MON I TOR I NG | FEATURE
This competition between OLED displays and LCD displays is fundamental to the display market in 2019. OLEDs are panels made of tiny lights, and break down into two groups: those (like the BVM-X300) which use red, green and blue emitters, and the large panels manufactured by companies such as LG, mainly targeting the domestic market. RGB OLEDs achieve excellent accuracy, but struggle to get to HDR levels of brightness without risking short lifespan and burn- in. LG’s OLED TVs combine red, green, blue and white, boosting brightness with the white emitters to achieve better peak whites at the expense of colour accuracy. They can be good at displaying standard dynamic range images, but can struggle to achieve accurate colour in bright HDR material. LCDs are panels made of tiny filters with a light behind them. Peak brightness is controlled by the brightness of the backlight, but some light always leaks through, so the lowest brightness is not entirely black. Illuminating the LCD panel in a series of separate zones makes it possible to display very bright and very dark subjects simultaneously. Since the zones are larger than a single pixel, though, the brightest white and darkest black cannot be displayed in adjacent pixels. Bright areas may appear to bleed into dark ones. PANEL TYPES
ABOVE Sony’s X300 monitors are still highly valued products around the world.
surface of the screen at 1000 NITs. When you grow that to full screen, you can have only 150 NITs. It’s to protect the panel.” At the same time, Dubreuil says, the new display maintains the superb contrast performance of the BVM-X300. “It’s not a normal, or a regular LCD like we say today. It’s a new technology that improves the contrast radio to the level of the X300. You can see that benefit in terms of contrast ratio and blacks. The ratio is still a million to one, the same as the X300, [but] it can maintain 1000 NITs at full screen.” SONY’S HX310 The technology used in Sony’s HX310 display may offer a solution. Flanders Scientific’s Desmet explains: “The easiest way to try to think about it is that you have a backlight that’s always on at full blast, and then what you have up front is essentially a standard LCD panel with red, green and blue filters. Then, in between that you have the light modulating cell layer. The best analogy for what that is, is it’s like a monochromatic LCD. A lot of people call this dual-layer LCD... we prefer light- modulating cell layer, LMCL. That’s what the people who developed it call it. That’s a bit more accurate because it’s not like it’s just two regular LCD panels.”
The technology is perhaps most closely associated with Panasonic, dating back to press releases in 2016, and Desmet suggests they may be supplying TVLogic and Eizo as well as Flanders Scientific and Sony. Dubreuil is keen to emphasise that Sony’s implementation takes full advantage of the company’s long experience in the field. “We call it new tech LCD. The most important for us is the result. A couple of competitors are using similar tech to achieve monitors with 1000 NITs full screen. Sony has exclusivity, the way the LCD [is made] could be similar, but the backlight, surface treatment and other stuff are different, which makes our panel unique.” Either way, the results shown at IBC were spectacular, competing ably with Sony’s own BVM-X300 in a side-by-side test in the blacked-out tent. “You have pixel level control of that light,” Dubreuil says. “You have something that allows you to have one area of the screen with a black level of about .001 NITs, then you can have 1000 NITs just a few pixels over.” Laurent Treherne at Goldcrest is cautiously enthusiastic. “The X310 seems to be a natural progression... from the quick review we’ve done so far the picture quality seems to be at least as good as the X300 with the added bonus of the LCD
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