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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."
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.
The eye has a maximum contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1. There may be little perceptable difference between the two, but the closer the better.
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
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.