Understanding the LCD Technology
The in's-and-out's
of the LCD Display
What exactly do all those statistics, numbers, and specs
mean on the side of the box?
Color Gamut
The human eye can perceive a wide array of colors far more complex then a
computer or even television display can produce. The number of different
colors a display is able to produce is defined as the Color Gamut, which is
commonly measured as a percentage of the NTSC (National Television System
Committee) color standard. The standard range of the color gamut for LCD
displays is 72 percent, but many recent innovations in technology have allowed
displays to produce up to 100% of the NTSC standard and have even gone beyond
that.
In general, the higher the color gamut range, the more colors
your display will be able to accurately create. Color Depth
An LCD's color depth defines the number of levels that each
primary color can render. In an 8-bit panel, the red,
green, and blue colors can each render 256 times, for a total of
over 16.7 million possible color combinations. With 6-bit
LCD panels, which are becoming increasingly more common, the
red, green, and blue colors can each render only 64 times,
making a total of 262,144 colors. This is a huge
difference between the 8-bit and 6-bit panels. In order to
compensate for this huge gap, manufacturers use techniques such
as dithering and frame-rate control to claim up to 16.7
million colors on their LCD, making it hard to distinguish between an 8-bit
or 6-bit display. Backlight
The majority of desktop LCD monitors use backlights made of
cold-cathode fluorescent lamps (CCFL). However, the use of LEDs
for backlights is growing more popular. LED backlights use
a grid of either white or mixed red, blue, and green LEDs to
create the backlight. It is believed that with the use of
LEDs, the panel's color is improved because the backlight matches
the color filters of the pixels, thus producing a wider color
gamut. The downside to LED backlights is that they are
more expensive than their CCFL counterparts and can sometimes
age at different rates. Inputs
Ideally LCD displays should come with at least one DVI port,
which is the current standard for LCD displays. However, the
current
standard is slowly becoming blurred as newer and better digital
interfaces, such as HDMI and DisplayPort, become widely available.
Both HDMI and DisplayPort offer greater bandwidth than DVI,
which can be crucial to LCD displays looking to hold a
resolution higher than 1920x1200. If you are looking for
your LCD to display video at resolutions higher than 1920x1200,
you'll definitely be wanting an HDMI or DisplayPort compatible
display. Of course it goes
without saying that you won't (hopefully) be planning to connect
your new LCD monitor with a VGA cable.
HDCP This basically
means that if your LCD display doesn't support HCDP (High
Definition Copy Protection), you won't be able to watch HD DVD
or Blue-ray movies in full resolution.
Contrast Ratio
Don't pay attention to contrast ratios, they are all hype from
the manufacturers who each use a different standard for testing,
so there is little to no basis for comparison.
Manufacturers have also taken to reporting dynamic contrast
ratio's, which are typically much higher (thus much more
impressive) than standard contrast ratio's. Some monitors
offer a dynamic contrast feature which performs on the fly
adjustments to the contrast ratio in order to provide better
grey-scale contrast. The downside to this is that these
adjustments aren't always perfect and your picture can be thrown
either to far into the dark range, or too far into the white
range. Another downside to dynamic contrasting is that if scenes in a
movie or game differ greatly, you will notice the image ghosting
as the monitor tries to keep adjusting the contrast to better
suite the scenes.
Pixel Response Time
Pixel response time refers to how long a pixel takes to change
from once color to the next. A slow pixel response time
can result in ghosting in fast moving scenes such as games.
As pixel response times improve, the more fluid the video will
when watching. Pixel response time is completely unrelated
to the refresh rate, and many will argue that refresh rate
doesn't matter in LCD's, only pixel response times.
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