Making LCD Displays Snappier

newSlashUser points out a very interesting article at ExtremeTech about a new means of more quickly controlling LCD panel response, so the old complaint that LCD panels make poor displays for gaming and high-motion video may be whittled down a bit. As a bonus, the change is all in the controller, so it doesn't require any change in the way the panels are manufactured.

My biggest complaint about LCD screens

is the fixed resolution they come with. Many applications I use for 3D require at a minimum 1280X1024, but work best at 1600X1200. So I wouldn't say that slow draw is the only problem, as this site states.

Cool beans!

This would really be fun :) Imagine playing Quake, or Flight Sim, and not worrying about missing things because the display was too slow?

I want one *drool* :)

Active LCD Screen

Having just upgraded all my CRT monitors to LCD, The difference in refresh was only noticable after the first week or so. But the clarity of the LCD screen makes all the difference. I look forward to this coming forward and letting me spend more money :)

One Key question is how does microsoft's ClearType work with this, as is uses Aliasing across pixels, does it effect the the refresh rate as well?

LCDs for gaming?

What the hell? If you can afford an LCD screen you sure as hell won't use it for gaming, are you?

Why is it that everything has to be measured in "how the hardware runs Quake 3"?

Scientific computing is the real hardware test!

It's about time...

The number of areas where CRTs were superior to LCD displays continues to dwindle. It used to be they were only smaller/lighter. But in exchange for that, you paid 4x as much, and if you typed faster than 40wpm all you'd see is a grey smudge for 15 seconds (I remember the monochrome, passive matrix screen on my Powerbook 145b). Now the prices are becoming dollar-for-dollar competitive with CRTs, they are still smaller/lighter, and now they might actually be able to handle Quake 3 Arena and look as good as my 20" monitor (and yeah -- they are pretty close to that now, especially with a still image, but...). I think the days of the CRT really are numbered this time around.

LCD's for Gamers

This might finally make LCD panels usable for action gamers. Those of us addicted to quake/CS/UT have put off upgrading to the spiffiness of LCD's for a while because they've been utterly useless for gaming. I really would like the sharpness of an LCD on my desktop, and now I may have a good reason to get one!

Sounds fishy

the whole article struck me as a little bit "telemarket shopping"ish i think i will reserve judgement untill i see one in action
mind you, a monitor on the wall would be nice :)

Software ``feed-forward'', feedback, overmod

If you can get your LCD controller to run at 60-80Hz, you should be able to implement this technique in software: compute change-corrected frames, where the ``feed-forward'' bits disappear faster than the human persistence rate. There's plenty of CPU for this, and the psychovisuals help: any reasonable transient errors in the LCD response are likely to be masked by the fact that the changing pixels are likely changing due to motion...

I had always just sort of assumed that controllers already did this, since it's so obvious. Even better would be to have the controller actually measure the pixel modulation (which it it should be able to do using the same mechanism it uses to change it) and use feedback, which would likely provide even faster response.

Sadly, at the end of the day, the 40Hz limit on skewing reasonably priced panels over the full range will continue to be a problem. With feedback and feedforward techniques, can one use higher pixel modulation voltages to improve this as well? I don't know, but I would guess one could...

LCDs lifespan limited by OLEDs anyway

Organic LEDs are on the way in probably about 5 years or so, and I am willing to wait for them. Cheaper to produce, no backlight, and flexible. Production screens for cell phones and camcorders are being produced, so it's only an engineering step to up-size them. They are also more durable and scaleable than LCDs.

It's nice that LCDs are getting better, but even better stuff is just down the pike.

WTF

From the article: One key result to note, however, is that switching from any gray shade to black is the fastest of all. This is because switching to black simply requires that the voltage to the cell be set to maximum, and the cell responds quickly.

What the hell? Don't they mean the voltage is turned off to get black? Or maybe they're confusing it with white? I don't understand why you need power to produce black...

...unless they give it so much voltage that the thing responds quickly and pops - producing a gaping black hole in the cell's place.

Re:WTF

Two polarizing filters encase the liquid crystals in the LCD. One filter is etched with horizontal lines; the other with vertical. Light enters the liquid-crystal compartment parallel to the first filter's lines and follows the path of the liquid crystals. If the liquid crystals become energized, the crystals and light rays do not twist to become parallel with the second filter. Light rays reach the second filter perpendicular to its lines and cannot pass through to the viewer's screen image. If the crystals are not energized, they twist themselves and the light rays to allow light to pass through and illuminate the LCD.

taken from

http://www.smartcomputing.com/editorial/article. as p?article=articles%2Farchive%2Fg0903%2F36g03%2F36g 03%2Easp

Re:WTF

As others have pointed out, the LCD stops the transmission of light when voltage is applied, hence giving you black.

But one other nit-pick: "I don't understand why you need power to produce black" - No you don't need power. You need Voltage. The LCD cell acts like a capacitor and does not pass DC electricity though it. So no current, and hence no power used.
Leakage would probably be in the micro-amp range.

--jeff

Patents?

First, why the hell did this new item draw a flood of offtopic firstpost/trolls/flames/WTC-jewish-conspiracies?

Maybe I'm the smartest person on the planet. Or maybe this "new technology" is bloody obvious and should have been implemented ages ago. In my oppinion the technique is blantant once you see the response time graph. Large changes respond faster, so you overdrive the pixel and stop when you get to the desired brightness.

This obviously warrants many broad patents. Oddly, the word patent never appears in the article.

Captain Obvious, or Admiral Oblivious?

I may be missing something, but wasn't the article talking about greyscale only? Looks like it's going to be even longer before we see the same thing in all 32k color shades.

Amazing displays

http://www.panoramtech.com/

The ultimate monitor :D pretty close to it :D

Look to Apple

Apple's LCD displays are probably the best that exist, beating out SGI by a large margin. I've never had a moment's problem playing Quake or Unreal Tournament on my TiBook or G4, using either the Studio or Cinema display.

Perhaps the solution isn't more hacks, but better hardware. Sure, it comes at a price, but I'd rather drop an extra couple hundred for something that actually works.

Re:Look to Apple

Aren't pretty much all consumer LCD screens produced by the same company, and remarked by Apple, NEC, etc?

-Paul Komarek

Improve the dark-color range!

I think LCDs could be improved a little bit in the dark color range. Unlike a CRT, which is a black surface on which color is added, LCDs are a white surface on which color is subtracted by blocking the light.

IMO, the image on LCDs already looks a lot better than that of CRTs, and doesn't fatigue me as much. In fact, no matter what refresh rate I was using with my CRT, I could always see the flicker for some reason. My eyes actually hurt after looking at the monitor for a few hours. This problem got worse proportionally with larger displays, so graphical work was always very tiring. The LCD fixed that. Yes, there is a refresh rate, but it works differently than that of a CRT, so I cannot see the LCD refresh.

I think the advantages of LCDs outweigh the disadvantage of slower animation. Most work I do is either textual (writing or coding) or graphical. There is rarely any fast action going on. (I occasionally play Quake II, the only game I ever bought, but with a CRT. I just don't play for very long. Why should I? There's so much to life that if I'm not working, I prefer to do things unrelated to computers.)

As for television (and this is a weak argument as I rarely watch TV), I think LCDs already accomodate that format quite well. The colors look great. Yeah, fast action isn't as good, but oh well. :-)

Like I said before, the only thing I would improve about the LCD is its reproduction of really dark colors--that is, better blocking of the light.

DOH!

Why didn't I think of that first?

I mean, if you're merging your car onto the freeway, you floor it until it you catch up with traffic, then let off to maintain constant speed.

You wouldn't even think of going 0 to 60 by applying only the amount of throttle that sustains 60 mph; it would take ages.

Seen it, it does work...

My time spent with Philips Flat Displays in Philips Components allowed me time to see this and many other LCD-ish technologies. If you look here [philips.com] at the papers about Motion Compensation, that is the stuff I saw, and in fact, our group was working on the drive electronics to make it work. David Parker, one of the authors on a couple of those papers, is a very cool guy, as were all of the guys at PRL in Redhill, England.

Unfortunately, the LCD panel business slipped into commodity mode too quickly, where 15-inch panels and the displays containing them had to be super-cheap, and that was where Philips wanted to be, so we tabled the project. The simulations, though, showed a drastic difference is clarity and response time, resulting in sharp images suitable for television or video gaming.

As an aside, someone asked about applying voltage to get black. This works best with active matrix displays, while passives use the normally-black approach (apply voltage to get white). If you remember your old laptop displays from back then, dark vertical lines in dialog boxes and the like created vertical lines that ran the height of the screen thanks to voltage leaking to all of the dots in a column, which is not a big problem for actives.

There is a lot of cool stuff in the future of displays. LCD tech of today sorta sucks/ Look for some very cool stuff in multidomain displays and OLED/PolyLED displays.

LTPS

LTPS (low temperature polycrystalline silicon)is a new technology that improves the quality of small LCDs (e.g., for handhelds). Supposedly Sony, Toshiba [toshiba.co.jp] (watch out for the fonts), and Sanyo are early adopters and should start mass production in 2002. Palm-3D-games anyone?

No such thing as a free lunch

I just wanted to add that this technique while very nice is not entirely free.

The "voltage spike" used to lower the response time means that there is an increase in power consumption (sp?).

So laptop users may not want this feature enabled while they are traveling..

Of course it depends it the increase of power consumption is large or not..

Snappier?

Put them in the fridge?

1600x1200 displays

Does anyone know why 1400x1050 and 1600x1200 displays, which are now commonplace in mid and high end laptops, can't be found anywhere as stand-alone monitors? You can pay through the nose for the best in lcd displays and still be stuck with a 1280x1024 monitor (with good angle, bright image, dadada...) Why???

lcD Display?

as in liquid crystal Display [techtarget.com] Display?

This might not seem important, but if you (read: /.) want to be taken seriously by the (printing) press, you might want to have your acronyms straight...

Other sources of artifacts

I'm surprised this wasn't done long ago. Most controlled devices that have some equivalent of inertia, no feedback, repeatable performance, and a speed problem are driven by a suitably ramped signal. Stepper motors, for example.

One of the big problems with "TV" on flat panels comes not from the flat panel response time, but the conversion from 24 FPS film to 30Hz video, often followed by some kind of compression. All the fooling around to accomodate interlaced displays adds artifacts. Movies transmitted by television or stored on DVD ought to be sent at 24FPS 1080p HDTV, then shown on a flat panel at 24FPS. That's rarely the case today, but we're getting there.

What's needed are some good, simple 21" flat panel HDTV sets that cost about $450. Then HDTV will take off. But we're probably five years away from that price point.

TFT's are now awesome

Just got my hands on a new Sony M61 DVI TFT, sitting alongside my Vision Master Pro410 CRT. Lets just say that under all circumstances (games as well) the sony TFT is a million times better - its clearer, perfect colour matching (DVI works a treat) and perfect geometry. For the money (£500) this Sony is smashing. All those people who think TFT sucks, just keep thinking that way, I'm going to buy shares in an opticians ASAP!

Re:Exterminate All Islam. Exterminate Muslims.

And this has something to do with LCDs? Get a clue.