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LCoS Shoot-Out Results
mikemuch writes "DisplayMate founder Ray Soniera has revealed the results of his LCoS HDTV Shoot-Out. He puts five HDTV's through a slew of test pattern measurements, and then lets 34 real people, including home-theater lay people and experts, conduct jury tests and make comments. There was one case where the experts gave low marks to a display that the lay people loved. From the article: 'We spent some time trying to understand why the consumer panelists rated the JVC Consumer unit so highly. It had the lowest objective on-screen resolution of all of the units, because of internal signal processing, but a number of consumer panelists commented on how sharp it looked. The copious artifacts and significant edge enhancement produced so much artificial texture in the image that some panelists interpreted it as superior sharpness. All of the Video Experts recognized this effect and gave the unit the lowest score.'"
As they say,
"Ignorance is bliss."
I can guess we can apply this to today's technologies.
Experts also go into these reviews with their own 'professional' bias against specific companies, models and brands while a lay-consumer, like myself, doesn't care if it's a Hitachi, RCA, Samsung or Sony.
Regardless of HOW it gets a 'sharper picture', if it appears to be a sharper picture to my eyes, then of course it's going to get a higher score over something with possibly better technology that SHOULD create a sharper image but creates other problems in it's 'excellency.'
Do you buy a name brand TV that has all of the gizmos and gadgets to make it perfect, or do you buy the Walmart brand TV that looks good and sounds good (to your eyes anyways) until your TV expert friends comes in and poo-poos on everything?
"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested." (LT 2004)
Same as people who buy a super sweet hi-def set, and watch crappy analog cable on it, and then tell you that they're watching hi-def.
These are the same people that put premium gasoline in their 'optimized for 87 octane' car, and then claim they can feel the extra performance.
Yup... but at the end of the day, the important thing is that the person who paid the money for the thing they got are happy with it. Doesn't matter if they don't actually know they're not getting what they thought, so long as they like it, who cares!
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
No Sony LCOS. Give me a break.
"But seriously, I wouldn't expect a "lay person" to be able to understand the technology involved in these units and to be able to make any intelligent\educated distinctions about their quality"
You've got to define quality here -- it depends on your goal and what metrics you assign to measure achievement.
Is your goal to maximize appreciation of the picture quality in your target market? If so, what's your target market -- video experts or typical consumer? What's the crossover between the two markets?
If my customers are more satisfied with my product than the 'experts' say they should be, then good for me. The problem here is not that experts and customers disagree -- the problem is that they are using different metrics. And to the people actually buying my product, it's their metrics that really matter.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Many consumer sets are tuned to be strongly oversharpened. I was at circuit city and some guy was doing consumer research for whatever big company he worked for, asked me to compare some DLP and Plasma units. Since I was doing that for myself anyways, I was happy to oblidge in some discussion.
The JVC at first looked really eye catching and noticable from the rest, but staring at it for three minutes made me realize it was because they cranked the crap out of the sharpness filter. Everything looks sharp and bold for a couple minutes, very eye catching, but after three minutes it gets really exhausting and thoroughly artificial. I cant remember the other set that did this. Way too much post-processing, but it catches your eye.
I told the guy this, he says I was defiantely the first person to ever describe anything as "oversharp" to him. Suprising, considering how much filtering some of these units do.
There's something to be said for a "non-expert" opinion on the matter.
To go back to your analogy of musicians: There is some "music" which is absolutely adored by the experts that sounds like utter crap to the lay person. Why? Because what the expert hears is technical acheivement, innovation, something hard to play that's never been done before. What they lay person hears is an annoying cacophony of seemingly random blarings from an orchestra. I'm thinking of a specific orchestral piece I heard on NPR a few months back. The composer's name eludes me, but his work made a lasting impression...it was impressive to me as a musician that he could write it, but (at best) annoying to listen to.
A monitor can have all the technical features and perfect picture in the world to impress the experts, but if another "inferior" TV somehow fools the average buyer into thinking they're looking at a better picture, which one do you think they'll buy? Last I checked, buyers far outnumber experts.
This article raised an excellent point about the *difference* between what technical experts and average consumers see when they look at a TV. In the end, two things will influence a buyer more than anything: their wallet and their eyes.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Subjectivity is rampant among experts also, for instance many long-time photographers love film grain but can't stand pixelization or compression artifacts. Why? Conditioning.
"IMHO, there's a reason we call them experts and they are the only ones we should really be paying attention to."
ummm...the people best suited to judge the quality are the people who are actually going to buy it and watch it.
One possible explanation for the consumer ratings is that JVC is simply giving consumers exactly what they think they want.
This statement hits the nail on the head...JVC knew what they were doing when they made a technically crappy screen, just like Microsoft cares more about how much users like clippy the office assistant than they do about a buffer overflow. They know what they need to do to sell their product, most other things are irrelevant. Why should JVC give a flying rat's if 100,000 geeks see artifacts when 1,000,000 non-geeks see "sharpness and texture"? They'll probably make more off the geeks by selling them some model they deem "higher-end" than the consumer version for 20% extra, because the geeks will percieve it as being so much better than the "inferior consumer" model. Someone at JVC really knows how to play the consumer perception card real well, and I bet this particular example comes at a manufacturing cost savings as well.
Many smokers are extremely satisfied with their cigarette product, far more than the expert Doctors suggest they should be based on the incidence of cancer.
It may be their metrics that determine sales, but not necessarily their metrics that determine what good is, or even what is in fact good for them.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Most consumers don't want a realistic looking picture, they want the picture they've seen all of their lives. Even with televisions; many of my wife's family and friends upon hearing about my background, asked me to look at their televisions. Most needed minor convergance/pincushion adjustment, all needed brightness/contrast/color/tint adjustment. I made them all look (IMHO) pretty good.
Virtually every set I touched was changed within a week. The single control that was most nudged: color (think saturation). Everybody is used to the cartoon-level, LSD-induced superbright colors of a children's room. Real skin doesn't look like that!. I could even hold my bare arm up next to a character on TV, show my relatives and friends that this is what the picture should look like (gee, flesh looks like flesh. Grass looks like grass), and within ten minutes they'd be cranking up the color.
I gave up. Nowadays, I tell people "I don't do Windows, and that includes televisions". Yes, I get some wierd looks for it, but I also get bothered a lot less.
Buy the television which matches your pocketbook and your expectation of picture quality. Most of you will never miss the extra quality that a 200-300% increase in price will bring; worse, you'll probably adjust the extra quality right out of the set in a quest to get the lurid color balance you want. By the way, on a new set you should have a pretty good picture if both brightness and contrast are set to mid-range. Cranking both of them to max may look like what you want, but you're just cutting the lifespan of your picture tube in half (applies to CRT's only - I have no idea what the effect is on LCD/Plasma displays).
The 6 panel sessions that he had included different types of people. Each panel reported their own complete set of scores. If you want, you can look only at the scores from the "video experts". But comparing the scores of these people with the scores given by high-school and university students is interesting.
The majority of people that view my HD setup (LCD projector on a white screen) are in fact students, or young college grads with tech careers. I know to not put much stock in what they say. This shoot-out gives me more confirmation that the average consumer, or even your average salesclerk in your local electronics retail store has no idea what to look for when evaluating display units.
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A couple minor, minor corrrections. First off, so called "single-pulse PWM" digital LCoS displays running at 120Hz actually pulse the mirrors only 240 times a second. (One pulse to switch to "reflect", one pulse to switch to "absorb", repeated 120 times a second gives 240 pulses.) Older PWM schemes would pulse the mirrors multiple times per refresh, sending out each bit plane one at a time.
Second, "reflect" and "absorb" aren't quite exactly what's going on. The material underlying the crystal is inherently reflective. Liquid crystal works by rotating the light that passes through it, based on how "twisted" the crystal is. An electric field applies force to the crystal to twist it. Pass in polarized light, and you can rotate the light's polarization with the liquid crystal. So basically, the way you switch between "reflect" and "absorb" is by varying the electrostatic charge that exerts force on a given pixel's crystal. You can get states between "reflect" and "absorb" by applying varying amounts of charge. The amount of light transmitted through a polarizer is given roughly by k * cos(theta) where theta is the difference angle between the planes of polarization. It's a tricky proposition, though, since the material itself has all sorts of fun properties, such as hysteresis and whatnot. Plus, in the case of LCoS, the light passes through the crystal twice (in contrast to transmissive LCD), so you're operating over a much narrower range of crystal twist to begin with.
This article has some pretty pictures, as long as you ignore the "Silicone" typo. :-)
I wonder how these LCoS screens look if you have polarizing sun glasses on. Also, does it make a difference if you tilt your head? A fun experiment to try: Put on polarizing glasses, and then look at an LCD display. Now tilt your head 90 degrees. Notice any differences?
This was one detail GM missed when they developed the head-up display for their cars. Because the light reflects off of the tilted windshield, it picks up some horizontal polarization. Polarized sun glassesd have vertical polarization, because most glare has horizontal polarization after reflecting off of a flat surface. Thus, the head-up display information almost completely disappears when I have polarized glasses on. *doh*
--JoeProgram Intellivision!