Gizmodo
If you guessed that Giz Explains Plasma TV was just the first of several TV-technology explainers, you were right. Congratulations! You win... this week's installment: Giz Explains LCD TVs. The little panels are in your phone, on your desk and maybe you're looking at one for your home theater too. Here's the quick and dirty basics.
Alright, so LCD stands for liquid crystal display. (Again, we're keeping this kind of simple, for simplicity's sake.) Basically, the liquid crystal part is a gel that sits in front of a backlight or—in the case of older panels such as those found in Game Boys up till like 2003—a reflective panel. (Remember those crappy lighting accessories?) The gel is divided up into a bunch of separate pixels, which can be fired individually. Color LCDs are a bit more complicated, made up of red, blue and green subpixels which combine to create pixels with the full range of color. To throw one more bit of tech at ya, most LCDs at this point are thin-film transistor LCDs, so that the control layer is embedded within the panel itself instead of off to the side. This provides better image stability and other benefits.
One of the problems with LCDs, and why plasma has an advantage in showing blacks, is that the liquid crystal layer is not opaque, even when all of the pixels are closed. On most LCDs, the bright backlight is on when the TV is on, so that will always bleed through at least a bit. LED-backlit LCDs can light up just a part of the panel instead of the whole thing, to an extent minimizing the problem.
Besides the "dynamic" backlighting described above, LCD technology is constantly improving its contrast through various crazier schemes involving pixel twisting and other light-blocking techniques.
The other notorious LCD problem is moton blur. If you've been buying LCD monitors for the past few years, you'll notice that advertised response times have dropped precipitously, down to as little as 2ms on some gamer-friendly computer monitors, and 6ms on big ol' TVs, so there's less true blurring of the picture. LCDs can also reduce motion blur further by processing the image: High-end LCDs use 120Hz technology to essentially double the framerate of source video, tricking the eye into seeing less blur.
Some 120Hz LCDs achieve this by tossing in a black frame of "downtime," but other sets morph two frames into a third, middle image that sits somewhere between the original frame and the next. As you might suspect, this can result in a weird, uncanny super silkiness that some reviewers object to.
Other reasons home theater buffs pick plasma over LCD in serious showdowns are that LCD naturally produces a less uniform picture and can't be seen as well (in color or brightness or both) from wide angles. LCDs can produce great pictures, and will keep getting better (LED backlights FTW), but in sets 42 inches and above, it just can't quite touch plasma, despite the fact that its cheaper pricer point has given it an overwhelming marketshare on the HDTV front.
Sony, which pushes Bravia LCD and hasn't sold plasma sets in years, is sending signals that it will soon focus on OLED instead. OLED pretty much makes both LCD and plasma look sad. They still cost a billion dollars and are a few years away, but the day of the OLED will come. [Giz Explains]
Comments
Hot centaur chick returns!!!
Great article Matt.
I guarantee that chick has no idea how an LCD works. "i think its hand puppets or something right?"
Any recommendations for an LCD tv? My ceiling is $1,000 and I would rather have a larger 720p than a kick-ass 14" 1080p screen.
www.futureofcanvas.com
I'll take one of those televisions, and one of those chicks. ahhhh fuck it, gimmie two.
@godawgs7: From tiger direct, i bought one of those $799 vizios. It's a 42" 1080p, and i LOVE it. I recently sold my desktop, but i was using it as a monitor. The picture is VERY bright, and VERY good. I've had no problems with pixels or hardware problems. At $800 it's probably the best deal you're going to find (if it's still that price..)
You mention that LCD is less expensive than plasma, but actually it is quite the opposite, especially in larger sizes. Typically a 50" plasma will retail for around $2000 where the equivalent 52" LCD with the fancy LED backlighting will run around $3500 retail! Where LCD really is the best option is on screens less than 42", though there are a very few manufacurers releasing small 37" and 32" plasmas the vast majority of screens this size are lcd based.
@godawgs7: I'd check out Olevia. They make pretty good Budget tvs.
Can someone explain how the picture in the center of my screen is "wired" all the way over to the side? This is something I have always wondered. Surely there are not a million wires all heading to the edges, but how else do you send a signal to "pixel x=959,y=132" to turn ruby red?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't LCDs more power efficient than Plasmas? Also, they don't throw off as much excess heat - which can matter in a small NYC apartment in the summer.
I love horse legged lady people.. soo hot.
@bandit: I think you're confusing passive matrix vs active matrix. With active matrix TFT, there are no "wires" for each pixel which is the case for passive.
@P3nnst8r: Also a good choice. The housemates and i bought a 32" olevia two years ago and we've had NOTHING go wrong with it. This is REALLY good consitering it's been in a house that throws partys nearly every weekend.
@Canoehead: I'm not sure about efficiency, but i'm 99% sure that LCDs consume the less power.
Now that I have an HD TV in the bedroom, where can I find a Gamecube component cable that won't require my first born child in trade?
My 27 inch HD-LCD-TV works great for me. No issues at all other than just being an HD TV and making PS2 games look like crap.
@Numerous: monoprice doesn't carry? DO pay extra for expedited shipping. They're not the fastest.
@Canoehead: Lower power consumption was a major reason I went with LCD over plasma. I also keep it on a switch to stop standby power drain.
BTW, anyone else doing this feel that standby is a bunch of crap? It's supposed to make the TV turn on more quickly, but I swear my TV turns on as quickly from standby as it does from after I turn its switch back on. If there is a difference, it's a few seconds at most. Not enough to justify a constant drain.
Hmm. I think you see a lot more digital artifacts and aliasing with LCDs than with plasmas or CRTs - I've had to ask edit facility companies to swap out LCD monitors and replace them with CRTs when editing, and a trip to my local TV shop recently was very revealing. The LCDs were noticeably slower, more juddery, had poorer blacks, more artifacts and more aliasing than similarly-sized plasmas.
A tricky one.
If anyone has the link to more pics of that ladyhorse, please share. We'd appreciate it.
@Canoehead: Power comparisons get a bit tricky, but if you are shopping for a 32" TV, it is a safe bet that a Plasma will use more power than an LCD which will use more power than a CRT. It is one of those comic misfortunes that LCD's consume much less power when in smaller sizes than CRT's, but due to the back-light method used, consumer more power than CRT's at the larger sizes. Plasma, on the other hand, eats coal morning, noon and night.
LCD power consumption is the same at all times when on.
The backlight is the most power hungry out of the LCD TV.
Now, plasma power consumption is hard to judge because on images showing that are darker use less power than brighter scenes so what is' rated consumption is is based on what the company want to put there.
So, depending on the scene, plasma could be more power efficient than plasma.
@Darrone: I guarantee that chick has no idea how an LCD works. "i think its hand puppets or something right?"
Why, because high Charisma implies that she used Intelligence as a dump stat? I know this is Gizmodo and all, but try to keep the prejudice focused on the gadgets.
Even though you readily captioned the display woman as wondering how LCDs work, you didn't explain it either- it would be nice to mention not just performance ratings but actually the basic principle behind all LCD systems- namely that there's a polarizing filter sandwich in place, and that the pixels are made up of rotatable "liquid crystals", which depending on their orientation transmit light between the filters by rotating the polarization. Put on your bass-master sunglasses, tilt your head at an LCD screen (including watches, calculators, etc.), and you'll see it.
@bandit: Check this out: [en.wikipedia.org]
nice knockers . . . for a horse
Every VIZIO I've seen in the store has had the worst picture out of all the TVs there. Don't believe me just go check one out at any electronics retailer.
@jnemesh: Where do you find plasmas cheaper than lcd? You must be comparing apples and oranges, name brands to store brands, older model plasmas to 120hz lcds. If plasmas were cheaper, you have to be an idiot to buy lcd.
@Canoehead: There is no simple answer re: power consumption.
With LCD, you can look at the spec, assuming it's accurate, and that's its power consumption.
With plasmas two things to consider are power levels and scene levels. If you properly calibrate a plasma, the maximum consumption is much less than the stated one in specs. Finally, as mentioned by trickstyle2, dark scenes require less power than bright scenes.
So you really need to measure a plasma over time, and then deduce the average power consumption. On some sets it is quite comparable to LCDs ... until LED LCD's come out of course.
This sounds like it was written by someone that owns a Plasma and chose that over LCD for their purposes.
skewed info=fail
For instance many of the LCD's positives are missing:
-Lower stand-by and running power(I hope everyone with a Prius buys a rear projection because it trumps both tech's in power/screen size); LED backlet dlp is the best by far on power
-Lower heat, My mother-in-law removed her 50" plasma from the bedroom because it was way too hot
-They can be made smaller and cheaper than plasma's
-They have more accurate color on the whole compared to Plasma, Most plasma's create green funny(grass glow's), not all but I notice it in anything under $2kish for a 50"
-42" plasma's are always some wacky rez that makes no sense to me and meets no standard I know of; 1024x768, what the heck is that?
I could go on but I assume the writer is some guy who just knows more than his friends. :(
guess she was hungry enough to eat a horse...
@P3nnst8r: I'd ride that! Yehaw!
I still do not understand are OLED's grown? do they live at the bottom of the sea? or is it a synth material
The only problem with OLEDs I've seen is flicker. On light colored segments, they flicker horrendously, much like CRTs.
Hopefully the second gen models refresh far quicker - or we'll all end up with nasty headaches.
The problem is because the OLED pixels can flash on and off, while LCDs tend to retain their image for a little while (ditto with plasmas). It's worse than CRTs because the phosphors also emit light for a little while (and early CRTs ghosted like LCD displays as well).
Nicely explained and understood. How bout splainin' the lser tv's next?
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