by W.A. Steer PhD
by W.A. Steer PhD
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LCD monitors are rapidly becoming shipped with new computers by default, and are superior to the old CRT screens for the majority of applications. Although liquid crystal displays boast perfect image geometry and should be perfectly sharp, in reality they still have various shortcomings. Viewing-angle dependancies, poor blacks and motion-blur are still issues, particularly for photographic and LCD television applications. Certain flicker or shimmers can be caused by sub-optimal user-adjustment, or shortcuts taken at the factory. On this page I explain a little of LCD screen technology and give you some pointers to the factors which separate the best from the rest. A large number of test patterns are provided to aid setting and diagnosis of your display.
| Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) | (CRT) Cathode-Ray Tube display |
| compact | bulky |
| lightweight | heavy |
| low power (c.20W) | high power (c.150W) |
| perfectly sharp | limited sharpness; tend to blur more at high brightness, and with age |
| perfect image geometry | tend to suffer from geometric distortions, which may be picture (brightness) dependent, and worsen with age |
| "consistent" tonal scale | strong bright areas can cause other regions of the picture to dim |
| excellent text contrast | poor text contrast (bandwidth limited) |
| do not normally flicker | inherently flicker (although peoples sensitivity varies) |
| contrast/colour change with viewing angle | consistent image irrespective of viewing angle |
| poor black on dark images | good blacks (quality monitor, properly adjusted) |
| may cause motion-blur | usually portray motion well |
| peak brightness limited by backlight; photos/videos can appear "flat" | very high (small area) peak brightness possible; gives "sparkle" and "life" to movies/video/photos |
| may have or develop "stuck" pixels | not pixel-based, no problem |
| fixed inherent resolution | support multiple resolutions equally well |
| maturing technology; cost falling | mature technology; cheap |
| native interface would be digital (eg. DVI) | naturally suited to analog interface |
| image can be sub-optimal with analog interface | naturally suited to analog interface |
On the basis of image-quality alone, in my opinion LCD is the monitor of choice for "office" and technical/CAD applications (largely text-based, or detailed but colour-non-critical graphics), while CRT still has the upper hand for high-end photographic/art work and for television displays.
Higher-priced LCDs (probably using "In-Plane Switching" "IPS" liquid crystal modes) marketed specifically for pre-press or
photographic work should have colours which are less affected by viewing angles for that application (IPS tends to have a less-
good black-state -lower contrast- however). "Vertically Aligned" eg "MVA" (Multidomain -VA) boast the darkest blacks, equivalently
highest contrast, of any LCD technology, but response time and viewing angle are poorer than IPS.
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| Line-paired RGB sub-pixel dot-inversion pattern | Row inversion (lower power) used eg. on laptops | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
The following test patterns deliberately excite only one polarity-half of the inversion pattern for some common schemes, and one of them should cause your screen to flicker. This is not a fault with the screen, but enables you to find out which inversion scheme your screen uses.
Note: if using an analog-input monitor, the following tests will not be meaningful unless the clock and phasing settings are correct (see previous test).
Warning to anyone who suffers from epilepsy or other extreme flicker-sensitivity: one or more of the tests below is likely to make your LCD flicker at 30 to 40Hz.
On Internet Explorer, you can switch to full-screen (and back) using F11. You might also want to set the toolbar to auto-hide (right-button menu when in full-screen mode).
Extreme tech:
The inversion pattern for any given screen will inevitably flicker to some extent and is not a fault. If it really flickers a great deal then it may indicate that the common-electrode voltage has not been set up properly. In that case you might also perceive a "dot crawl" effect on plain colours of medium brightness. A grossly mis-set common-voltage will also make your screen more susceptible to temporary 'image sticking' problems.
Common-electrode voltage can sometimes be adjusted by means of an internal preset, or on a manufacturers' configuration screen (adjust for minimum flicker on the inversion-pattern) ...but doing so would almost certainly invalidate your warrantee. Typically, with the optimum setting, the centre of the screen will have minimum flicker on the inversion pattern, while the flicker will increase somewhat towards the left and right edges. If there's a distinct minimum anywhere on the screen, then the setting is pretty close. Note also that the optimum setting is likely to drift over the life of your screen, and may be slightly affected by temperature and the greylevel of the test pattern.
Any adjustments are made at your own risk!
Some diagonal cross-hatch patterns used for shading by CAD programs can interact with inversion and cause objectionable flicker on some LCD monitors - this should only be a problem if the manufacturer has left the common-electrode voltage grossly mis-set. Having seen the severity of the effect on some new monitors (and how easily it could have been tweaked out at the factory), I'm beginnning to form the opinion [January 2005] that in some cases this flicker could argueably be classed as a "fault" with the product.
Laptop LCD screens tend to be optimised for lower power, with some relaxation of image-quality criterion. As well as (often) lower brightness and less saturated colours, laptop screens usually use a 'row inversion' (aka 'line inversion') scheme rather than the dot inversion now universal in desktop screens. If you look closely at a row-inversion LCD, particularly if it is showing a fairly plain, mid-brightness colour, you may see a slight horizontal line interference pattern on alternate lines, which may appear to drift up or down the screen. This is also not uncommon on colour mobile-phone displays, or personal DVD players.
A fortunate side-effect of inversion (see above) is that, for most display material, what little cross-talk there is is largely cancelled out. For most practical purposes, the level of crosstalk in modern LCDs is negligible.
Certain patterns, particularly those involving fine dots, can interact with the inversion and reveal visible cross-talk. If you try moving a small Window in front of the inversion pattern (above) which makes your screen flicker the most, you may well see cross-talk in the surrounding pattern.
Different patterns are required to reveal cross-talk on different displays (depending on their inversion scheme). The following patterns may show cross-talk on your screen.
These patterns are not comprehensive and should not be used blindy to rate one screen against another. The appearance of a visible cross-talk from any of these patterns does not indicate a "fault condition" with your display!
Newer liquid-crystal modes such as Vertical Alignment ("VA") or In-Plane Switching ("IPS") have less viewing- angle dependence, but may suffer slower response times and/or lower contrast.
Refresh rate is the rate at which the electronics in the monitor addresses (updates) the brightness of the pixels on the screen (typically 60 to 75Hz).
For each pixel, an LCD monitor maintains a constant light output from one addressing cycle to the next (sometimes referred to as 'sample-and-hold'), so the display has no refresh-dependent flicker.
There should be no need to set a high refresh rate to avoid flicker on an LCD.
Response time relates to the time taken for the light throughput of a pixel to fully react to a change in its electrically-programmed brightness. The viscosity of the liquid-crystal material means it takes a finite time to reorientate in response to a changed electric field. A second effect (which has a rather more complicated explanation) is that the capacitance of the LC material is affected by the molecule alignment, and so if a step change is brightness is programmed, as the LC realigns the cell voltage changes and the brightness to which it settles is not quite what was programmed. Unless 'overdrive' (which tries to pre-compensate for this effect) is employed, it may take several refreshes before the light output stablises to the correct value. Response rate for dark-to-light is normally different from light-to-dark, and is often slower still between mid-greys. VESA and others define standard ways of measuring response time, but a single figure rarely tells the whole story.
Manufacturers 'response times' rarely tell the whole story.
Unless combined with a strobing backlight, response times much below 16ms are likely to be of only marginal benefit, owing to more-dominant 'sample and hold' effects (see below),
The visual effect of motion blur is self-explanatory and it is fairly intuitive to realise that a slow pixel response-time will cause this problem. What is less obvious, but at least as important in causing motion-blur, is the 'sample-and-hold' effect: an image held on the screen for the duration of a frame-time blurs on the retina as the eye tracks the (average) motion from one frame to the next. By comparison, as the electron beam sweeps the surface of a cathode ray tube, it lights any given part of the screen only for a miniscule fraction of the frame time. It's a bit like comparing film or video footage shot with low- and high-shutter speeds. Motion-blur originating from sample-and-hold in the display can become less of an issue as the frame (refresh) rate is increased... provided that the source material (film, video, or game) contains that many unique frames. For LCD TV there is significant interest in the industry in strobing (flickering!) the backlight deliberately so as to reduce sample-and-hold motion-blur!
| Name | Pixel array | Aspect ratio | Comment | |
| VGA | 640 | ×480 | 4:3 | |
| SVGA | 800 | ×600 | 4:3 | |
| XGA | 1024 | ×768 | 4:3 | |
| WXGA | 1365 | ×768 | 16:9 | Wide-XGA; used for widescreen LC TV displays (beware: sometimes 1280×768 is called WXGA) |
| SXGA | 1280 | ×1024 | 5:4 | This format is "squarer" than the others |
| WSXGA+ | 1680 | ×1050 | 16:10 | Wide-SXGA (plus a bit more) |
| UXGA | 1600 | ×1200 | 4:3 | |
| WUXGA | 1920 | ×1200 | 16:10 | Wide-UXGA |
| QXGA | 2048 | ×1536 | 4:3 | Quad-XGA |
Note that, in general, LCD panels in LC-TV products typically have much lower resolution (i.e. fewer, and bigger pixels) than similarly-sized LCD computer monitors.
| Name | Pixel array | Aspect ratio | Comment | |
| PAL (625/50) | 720 | ×576 | 4:3 (or 16:9) | NB. Pixels are not 'square' |
| NTSC (525/60) | 720 | ×480 | 4:3 (or 16:9) | NB. Pixels are not 'square' |
| CIF (PAL-based) | 352 | ×288 | 4:3 | "Common Intermediate Format" - essentially half the lines and columns of full-res PAL |
| CIF (NTSC-based) | 352 | ×240 | 4:3 | "Common Intermediate Format" - essentially half the lines and columns of full-res NTSC |
| QCIF (PAL-based) | 176 | ×144 | 4:3 | Quarter-CIF |
| QCIF (NTSC-based) | 176 | ×120 | 4:3 | Quarter-CIF |
| QCIF+ | 176 | ×220 | 4:5 | Portrait |
Some mobile phone or PDA-type displays are specified from the CIF family. Whether CIF/QCIF formats have square pixels or not probably depends on the application in mind!
For interest, modern cinema films are made either in 'widescreen' 1.85:1 or 'scope' 2.35:1 aspect ratios. Widescreen television standardised on 16:9 (1.78:1), so 'scope' films still have narrow black bars at the top and bottom when presented in a TV 16:9 frame. Widescreen-films (1.85:1) are usually shot with sufficient excess head- and footroom to fill a 16:9 TV frame when required.
DVDs are mastered in either 4:3 or 16:9 frames, in both cases PAL-format DVDs have 576 active lines vertically (NTSC DVDs will have 480 active lines).
The horizontal pixel-count for DVDs is universally 720 pixels (NTSC and PAL) for both 4:3 and 16:9 ratios; television and DVD pixels are not square!
In principle, a PAL 16:9 DVD should display without need for vertical scaling on a square-pixel display 1024 pixels wide (576×16/9 = 1024).
Owing to non-square pixels, and the fact that analogue processing does not define (or maintain) horizontal resolution of video-material precisely, it may be less worthwhile trying to match horizontal pixel-count for display.
| Name | Pixel array | Aspect ratio | Comment | |
| 720-line HDTV | 1280 | ×720 | 16:9 | Square-pixel mid-resolution HDTV |
| Full HDTV | 1920 | ×1080 | 16:9 | Square-pixel full-resolution HDTV |
| HDCAM videotape | 1440 | ×1080 | 16:9 | Non-square pixel reduced-data-rate HDTV |
| "2K" digital-cinema | 2048 | ×1536 | 1.85:1 2.35:1 | NB. Pixels are not 'square' |
| "4K" digital-cinema | 4096 | ×3112 | 1.85:1 2.35:1 | NB. Pixels are not 'square' |
| DataCine native | 1920 | ×1440 | 4:3 1.85:1 2.35:1 | Native luminance resolution of Thomson Spirit DataCine HD-telecine machine. Colour is horizontally subsampled. Other output formats (eg 1920x1080 HD) are created by digital resampling. |
] and [Amazon.co.uk
].
©2003-8 William Andrew Steer