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LED-Based LCD Display Tested
vrioux writes "Tom's Hardware reviews a pre-production NEC SpectraView 2180WG-LED, a new type of LCD display using LumiLED technology, which is a mixture of LED arrays and lightguides. The technology provides near-perfect (98% accurate) color reproduction and uniformity with no apparent downside. This new backlight technology seems like a clear winner for future LCD panels." From the article: "The 2180WG-LED's superiority is overwhelming. 98% of the colors were perfect; and all were at least correct. The result you see is for calibration for the sRGB standard. Unfortunately, the on screen display (OSD) on the model we got from NEC wasn't finalized, so we weren't able to test at other color temperatures. We've asked for a production model so that we can get a better idea of how it performs at 9300K and 5000K."
What ever happened to OLED displays? Or did I just miss out?
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well I know the old adage about showing TV displays on TV, I guess that would apply here, but I'd still like to see a screenshot of the thing with a display on it.
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that looks ugly. Might not be really scientific criticism, but it reminds me of those old library computer terminals.
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With no apparent downside... except of course for the $6000+ price tag.
Another promising technology for displays is SED. Essentially using the same phosphors as a CRT, but each element which is laid out the same as an LCD has its own electron emitter behind it. No vacuum 'tube' like current CRTs, thin, and without the colour issues around LCDs.
Whether or not it becomes economically feasible is something else entirely, of course. More information on wikipedia
...that my next monitor will be from the makers of Lite-brite?
It uses the LEDs as backlighting for the LCD display.
Money for nothing, pix for free
It can't be a LED-based LCD.
Why not? It has LEDs providing the backlighting, and liquid crystals gating the subpixels. The LEDs aren't firing separately for each pixel, they're just providing a more even, higher-quality, longer-life, and hugely more expensive source of light than the fluorescent tubes more commonly used. The result is more vibrant colors, more even contrast, and no hot pockets in the corners of the screen. All of which are things I'd certainly want if I were spending $6k on a display.
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One thing is for sure it doesn't have the same viewing angle aslcd or plasma ;)
-Mark
I've seen one of these in action before; color reproduction/quality was amazing. It was the first time I'd seen a non CRT display that I'd be willing to use for photo work.
Nice to see a bit of ASR Redundancy every now and then.
(That's Acronym Suffix Redundancy)
No matter what the device, moving to LEDs is always an improvement in my book -- they're low power, last basically forever, and all the rest of it. This is pretty nice technology from NEC. Now all we need are a few other manufacturers to get in on the LED action and drive the prices (and the thickness of the display) down.
At the same time, I can't help thinking that the whole design paradigm of using a light generation source, with a filter in front, is sort of non-optimal. All the work that has to be done to spread the light correctly with those lightguides etc. It'll be interesting to see where display tech goes in the next 15 years -- maybe some sort of sheet of micro-LEDs that emit light for individual pixels.
Although, what with the current desire to significantly increase DPI, and the graphics card power we have now starting to make it feasible, this probably wouldn't work too well... I don't know how likely we are to develop LEDs at cellular dimensions any time soon.
Back in the day SED stood for Smoke Emitting Diodes.
What, exactly, do you think DOES the backlight job in cellular LCDs?
Those use LEDS for _AGES_.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
The big thing of the this is not that its as good as CRTs (every manufacturer has high end LCDs with integrated colour correction that are as good, no matter what ignorant ./ groupthink people always claim without anything to back it up).
This particular device blows CRT out of the water. Due to the fact that it uses indepentend sources for reds/blues/green, it can shift the colour temperatur without any need for recalibration the lookup tables.
Because the light source is solid state, it can cover more then the whole adobeNTSC colour space (while CRTs CANT. There is a limit to what you can make phosphor emit by hitting it electrons in terms of spectral cleaness and range)
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Pretty exciting for CG artists. My current monitor is an NEC 1970 GX. It's not a CRT but it still has one of the best images I've ever seen for a computer screen. The conrast and saturation is amazing. I can't wait to get a look at the combo monitor. Seems to solve the problems inherent to both systems. Also has the potential for once of a decent laptop screen. Most are pretty mediocre. My current laptop has a bad blue grey shift making it useless for color work. The price tag is daunting at this point but the price will drop. If they can get it down to a third of that price I'd buy. In truth I'd get mighty interested at half that price. Barring a lottery win it's out of my league for now. At least it's good to see things headed in that direction. The progress in LCD displays or the last five years has been remarkable. I still remember my first notebook 15 years ago. It had a passive matrix. I was impressed at the time but having the cursor disappear when you moved it too fast was a real pain. Also the video games of the time looked pretty terrible unless you used an external monitor. Personally I got tired of hauling 19" montors around. The new LCDs look amazing and are a fraction of the weight. The last Viewsonic CRT I had was a piece of junk. Sad to see Viewsonic fall. Their LCDs just can't compete with the NECs and really don't look any better than ones selling for dramatically less. The biggest problem I see with LCDs is the text tends to ghost badly. Mine looks good but some were so bad that you couldn't even read fine print. People have gotten spoiled by cheap equipment. 20" plus pro level monitors used to run 5 or 6 grand back in the mid to late 90s. It's not for the average game player at this stage. Professional artists and photographers will happily pay the money for the quality. After a while the prices will drop and they will be approachable to gamers and the budget minded graphics people. The turnaround time has compressed in recent years. I bought a DVD burner four years ago. I paid $550 and was quite happy with the purchase. A month later the same one was $450. Three months later I saw it for $350. Now you can get one for $50 or less. It might have made sense to wait but A: I didn't know they would drop that fast and B: I got a lot of use out of it in those three months. Hopefully a year from now the new monitors will drop to half their initial price.
This thing looks more like a Dell branded iMac G5 than it does state of the art monitor tech from NEC
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From what I've read, I'd like to know what their warranty is on stuck pixels. With a certain manufacturer (samsung Samsung SAMSUNG) you can get LCDs with a warranty so good they'll replace your entire monitor if ONE pixel gets stuck. As for this new NEC monitor, with all that new, extra technology I'd say the chances for stuck pixels would be high until a few more models down the line. Then again I might be saying nonsense since some later bits in the article could say otherwise.
The technology provides... uniformity with no apparent downside.
Yup, the monitor is so uniform in fact that its feature article keeps on crashing FirefoxB2. This is the first time in my experience that an article covering NEC monitors could crash my browser if I'm not using an NEC monitor. Not that I'm paranoid, (my tinfoil hat is in the mail as-we-speak,) but I think they must have something against Samsung.
we weren't able to test at other color temperatures
Just put a bunsen burner under it and I'm sure you'll see some pretty colors in no time.
Redundant Acronym Syndrome Synd... uh, oops
Personally, I'm much more interested in this technology. These guys vary the brightness of individual LEDs in their backlight array, which results in a vastly higher dynamic range. (Near-infinite contrast ratio, basically.)
-jcr
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So the basic LCD panel itself isn't anything noteworthy. I've seen people make their own LED backlighting for car installs for extra brightness using ultra bright LEDs with reflective materials and another material for absorbing the light and deflecting it. If you used a faster refresh panel and made your own backlighting that would sound optimal, of course their lighting was white only, and I'm guessing from the article that this uses multiple color LEDs.
The only thing I see to make up for this crazy high cost is R&D and the processing behind the color management via LED's brightness.
Hopefully a competitor will come out with the same techniques for a much lower cost, because frankly 6 grand is outrageous.
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Juste about how many people DO correctly setup refresh rates for their displays ?
Going back to a CRT based technology like SED, means the return of 60Hz-flicking junk.
PHB and other non-technical joe-6-packers (basically anyone for whom "Refresh rate" sound science-fiction or is something you look for on a check list), won't like them because they flicker.
So there're won't be a huge market penetration.
The product will be sold only in special hi-tech equipemment (like medical displays) that come pre-tuned. Or hi-end displays sold to people who will be able to correctly use them (architects ? artists ?). Because of this small niche market, don't expect those display to sell cheaply.
just my 0.02$
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While this is a great display, that addresses many of the problems of flourescent LCD displays, there's a more exciting one that I've recently read about that unfortunately I can't find the link to at this time.
All color LCDs up to this point use a matrix of black-and-white LCD shutters behind an array of color filters. This means that for any spot on the screen, two-thirds of the light is always blocked (a red pixel will always block all of the green and blue light). It also means that a 1280x1024 display really needs to have 3x1280 or 3840 pixels across. (This is not completely a bad thing for computer displays -- current text display drivers take advantage of this to give higher resolution)
This new LCD panel uses no filters, but instead flickers the backlight R/G/B very quickly. The LCD shutters turn on and off in sync with the backlight color, so if a part of the image is red, the LCD pixel shutters are only clear when the red backlight is on.
This allows a much lower-power display, as you are only using 1/3 of the light.
Conceivably one could use more than three colors of LED, too, to get wider gamut -- although that's not part of the product that I recall seeing.
Anyway, I'm still holding the torch for SED displays mentioned above, but these LCD advances are looking very strong indeed, and could surpass SED brightness, flatness, color purity, and low-power characteristics before SEDs can be mass-produced.
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
but a display using LEDs is by definition not an LCD, correct? LED is "Light Emitting Diode" and LCD is "Liquid Crystal Display". LEDs are not LCDs.
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unfortunately is part of the 2% of incorrect colors so it's still CRT all the way for porn. Take that IPOD porn sites.
It's 8.3in thickness, 40lb weight, and difficult screen rotation are also definite design handicaps. If I want a monster with good color performance on my desk I'll just buy a CRT...
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Aren't we supposed to be doing our duty and demanding HDCP on our monitors? I mean who wants to spend $6000+ on a monitor that would not let Windows Vista display HD content on?
;)
Personally, I would just fix that in software.
So you can find a 21" monitor that is no more than 8.3" thick and weighs less than 40lbs can you?
A CRT would be much thicker and heavier.
I know I'm going off on a bit of a tangent here, but an above post got me thinking. How many average computer users are currently running their CRT based monitors at a 60HZ refresh? I know I can pick out a 60Hz refresh from a distance however your average person doesn't seem to notice...except for their eyes hurting at the end of the day. I know even back in the day when i was working in a computer store and there would be two monitors with different refresh rates next to each other, even when pointed out half the time the customer couldn't tell the different.
Which raises another question...If the display settings are set at 60Hz, and then locked out so you couldn't even change it if you wanted to, is that grounds for a protential lawsuit?
Just some thoughts...
-Chris
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
This LCD's depth is the base, the screen body itself appears similar to NEC's current LCDs, in that it's around 4" deep. The 8" base is necessary, unless you want your $6000 monitor to tip easily when you bump your desk. And at least the screen rotates...not to mention that this is still a pre-production model. I just hope it doesn't take five or ten years for this to become feasible for mere mortals.
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...with no apparent downside...
What could possibly go wrong!?
Hasn't anyone else noticed how crappy the specs are? Brightness 230 nits, contrast 430, viewing angle 176 degrees. I have an ancient Samsung 213T 21.3" - 250/500/170 - and an ordinary 204T 20.1" - 300/700/178. The new 214T 21.3" will be 300/900/178. Any of these cost 1/10 to 1/6 as much as this overpriced clunker.
The colors look perfectly fine to me - far better than a CRT where the 3 color guns quickly wear at differential rates.
Sheesh, I thought this thing was supposed to IMPROVE brightness and contrast.
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Offtopic, but man. I understand that the site's free for me to view (or not view), and that ads are necessary
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but, the content seems secondary to the ads.
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I was hoping for a 'Printable Version' but I guess it's not there, or I somehow missed it.
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All diodes can be converted into Smoke Emitting Diodes with the proper circuit. Simply conntect the diode in reverse to its manufacturer's recommendations and provide sufficient voltage and current.
If done properly, this method can yield large quantities of smoke. If done enthusiastically, this method can also yield micro-lightning (sparks. If done to excess, this method can yield fire.
Unfortunately, this connection method also turns the diode into a one-shot.
If you forget about the future, the future will forget about you.
I've searched but cannot find the article. Anyone else remember that? Since the parts and manufacturing cost was supposed to be so low, they claimed we would have 50" flat screen HDTVs for less than $500 in a few years.
Does the SED result in less power consumption and heat generation than a conventional smoke machine, yet put out the same volume of smoke?
My heavy-metal cover band wants to know.
The color range may be good, but why the poor contrast ratio?
The technology sounds similar to Brightside's Extreme-Dynamic Range Display. Both are LCD monitors backlit by an array of LEDs, but Brightside claims a 200,000:1 contrast ratio because backlights can be turned off entirely for black pixels. The SpectraView clocks in with a 448: 1 contrast ratio... it seems like they should be able to do the same thing.
"it has been impossible to get a true white display on TFT"
bullshit
I was buying Sharp industrial grade TFT back in 1999 which had the original backlights removed and replaced with high intensity 1500 candela jobs by a company called Landmark in the states, to this day at native resolution it blows away EVERYTHING else, even my 21 inch Sony G520's, people just go "WOW!" when they see it...
know what the secret was?
not the backlight, that just gives you paper white when you want it.
the true secret was a 300 dollar RGB to TFT board buried in the back of the screen, in preferenve to the cheap consumer grade crap ALL these TFT's have to do this job.
Tom's should stick to talking about selling ad space, it's the one thing they know about.
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Photographers go to great lengths to calibrate their monitors.
This announcement is not very impressive from a photography standpoint. The sRGB colourspace has a very small gamut relative to most monitors. sRGB is the intersection of the gamuts of most screens, photographic prints, CMYK printing, LightJet printing, and slide film.
If they want to show how good the screen is (for photographers), accuracy in the sRGB colour space is not what to show. They should show the contrast ratio for each colour (RGB)(determines gamut), And that it is very consistant across the screen, and that it stays consistant over time.
Fitting a standard colourspace is not an advantage since it must be calibrated for local lighting conditions anyways (unless an off pixel is 100% absorbtive).
Did you notice the tooltips on the links were ads as well?
I quote: ...By the way, the "WG" in 2180WG-LED stands for Wide Gamut, and now we know why....
Its superiority is overwhelming. The SpectraView 2180WG-LED covers more colors in the reds and greens, and it's just as good for blues. In fact, the SpectraView 2180WG-LED is one of the rare monitors that can claim to fully cover the Adobe RGB color space, which is much more demanding than the traditional sRGB.
End quote.
Most CRTs cannot handle the whole Adobe RGB.... pretty good for a 6,000 lcd! LCDs that could handle that kind of range cost many 10s of thousands of dollars, and are mainly only used in the medical field. I would say this monitor is quite a price breakthrough for this level of quality.
The one major drawback with OLED monitors at the moment is their lifespan. The blue OLEDs have historically had a tendency to die before the others, which isn't a problem for a MP3 player screen but pretty much ends a video display. That said, what's the oldest display you've got?
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Dell is always ripping Apple off...
This Slashdot article is one of the stupidest I've seen in a long time. Billing a LED-based display as a new kind of LCD display is idiotic. It's LED, not LCD. So it's not a new kind of LCD display.
If you're unfamiliar with the technology, a moment with Google and Wikipedia might help make you look less dumb.
I have one of these, and with my blast furnace, I was able to test it at 5000K. At 5000K, it burst into flames almost instantly, and all the plastic parts either burned or melted then boiled. All that remained was a charred steel frame and some cinders. At 9300K, the steel frame also vaporized and very little of the remains were recognizeable from the original monitor. All told, I do not recommend using this monitor for such high-temperature applications.
Unknown host pong.
I don't think there's a way to wire each beam to a permanent power source.
There isn't a single wire going from the display controller chip to every last one of all millions of pixels.
You can do this for digital whatch when there's a dozens of "bars" composing the numbers, but you cannot for 3 million pixels (1024x768x3)
OLED, LED, LCD, SED, etc... _DO_ scan the whole display.
For such flat displays, the controler scans all connection in a grid.
Without continuous power, the individual beam for each phosphor isn't continous either, and the pixel could flicker between grid scans, if refresh rate is low.
LCD don't flicker because of the slow chemical process in pixels (crystal reorientation).
Huge LED display could have reduced flicker, because the size of the display gives room to put a capacitor next to each led. But it's more difficult for small phosphors of a SED to have something that keeps the beam "on" between grid scans.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Look up the definition of "base". The most fitting definition from Answers.com is: "The fundamental principle or underlying concept of a system or theory; a basis." The backlight doesn't fit that description. Some LCDs don't even have backlights.
Great product but for $6000 you can buy an awsome computer and one of the best LCDs on the market. At any rate, a great step forward though.
The box said: Requires Windows 98 or better. So I installed Linux!
WTF?
Just to be a pedant; An LED (Light Emitting Diode) display is probably not a LCD (Liquid crystal display). Different technologies. We seem to be using LCD to mean thin, flat panel display.