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Displays Science Technology

LCD Pixel Response Time Halved 163

Posted by Hemos from the speeding-things-up dept.
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."
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LCD Pixel Response Time Halved More

LCD Pixel Response Time Halved

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  • nice (Score:1, Redundant)

    by Slashbot Hive-Mind ( 810267 )
    this will be good for games

  • I like the link (Score:4, Funny)

    by bert.cl ( 787057 ) on Monday September 06, 2004 @06:17AM (#10167576)
    Yeah, the non-registration link really tells me a lot more than the blurb... or not ... them evil registrations...

  • but isn't 100%... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by phantasma6 ( 799340 ) on Monday September 06, 2004 @06:17AM (#10167578)
    doesn't a reduction of 100% mean it has been reduced to 0ms?

  • Not exactly an explanation (Score:5, Insightful)

    by beeglebug ( 767468 ) * on Monday September 06, 2004 @06:18AM (#10167581)
    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?

  • Improving outdated technologies (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Tennguin ( 553870 ) on Monday September 06, 2004 @06:19AM (#10167586) Homepage Journal
    I thought LCD technology was being replaced by DLP? Is this not the case?
    • I thought LCD technology was being replaced by DLP? Is this not the case?

      The problem isn't the technology but the investment; we're not talking small dollars to make plants to produce LCD panels, we're talking hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars invested by the electronics industry.

      LCDs are going to be around for a long while; it'll be nice when the response rates come down and larger panels get cheaper.
      • I just want a true black. I bought a 30 inch LCD panel this weekend only to find that the black levels were so horrible that the screen was almost unusable. Looked good under the store lighting, though...

    • Re:Improving outdated technologies (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I've never heard of DLP monitors, and I don't see how DLP could be used for anything but projectors (DLP = tiny mirrors on a chip).
    • I thought LCD technology was being replaced by DLP? Is this not the case?

      Perhaps if LCD is sufficiently improved, it will obviate the need for a costly transition to DLP in most applications?

    • Re:Improving outdated technologies (Score:4, Informative)

      by TheGavster ( 774657 ) on Monday September 06, 2004 @10:47AM (#10169081) Homepage
      DLP is a technology replacing the LCDs in high-end projectors. It is also used to replace the CRTs in high-end rear-projection televisions. This innovation improves backlit LCDs used for notebook and desktop computers. The competing tech in that arena is OLED, which is both thinner and does not require a backlight (once it gets rolling, it will also be easier to scale to larger screen sizes because of the inkjet process used to manufacture the displays)

  • Plasma Televisions are not ready for primetime. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by John_Allen_Mohammed ( 811050 ) on Monday September 06, 2004 @06:23AM (#10167603)
    Sucks to be me. Bought a 42" plasma television 9 months ago and the brightness has dropped significantly in that time, probably a half of what it was when I bought it. Thats under heavy use, maybe 16-18 hours/day it's on. Anybody else here have the same experience ?

    • Re:Plasma Televisions are not ready for primetime. (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      plasma tvs have a short lifetime. didnt the salesperson tell you? your experience seems a little worse than normal though.

    • Re:Plasma Televisions are not ready for primetime. (Score:5, Funny)

      by neonstz ( 79215 ) * on Monday September 06, 2004 @06:39AM (#10167663) Homepage

      ...or maybe your eyes are just tired of watching TV 16-18 hours every day in 9 months?

    • I thought that (reduction in brightness, not necessarily the time scale) was normal for plasma screens; after a period of time the plasma must be replaced.

    • Re:Plasma Televisions are not ready for primetime. (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yep, but it it was rather easily fixed when I realized my cat had been playing with the remote control.

    • Re:Plasma Televisions are not ready for primetime. (Score:5, Informative)

      by mikael ( 484 ) on Monday September 06, 2004 @06:55AM (#10167703)
      Plasma TV's will only last around five years. During that time the brightness will continue to decline. This makes them great for outdoor displays/public events, since there is more chance of a unit being rendered inoperable through transportation/assembly than there is through normal use. The following paper has a graph demonstrating the decline [planar.com].

      • Plasma TV's will only last around five years.

        False.

        During that time the brightness will continue to decline.

        True.

        The following paper has a graph demonstrating the decline.

        The graph (on page 6) does illustrate the decline in brightness of some Planar product at some point in time. It is not indicative of current plasma technology.

        Modern plasma panels have half-brightness times as high as 30,000 hours. In addition, your eye measures brightness logarithmically-- similarly to the measure by which y
        • Plasma TV's will only last around five years.

          False.

          br>
          Interesting. We have a guy who did a course in Advanced Display Systems. According to his course notes, plasma displays only have a lifetime of five years. I'm starting to wonder if this a myth propagated by local LCD manufacturers.
          • I'm starting to wonder if this a myth propagated by local LCD manufacturers.

            I don't think it's that sinister. Plasma display technology has made great improvements over the past 5 or so years. This is not to say that there are not still major issues with them, but there are fewer than there used to be. Phosphor life, contrast ratio, and burn in (mitigation) are a few they've managed to fix. There are still issues with image retention and high power demand. LCD has problems with black levels, saturati
    • Sucks to be you indeed. A normal, recent (made in the last few years) plasma should have a life of about 30,000 hours if I remember correctly. About three years of continuous use, at which time the brightness will be about half.
      I've had a Fujitsu Plasma for about a year, on for a several hours a day. Still looks the same. Perhaps you had yours set in "Exibition mode", with the brighness upped to extreme levels, and you've worn it out too soon. If not, maybe something's wrong with it and you can get it fixe
    • It should be under warranty, it does sound extreme. What you want to do with any screen type that can be over driven is to calibrate it, Avia, DVD Essentials (now Digital Essentials) or THX Optimode can help.

      The screens are intentionally overbright so they look good on showroom floors with bright flourescent lighting, but it eats screen life big time. The brightness & contrast need to be calibrated to maximize life.

  • Article Text... (Score:4, Funny)

    by OzRoy ( 602691 ) on Monday September 06, 2004 @06:29AM (#10167623)
    Wow! This is a great way to preempt a dying web server. Post the entire article in the summary instead of relying on karma whores.

  • marketing... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by taj ( 32429 ) on Monday September 06, 2004 @06:29AM (#10167625) Homepage

    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.
    • If I saw in some marketing literature that my new car, computer, video card would be twice as fast as my old one as opposed to "100% work*time improvement" I'm sure I would be more likely to take notice.

      There is no point in marketing something to people in a manner they can't understand. "blah times as fast" is exceedingly attractive to marketing because it easily understandable. How many times have you seen ads for cable modem or DSL that talked about being n times as fast as dialup or some other competin

  • Better numbers (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Spy Hunter ( 317220 ) on Monday September 06, 2004 @06:31AM (#10167628) Journal
    If the pixels can respond to any signal within 5 ms, that means the highest framerate that can be displayed without ghosting is 200 fps (1 / 5ms = 200 Hz). Which is more than you should ever need, and a big improvement on current LCD displays (a good consumer display has a ~20ms response time; 1 / 20ms = 50 Hz, not even 60 fps, but good enough for TV's 30 fps.)

    • If only (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Moraelin ( 679338 ) on Monday September 06, 2004 @09:12AM (#10168413) Journal
      If only those numbers weren't just pulled out of some marketroid's arse just because they look good.

      Remember that it's from the same guys who brought you the 14" display with only 10" visible. Or 16ms TFT panels which actually show about 120ms worth of ghosting.

      Or 18 bit colour TFT panels + dithering being sold as 24 bit panels. On account that surely making the display shimmer and flicker as it approximates colours by switching between other colours, is exactly what you always wanted in a TFT.

      (Someone remind me why a 20-30 Hz shimmer on TFT is better for my eyes than the 85 Hz flicker of a CRT? No really, I keep forgetting.)

      The computer industry as a whole is a pretty sad display of lies, shameless lies and IT marketting. But the display part of the industry has got to take the cake.

      At least half of the progress since the days of 120ms panels is just more creative ways to measure it, and/or to fudge the numbers.

      So basically what I'm getting at is: when you'll see a 5ms display on sale, you can rest assured that it's really a 30-40ms real latency fudged down to 5ms by the marketting department. And after the dithering is applied too, you can probably count on 40-50ms or more.

      I really wouldn't set my hopes too high about being able to display 100 fps without ghosting anywhere in the next 5 years.
    • a good consumer display has a ~20ms response time; 1 / 20ms = 50 Hz, not even 60 fps, but good enough for TV's 30 fps.

      You know, fps is a funny thing. Gamers can have huge issues with getting only 30fps in a computer game, yet if you put them behind a playstation or xbox, also running at 30fps, they don't have any problems with it anymore. And 30 fps is even high. Movies are only 24 fps, and you never read movie reviews going "man, I wish the framerate had been higher"
      • After playing computer games for so long I actually do wish this when going to the theatre. I notice the refresh and flicker of the movie on the big screen and it is distracting.
      • Movies aren't interactive. In particular, they are not interactive and rely on fast reflexes. It only makes sense. You get all the information you need to enjoy a movie at 24fps. However, that is insufficient for fast-paced interactive content.
      • The FPS figures quoted by benchmark sites and reviewers are almost always "average" figures. An average of 30 FPS means that sometimes it's faster, but more noticably, sometimes it is slower.

        I propose that benchmarks and reviewers should ditch the "average" FPS figure and either replace it with reporting the lowest FPS measured, or some sort of "95th percentile" to weed out minor glitches. The only time FPS matters is when it's slow anyways.
      • 24fps for movies sucks, it's flickery as all get out.

        (I'm hopeful that someday they'll switch to a 48fps standard, which can somewhat easily be adjusted for both 50Hz PAL and 60Hz NTSC.)

        30fps for a first person view game is pretty close to the minimum acceptable. Try landing a plane in a flight sim at 10-20fps... it's a real PITA. Bump the fps up to 40-60 and it's a lot smoother. The other issue is that some game engines have glitches, where being able to reach a certain fps allows you to jump higher
      • Gamers can have huge issues with getting only 30fps in a computer game, yet if you put them behind a playstation or xbox, also running at 30fps, they don't have any problems with it anymore. And 30 fps is even high. Movies are only 24 fps, and you never read movie reviews going "man, I wish the framerate had been higher"

        That's because movies are captured from smooth motion, so any motion depicted is blurred and links perfectly with the next frame. Your eyes are great at interpolating the blurred images,
        • Your eyes are great at interpolating the blurred images, so you don't notice the low frame rate.

          Why aren't graphics companies working on decent motion blur then?

          the display rate of an ordinary TV monitor is 50Hz and the consoles, from what I can quickly find on the web, display at this rate.

          TV's are interlaced. That is they only display one new frame every 2hz (by showing half a frame every hz). NTSC, with the 60hz cycle, has a 30fps rate.
          • Why aren't graphics companies working on decent motion blur then?

            Maybe because you'd have to internally render at a higher frame rate, or at the very least internally interpolate the motion vectors and somehow add blurring? I'm not an expert on 3D games, but I imagine that the increased performance hit in motion blurring would counteract any improvement in visual perception. (And since I don't think openGL has any motion-blurring capabilities (other than a simple recursive overlay of previous frames whi

  • The Samsung 710T has basically no ghosting. (Score:5, Informative)

    by UranusReallyHertz ( 567776 ) on Monday September 06, 2004 @06:32AM (#10167634)
    After days of agonizing between it and the 20 inch Dell, I bought the Samsung 710T and I am pretty happy with it. And I have never noticed any ghosting whatsoever while playing games like Far Cry and Doom 3 and watching movies like Hell Boy. So I think the Response Time is already adequate, at least on the 17 inch sizes.
    • That monitor has a claimed 12ms response time, which is equivilent to 83Hz (1 / 0.012s), which is as good as if not better than most CRTs out there, although some people claim to be able to see flicker right up to 85Hz (although much of the time I think the problem is about 5cm behind the eye, not in the eye itself).

      I can see flicker at 70Hz, but I can usually get on with 75Hz or 80Hz. I hate CRTs anyway, wouldn't touch them unless forced to nowadays. The geometry and sharpness of an LCD more than make u
    • And I have never noticed any ghosting whatsoever while playing games like [...] Doom 3 [...]
      It's easy, switching from a black image to a back image never flickers. I can even play without turning the monitor on!!

  • Who ya gonna Call? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Justabit ( 651314 )
    No ghosts and (suposedly) heaps better responce time is much better than the second hand CRT I was using last lear, which had burn in of previous companys logo. I guess the guy who worked on it went on holiday and left his screen on... Wonder if new LCDs will have a hidden down similar to plasmas (colour fade) ? I'm just waiting till direct neural wireless interface is invented so I can burn out my optic nerves watching ultraviolet!

  • Bragging with percentages (Score:4, Insightful)

    by shoppa ( 464619 ) on Monday September 06, 2004 @06:38AM (#10167659)
    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.
    • It's that last step that's most dubious to me, arithmetically (or geometrically) there's no justification.

      I guess the (dubious) justification is that the competitior is 100% slower than us, so we must be 100% faster!

      • Surely that's reversed; if we are twice the speed of the competitor, then

        * Our competitors are 50% slower than us, but
        * We are 100% faster than our competitors.

        If we are 50% faster than our competitors, then they are only 33% slower than we are...
    • the last step is perfectly ok, the second is the dubios one
    • Your fist exampel is correct but tnot the second one. If you say something is 50% faster than something else then that something else is the baseline i.e. 100%. Ex. Their CPU 100Mhz, yours is 150Mhz = your CPU is 50% faster than theirs (all else being equal). If you had said their CPU is 50% slower than ours then you CPU is the baseline and is 100% and their CPU is then only 75Mhz (using the previous example) Only then is it also correct to say: Our thingy is twice as fast as theirs. To sum up: We are 5
    • No, it's the first step that's dubious. The last two statements really are equivalent.

      The first statement does not involve a facor of two at all, it implies a factor of 1.5 for speed or a factor of 2/3 for time (or the opposite if you start with the new product).

      Speed = change/time. Half the time = double the speed, if the change is the same.

    • Re:Bragging with percentages (Score:4, Informative)

      by RealProgrammer ( 723725 ) on Monday September 06, 2004 @07:04AM (#10167723) Homepage Journal
      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!

      In your example, that's where the deception is:

      • "50% faster" means 1.5 times faster.

      • "100% faster" means 2 times faster.
      • Suppose he's talking about speed as time per event. By "50% faster" he means "time 50% shorter", which is really "twice as fast".

        Here, all of a sudden, we start defining speed as "events per time unit". Then, "twice as fast" means "twice as many events per time unit", i.e. 100% faster.

        Now, if you think about it, "50% shorter time per event" really does mean "100% more events per time unit", so my argument is correct and complete. I've just proven that "50% faster" is the same as "100% faster" :-)
      • "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.

    • you're wrong...
      50% faster than the competition is not twice the speed, is 1.5 the speed.
      The last sentence (100% faster) is correct in respect with the second one. The second (twice the speed) is not correct in respect with the first one (50% faster).

      Also, the article doesn't says:
      100% less response time. It says: The response time is 100% faster (if it took 10ms now it takes 5ms), and that makes the title 100% correct:
      response times (halved).

    • The authorities played a similar sort of game in Mexico City in the late 70s by repainting the lines on the roads to carry more lanes and then boasting that they had "increased capacity by 50%!" - from four lanes to six IIRC. Then when the inevitable happened and far more accidents happened because of decreased room to manoeuvre, they reduced it back to four and claimed that there was now "33% less congestion!" Of course, nothing had changed (and certainly not the physical width of the road): 6 lanes is 50%

  • Great: (Score:2, Funny)

    by headqtrs ( 467875 )
    Just in time for Doom 3....

  • But.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by adeyadey ( 678765 ) on Monday September 06, 2004 @06:56AM (#10167706) Journal
    Faster switching == more power needed? Not good for laptops..

    • Re:But.. (Score:3, Informative)

      by j3110 ( 193209 )
      Most of the power used by LCD is still going to be the backlight. The LCD itself doesn't even get warm itself. You may loose a few few minutes of battery life, who knows.
  • I was wary of buying an LCD a few months ago because of the ghosting issues. I finally caved and bought a Samsung 172x. It was expensive, but it was worth it. With the 12ms response time there are literally no ghosts. And sitting next to my old CRT with xinerama its like night and day. I'm waiting for the price to drop so I can buy one or two more and get rid of my CRT once and for all. If only my video card had two DVI instead of one DVI one VGA...

    So yeah, I don't know why this is news. Sure, maybe t

  • Article copied almost verbatim (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Rogerborg ( 306625 ) on Monday September 06, 2004 @07:04AM (#10167729) Homepage
    From The Enquirer.net [theinquirer.net].

  • Meanwhile (Score:4, Informative)

    by berkut7 ( 761778 ) on Monday September 06, 2004 @07:44AM (#10167873)
    Meanwhile Samsung is readying 8ms 19" LCDs for production in Q4 , 2004 [samsung.com]. 12ms LCDs produce almost no noticeble ghosting, 8ms should be even better at closing the gap to CRTs.
    • Until they get to 1600 X 1200, they still are behind CRT's. The resolution has to go up and the price get competative for LCD's to really take over. They will, but it's a slow process. Really, why pay 3X the price for less resolution and brightness than a Viewsonic P95f+?
      • Really, why pay 3X the price for less resolution and brightness than a Viewsonic P95f+?

        For the love of my eyes, really. I would enjoy paying significantly less for significantly more size and resolution, but my eyes just can't take the flicker. Since switching to an LCD my vision has improved significantly, and I no longer suffer from piercing headaches.

        I've been switched for a year and a half now. Still waiting for my vision to go back to 20/10.
        • The reason I mentioned the P95f+ is that it runs at 85 and I detect no flicker.
          • I count you a lucky man :)

            I detect flicker well over 100Hz, but the headaches still come, even then. Not as quickly, thank God.
            • I guess I am lucky, because I don't see it head on unless it's bad. I do see flicker peripherally when it's noticable. This monitor is only a year old, check back in two more.
        • Maybe you should try turning up your refresh rate? I use both LCD's and CRT's. The LCD's give me headaches after a while and the text always seems blurry. You might also have the brightness way to high on your CRT. Try adjusting it down when your not doing something like playing a game.
          • Unfortunately, I can see flicker well over 100Hz, and I've yet to meet a CRT with a referesh high enough to not give me a headache.

            Strange to hear about your LCD, although I have friends who claim that even staring at a piece of paper gives them a headache, since they're used to a CRT. I can't imagine how an LCD would have blurry text, though, unless you're running it at a non-native resolution.
  • 12ms are on the market now, so if by a 100% improvement they mean 100% improvement over 12ms, that's reasonable.

    But with 8ms LCDs coming out soon, this announcement is decidedly less impressive.

    Besides, when Samsung's 17" OLED display comes out next year, we'll all forget about response times.
  • TVs do 60Hz refresh, alternating ("interlacing") odd/even line fields for 30Hz, which is 33 1/3ms. Even if LCDs can get below their 40ms to 30ms, they've got parity with TVs, and designers can concentrate on making the $500 800x600 sheets cheaper than their $100 CRT competition. If they can get down to 15ms, they can do 60Hz noninterlaced, which will be good enough for HDTV (at 1280x720 and 1920x1080). If they've really got an LCD square wave signal emission at 5ms, that's 200Hz, which "ought to be enough f
  • There is one problem LCDs have for moving images (face it, for videos and games CRTs are still better) the switch time already has reached more or less the times needed for video and games, the problem is the tearing caused by differend color switch times. I rather doubt this problem has been resolved since the bright-dark cicle has different switch times into different directions.
  • It's Nihon Keizai Shinbun. Gods, we need the Japanese equivalent of Engrish.com :P

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