends on the source.
- CAT-Scan slice can be as small as 512x512 (so there's no fundamental problem of using it on a 72dpi display)
(and i'm only mentionning X-ray produced pictures. There are stuff from nuclear medicine produce picture with very low resolution due to scathering and everything is just about shades of gray... or rather shade of pseudo-color mapping)
- On the other side, mamographies can be as huge (sorry no pun intended) as 4096x4096
(and resolution is critical because you have to spot small calcification that are only a few pixels wide).
So most specialised medical viewing equipement are usually very high resolution (huge dual 2048x2048 B/W CRT are common on radiology "viewing station" - have worked on with some. Great to watch X-ray pics. Great also to watch webcomics on dead (sorry no pun intended) days.)
but :
- it's still useful do be able to zoom, because of the complexity of spatial resolution of the human eye, some details are more likeliy to be seen when at larger or smaller scale.
- there's not only "viewing station". There are doctors who may want to view pictures on their desktop that are connected to regular LCD screens (for the sake of saving desktop space) from the office in their clinic, for exemple : they may want to correlate the current X-ray pic & report, with older one from the hospital's archives and it's way much faster to retrieve the digital backup of the picture and its report from the database, than try to find if there's still an actual transparent print somewhere.
Having high-contrast LCD screen will bring better quality in situation where a workingstation station with normal desktop foot print is needed, like in the internal medicine doctors office.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
how does this get us closer to 3D holographic TV's in our homes?
False color maps are indeed used in some situation like scintigraphy prints from nuclear medecine, or indication of flow on doppler-effect ultra sound pictures.
But there's still some problem to use LUTs everywhere :
- Constrast/Lightning windows. As I said, you play a lot with these when you try to reveal subtle details. If you shift around your window on a gray scale, things that were gray before, will still be gray, you'll still have lighter and darker gary, altought different shade. If you do the same with a pseudo-color table, something that was blue and orange may sundenly become two different shades of green, and color will be jumping happily in a psychedelic way. (I did try it. The software has indeed a built-in pseudo-color mode, for situation when it is needed as i mentionned before).
- Equipement : Most of the ultra-hi-res display used in hospital are older B/W, and it could be very costly to change ALL THE SCREENs to expensive ultra-hi-res color displays, just to be able to display pseudo-colors.
- Experience : most of the training was done using gray pictures. Still, studies have shown that transparent gray films over ultra-bright-backlight gives the best readibility, doctors use them a lot, and so computer display try to emulate those.
- Inertia : we're speaking about doctors. Not techno geek. Most of them are better at medecine than computer stufff (not like me ahem... must work more... must stop reading slashdot... must resist...) And don't want to re-learn everything and get used to something */new/* just because some computer guru said pseudo-colors are better (was once named "psychedelic yak" in the research lab I worked because I do use pseudo-color a lot, even for computer representation of migration gels).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Where are those mod points when you need them ? ...and student's best friend during radiology exams : the sign of the fingerprints-scrathes-on-the-radiology-film....
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
There is no pain like Doom 3 on an LCD unless you turn the brightness up to where black isn't black. The only complaint I have about my LCD is the color deffinition between the very dark colors.
Q: How much more black can the display be?
A: None. None more black.
And only a handful of dead pixels!
What matters is the amount you can discern at any given pupil dialation
Here, take this small, interesting, blue pill. Your eyes will become dialated, and you will be able to perceive all 64,000,000 colors eminating from the monitor at fantastic contrast ratios. Several hours later, when you can move again, you notice that the monitor is a vintage 1981 Sears black and white television.Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
I enjoy my porn as much as the next man but I'm tired of people working it in completely unrelated subjects. The porn industry doesn't have any particular use for a high contrast monitor...
Why in god's name would you assume they'd do something interesting with it? What were you thinking? That maybe they'd send us each a high contrast monitor so we can watch the new "HIGH CONTRAST" porn movies they have in the works?
Seriously...
"Dynamic Range
At any given instant, the retina can resolve a contrast ratio of around 100:1 (about 6 1/2 stops). As soon as your eye moves (saccades) it re-adjusts its exposure both chemically and by adjusting the iris. Hence, over time, you can resolve a contrast ratio of about 1,000,000:1 (about 20 stops)."
So the eye is just the light sensing device and your brain can analyse the composited images -that all have a different focus - with a perception of up to 1 000 000:1...
then an addendum
"
Saccades
Saccades are rapid refocussing actions of the eyes. Many animals are able to quickly look at a point in space (prompted by memory, peripheral vision or an audio cue) without actively looking at anything in between. The eyes simply jerk into a new position. Saccades move the eye at up to 900/s in adult humans.
"
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
What good is 1,000,000:1 contrast when the resolution is garbage? I've got that 24" widescreen dell monitor with 1920x1200 resolution, while this has 37" and 1920x1080? Those pixels must be huge... 1000:1 is plenty being that it's just about as bright as staring into the high beams of any HID or Xenon-equipped car.
The human eye can only see so much. I mean, can you really tell the difference between 100,000 to 1 and 1,000,000 to 1?
So how close are we to 1 TeraContrast?
Wow a contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1, what are the odds of that happening?
In photography terms, 1,000,000:1 is about 20 "stops" (doublings of light intensity), whereas 100,000:1 is about 17 stops.
As a comparison, photographic film can register about a 10-stop range (less for color) within a single exposure. For normal usage, it might be hard to tell this difference between these two screens, but for a movie editor it might be important to see the extremes just a little better.
I owned a SharpVision series LCD projector. Within one year the red LCD panel went bad. I got it repaired under warranty. Then the green, repaired again. Then, just after the warranty expired (1 or 2 years) the blue went bad. At the time a new LCD panel was $1,200 according to the place where I bought it. So I called Sharp and went back and fourth with them for awile asking if they would replace it, because, to me, it seemed like a major problem. They never did anything, I took it as "Too bad, your warranty is up not our fault" Just my story about Sharp, take it how you wish.. Good day Will
Grammar Nazi Nazi?
That sounds like the odds of whether or not these specs are accurate...
It was a Joke, dude! A joke!
*sigh*
Linux is *not* user friendly, and until it is linux will stay with >1% marketshare.
Most people have the wrong idea about contrast ratio. It doesn't neccesarily mean the display is extra bright. It most likely means the black is really friggen black. It is the ratio of the brightness of the white pixel to the brightness of the black pixel. Ever notice how black isn't really black on an LCD display, it's kind of lit up? That's a low contrast ratio for you. Read more at wikipedia.
...was the joke going over your (and the mod's) head at Mach 3.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
The contrast ratio looked the same as my current monitor...
Whatever, I saw a digital photo of the Sharp LCD and the contrast wasn't any better than that of my current monitor.
"Never put off for tomorrow what can be avoided altogether"
Nevertheless it is hard to believe that this 1000000:1 spec is meaningful. Max brightness is quoted as 500cd/m2, so that means that minimum (black) is 500/1000000 or 0.5mcd/m2. That's pretty dim (and unlikely). Turn one pixel on and the light scatter would wash this dim level of light out...
so whats the difference of the Sharp ASV Premium LCD to the other brand, thus the Sharp ASV Premium LCD differ only in price?
cheap flooring materials
Odds I'll ever be able to afford a display incorporating this technology, OR have an apartment large enough to install it? Oddly, eerily, a million to one.