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."

OLED?

[Apotekaren]

What ever happened to OLED displays? Or did I just miss out?

Another promising technology

[baryon351]

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 [wikipedia.org]

Re:led based lcd

[ottffssent]

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.

A hot item for CG graphics.

[Belseth]

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.

Looks like Dell ripped off Apple for some reason

[Rod76]

This thing looks more like a Dell branded iMac G5 than it does state of the art monitor tech from NEC

Re:These are amazing

[Keeper]

If you RTFA, you'll notice that they address this issue and note that performance in this area is lightyears ahead of traditional LCD monitors.

From what I saw of the demo unit, viewing angle wasn't an issue. I thought at some newfangled thin CRT at first (the monitor is rather 'thick'). I didn't notice any dropoff or color shifting.

I was impressed by it, and it isn't often that happens. As I said, this was the first display I'd ever seen that I'd consider replacing a CRT with.

Now, there is the small matter of the pricetag...:(

Re:Better than it seems

[Keeper]

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

Accurate color display isn't the issue. The issues are limited gamut and contrast. Additionally, blacklevels and colors shift with your viewing angle AND based on where you're looking at on the screen.

You are incorrect about the display gamut CRTs are capable of. You don't have to look very hard to find professional wide gamut CRT displays that are more than capable of displaying the Adobe colorspace.

I wouldn't say this device blows CRTs out of the water. It definately blows traditional LCD displays out of the water -- bigtime (I've seen a demo unit; it is very impressive). I would definately consider replacing a CRT with one, but I'd have trouble picking out a winner between the two.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Some issues.

[dawhippersnapper]

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.

Better LCD technology available

[Thagg]

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

Re:CRT technologies : my 0.02$

[NeoSkandranon]

If the source was always on, would there be a potential for burn in or some kind of 'wearing out' of the individual phosphor?

Refresh Rates

[shoemakc]

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

Re:CRT technologies : my 0.02$

[nutshell42]

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.