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Benchmark Today...Park Bench Tomorrow?

Nov 4, 2005 5:02 PM, John McKeon

Video industry quality benchmarks don’t have the shelf lives they used to. A glance at the flood of new technologies and products hitting the market just now bears out the transience of new “industry standards” for image quality.

Among the latest buzz generators are new technologies being marketed by NEC, Canon and Sony, which use different technological approaches to generate previously unheard-of contrast ratios and which all claim to raise the quality bar higher than ever before.

NEC’s new LCD2180WG-LED-BK is the first of what promises to be a new generation of LCD rear-projection displays driven by LED backlighting rather than the traditional fluorescent tubes. The LCD is illuminated by an array of 48 LEDs in adjustable colors, coupled with a system of reflectors and light guards that help provide uniform brightness across large screens.

The color of the backlighting can be minutely controlled by built-in software, providing both a true, reliable white and the flexibility to meet the user’s preferences in color temperature.

The LEDs are developed by LumiLEDs Lighting.

Sony, meanwhile, has introduced a series of products using the new Silicon X-tal Reflective Display (SXRD™) technology, which Sony says can deliver contrast ratios of up to 15,000:1. Among these products are a digital cinema projector and a new front projector that uses three SXRD chips - for red, green and blue - to create 1920 x 1080 progressive resolution with more than 6 million native pixels.

Ever higher contrast ratios continue to present a moving target for marketers, but how high can a contrast ratio go? At October’s CEATEC exhibition in Japan, Sharp showed what it called a “mega-contrast” LCD product, a 37-inch display with 1920 x 1080 resolution and a contrast ratio of a million to one!

“This contrast ratio goes well beyond that of self-illuminating displays such as CRTs, plasma and organic EL (electro-luminescent) displays,” the company says, “and represents a revolutionary technology which is ideal for master monitors used in darkened locations such as television broadcast studios, mobile broadcast vans and motion picture production houses.”

Sharp cites these darkened environments as settings that demand extra-high contrast, and notes that CRTs have long been the standard for this application. Advanced LCDs are making significant inroads in the market, though, Sharp says.

With this flurry of announcements, it may be difficult to remember that only a month or so ago, Insight Media reported on a comparison of LCOS (Liquid Crystal on Silicon) displays that was so impressive it prompted DisplayMate President Ray Soneira to declare that LCOS-based RPTVs represented the new benchmark in image quality.

That would be news to Canon and Toshiba, who have recently unveiled their jointly developed new Surface-Conduction Electron-Emitter Display) (SED), delivering a contrast ratio of up to 100,000:1 along with true high definition images.

The companies explain that SEDs are similar to CRT televisions, using electrons to excite phosphors on a screen. But instead of the traditional scanning beam of electrons, SEDs assign a separate electron emitter to each screen pixel, sandwiching the emitter and display components closely together. The result has the thinness of plasma and LCD panels.

Canon says that “since SEDs apply the same light emission theory as CRTs, they provide dynamic color expression, a sharp picture, and faster video response than LCDs and PDPs. In addition, SEDs do not require electronic beam deflection, making possible screens of more than 40 inches in size that are only several centimeters thick.”

It’s also helpful to remember that traditional CRTs -- long recognized for delivering the industry’s best image quality -- also aren’t going away. Only last spring, Samsung, LG Electronics, and Toshiba all announced ventures into the “thin CRT” niche. These products are traditional CRT monitors, but they use a new “short neck” design to cut the depth of the monitor dramatically.

Of course, rear projection DLP™ and LCD systems, together with plasmas and LCD panels, continue to battle for market share with steadily declining prices and improving quality.

The current proliferation of new technologies and products adds another “moving target” to the already-difficult choice of display products.

© 2009 Penton Media, Inc.