LCD Pixel Response Time Halved

kagaku writes "Japanese newspaper the Nihon Kaizai Shimbun (evil registration required) said that Mitsubishi has mastered a technology to improve the response speed of pixels on LCDs by 100 per cent or more. It's done this by getting rid of the afterimages on screens which known as "ghosts", said the newspaper, and invented a proprietary system called Dual Domain Bend. It cites unnamed sources at Mitsubishi saying that this method produces a response speed of one millisecond when power is applied and five milliseconds when the lights go off and the power goes down. That, the paper said, compares to up to forty milliseconds to switch pixels on and off. While the technique, when it gets to the manufacturing stage, will have immediate benefits for PC monitors, it will also help narrow the gap between LCD TVs and plasma displays, which have a quicker response speed. Here's a non-registration required link."

but isn't 100%...

[phantasma6]

doesn't a reduction of 100% mean it has been reduced to 0ms?

Not exactly an explanation

[beeglebug]

It's done this by getting rid of the afterimages on screens which known as "ghosts"

The pixel response time has been reduced by getting rid of ghosts? Surely that's an effect of the reduction, not a cause?

Re:but isn't 100%...

[bert.cl]

response improved 100% procent, time wasn't reduced 100% i guess time was reduced 50%, however it's still early, so you can brag with numbers if you know better :)

marketing...

[taj]

100% work*time improvement - Everyone goes what?
50% of the time to display - Everyone says what? then gets it.
twice as fast. - Everyone says oh, OK.

Each increasing easier to understand but decreasingly attractive to marketing droids.

Sigh.

Bragging with percentages

[shoppa]

I've seen some games played with percentages:

Product A costs 40% more than product B!

Product B costs 29% less than product A!

Both are true... A is $14.00, B is $10.00. The difference is the same arithmetically, but doing it fractionally only serves to confuse things (usually, confuse the customer...)

Things get really out of hand when there's a factor of two:

We are 50% faster than the competition!

From this it's not too far to say

We are twice the speed of the competition!

Which then gets twisted further to

We are 100% faster than the competition!

It's that last step that's most dubious to me, arithmetically (or geometrically) there's no justification.

Re:but isn't 100%...

[jejones]

it is a increase of 100% in response time, aka a redution of 50%.

If response time increases by 100%, they've succeeded in making it twice as slow.

Re:Bragging with percentages

[TeknoHog]

"50% faster" means 1.5 times faster. "100% faster" means 2 times faster.

Even this is not true! '50% faster' means 150% times the original, i.e. 1.5 times as fast.

This is a common confusion, but it makes one hell of a difference. 'N% faster' means '(100+N)% as fast', because faster is always more than the original.

It should be obvious that '50% as fast' is less than the original, but '50% faster' is more than the original.

100% faster means twice as fast, not 2 times faster.

Fix the bad pixel problem

[Anonymous Coward]

How fast the display is does not mean much if you are looking at several bad pixels. That, not the speed of the display, is what is keeping me from switching.

Re:The Samsung 710T has basically no ghosting.

[Xain]

I presume you're referring to the Dell 2001FP? I just got one of those, which I'm using now. It has a response time of 16ms too (I'm fairly sure the 710T is 16ms, not 12ms as mentioned in an earlier reply and on a few sites, including at least one of Samsung's regional sites) and like you, I have witnessed absolutely no ghosting.

This leads me to wonder why response times are still considered to be a big deal. I'm pretty sensitive to visual timing, I can tell when a CRT monitor is at 75hz instead of the 85hz I usually use, but I see no ghosting at 16ms. Shouldn't other things take precedence now? I'm not saying we shouldn't try to reduce response times. I'm sure I could see ghosting on my 16ms panel under the right circumstances. However, I do think it's become less important and I'd like to see other aspects get due research. Naturally price would be one, but short of some revolutionary concept, it will take a cheaper manufacturing technique a while just to pay for it's own research so I think the only way we'll get cheaper LCD screens is more and more buyers over time. IMHO the most important thing to work on now is reliability - N dead pixel warranties are a horrible concept and improving pixel development to gets rid of these would be my preference of things to work on with LCD panels. The second thing to work on is 18bit colour - I was careful to get a 24bit colour monitor as I dislike my laptop's shimmering display. If I get a 17" screen, at present I'd go for the 710T instead of the 172X (both Samsung) because of it's true 24bit colour despite the 4ms response time increase.

Re:but isn't 100%...

[mlyle]

response speed of pixels on LCDs by 100 per cent

Or speed, to be more precise. I don't know why this is so hard for everyone to understand.

If I normally drive home at 30 MPH, and I increase my speed by 100% (to 60MPH), I will get home in half the time. So if the rate at which pixels change luminosity increases by 100%, the transition time will fall by a factor of 2.

Re:but isn't 100%...

[Anonymous Coward]

No. It was 100% improvement in refresh rate. Which in practice mean 50% reduction in update time.