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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?
"#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.
(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."
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 ]
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 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."
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.
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
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.