Re: LED displays: some comments and observations.
Re: LED displays: some comments and observations.
- Subject: Re: LED displays: some comments and observations.
- From: William Hollingworth <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2007 12:09:57 -0600
Just to add to some of the items that Tom mentioned in his recent
very informative post:
Date: Thu, 06 Dec 2007 08:25:51 -0500
From: tom lianza <email@hidden>
Led backlit displays are a relatively new technology and one should
expect that there will be a long learning curve in this market. The LED
technologies do not optimally align with the filter sets of the LCD
panels in use today. Changing the filtration in a panel is a rather
monumental, high risk, undertaking, so you are going to see this issue
for a relatively long time. The reason the LED panels are hard to get,
is that they hard to build at any price, and it is nearly impossible to
make money at the price they are selling at.
A major problem with producing a "wide gamut LED monitor" by
replacing a CCFL backlight with one based on RGB LEDs is the RGB
color filter characteristics are not optimal, as Tom correctly
stated. The standard blue filters let too much green though when
combined with the lower dominant wavelength green LEDs.
What this means is that without using a customized RGB filter
designed specifically for LED backlights, the blue output can
actually end up having a smaller gamut than most standard CCFL based
displays. The blue primary ends up being well inside the sRGB and
AdobeRGB gamuts - meaning that it is impossible to faithfully display
saturated blues and magentas of these colorspaces.
The countermeasure for this is of course to make a custom RGB filter
set for the LED panel that has improved filtering of the blue to
allow less green to pass through. While that sounds easy, in practice
it is quite difficult and very expensive. The LCD RGB filters are
printed by the millions for use on standard CCFL based displays -
hence they can be churned out for just dollars each. Creating a
custom filter design means a new custom ink formulation, which then
needs to be tested to make sure it is stable over the lifetime of the
display. Couple that with the very small market for wide gamut LED
displays (in the tens of thousands), the resulting limited production
runs, and the cost of the filter alone soon skyrockets.
This high startup cost was reflected in our first LED based display,
the LCD2180WG-LED which has a custom RGB filter in order to achieve a
gamut that meets and exceeds the blue of sRGB and AdobeRGB.
In addition to the RGB filter, there are also a whole host of other
issues that need to be resolved when using RGB LEDs in order to make
a true "professional reference" display - meaning one that is color
stable, both in the short term (minutes and hours), but also over the
lifetime of the display; and uniform in color and brightness across the screen.
It is not as simple as replacing the CCFL backlights with some RGB
LEDs and a power supply. LEDs are inherently unstable and difficult
to regulate. For example as you try to increase the brightness by
increasing the power to the device, beyond a certain point the
efficiency actually decreases, which reduces the light output. Red,
Green and Blue LEDs age at different rates, and the rate of aging is
a function of their ambient working temperature, so good thermal
management and monitoring is essential within the backlight. Multiply
these issues by the number of LEDs in the display and you can see it
becomes very complex. Also the R, G and B light from the individual
LEDs needs to be diffused together to achieve excellent color
uniformity across the screen. Couple that with the temperature vs.
dominant wavelength shift issues that Tom mentioned and it becomes no
easy (or inexpensive) task to design a professional LED display.
Tying this blue filter issue in with a different topic discussed a
couple of weeks ago relating to gamut sizes, and how the display
industry currently has no standard for this specification: It is
currently very easy to market a "wide gamut" display that
claims >100% of AdobeRGB, or whatever, but is actually deficient in
key areas such as the blue primary, by simply quoting a "gamut size"
rather than "gamut coverage" value. I for one would like to see a
standardized metric for color gamut in the display industry to avoid
these loopholes.
As far as affordable devices to actually measure and calibrate these
LED displays, we chose to go with a custom calibrated iOne Display V2
for a variety of reasons. The standard off the shelf device did a
fairly good job of measuring the display (at least compared compared
to some other devices), however in the end we decided to offer
sensors individually re-calibrated by X-Rite to match the
characteristics of the LED display. While the iOne Pro does an
excellent job at measuring chromaticity on the LED display, it
unfortunately suffers in other areas as discussed here recently, not
to mention being rather expensive.
Will Hollingworth
Manager of OEM Product Design & Development Engineering
NEC Display Solutions of America, Inc.
http://www.necdisplay.com
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