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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.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
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
that looks ugly.
I don't think the enclosure is necessarily designed to look pretty. It's probably not the target market of graphic designers, probably medical imaging and so on. In those markets, the actual image on the screen is far more important than any consideration of how the screen is packaged.
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.
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
Die First, Then Quit
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.
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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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
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Um... no.
CRTs flicker because they use a single electron source to scan over all of the pixels on the display, it takes a while (1/60 of a second in the case of a 60Hz display) for it to scan over every pixel and start over at the first pixel, and the pixels slowly dim as they wait to be rescanned and get a sudden surge of brightness as they hit their turn in front of the electron beam.
If each pixel had it's own dedicated electron source that could always be on, there would be no reason for a display to flicker.
It's still and LCD because that is the technology that displays the picture. In this case, the LEDs replace the lightbulb that sits behind the display. LCD crystals do not generate light, they need a light generator behind, or in front of them. Using LEDs instead of light bulbs is better for: less heat usage, less power usage, longer lasting, and apparently better colour representation.
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.
If the source was always on, would there be a potential for burn in or some kind of 'wearing out' of the individual phosphor?
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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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Well I assume they either wouldn't use a source that's always on -- as long as it refreshs the image at about 100Hz there's no problem because that's what current CRTs do and burn-in hasn't been a problem with CRT displays for quite some time -- or (which is IMHO more likely) they'd use electron emitters that are a lot weaker and a coating that's optimized for longer but less intensive light emission -- because today the phosphor is optimized for pulsed activation (hit->strong light->short cooldown->next hit) while in a SED it could be active all the time. Also, instead of 3 emitters you suddenly have a million which limits the power of the individual emitters.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
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?
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.
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