Which contrast ratio

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Contrast Ratio of TVs. What it is: Brightness difference between white and black. This is the main component of picture quality. When it matters: Always, but especially when watching dark scenes.

Score distribution. When It Matters TVs with high contrast ratios are most noticeable in dark rooms compared to those with low contrast. Our tests The way we measure contrast is fairly simple. Below is an example of an image with good contrast left , and one with bad.

Pretty easy to see that you'd want the one of the left, correct? The image on the right has a higher black level, and if I were demoing two different TVs with this image in front of you, you'd notice that the lights aren't as punchy on the right TV either. There are two more aspects of contrast ratio.

Most often these are referred to as "native" and "dynamic. With an LCD, this is what the liquid crystal panel itself is capable of. Imagine putting the image above on your TV's screen.

Native contrast ratio is how dark the darkest parts of the image are, compared with the brightest parts of the same image. I like to call this "intra-scene contrast ratio" though I'm certainly open to something better if anyone has an idea. The reason there's a distinction is due to most TVs now having a dynamic contrast ratio. This is a broad term to describe technologies that augment the native contrast ratio of the TV.

These work by having the TV sense what content it's showing, and adjust the overall light output accordingly. If you've ever adjusted an LCD's backlight , the TV is basically doing this in real time depending on the video. When an adjustable backlight, or a projector's iris, is used in conjunction with circuitry to monitor the video signal, it is able to adjust the overall light output in real time depending on what's onscreen. This dynamic contrast ratio looks like this:. A bright image is bright, a dark image is dark.

Done well, this does increase the apparent contrast ratio of a display, but not nearly as much as the numbers would suggest. A TV with 5,, contrast ratio would be unbelievable to look it. Too bad one doesn't exist. A TV with a high dynamic contrast ratio may look better than a TV that has no such circuitry, but it won't look as good as a display with a high native contrast ratio. Picture the end credits of a movie.

A display with a high native contrast will show this as a dark black background, and punchy white text. A display with a high dynamic contrast ratio may have a similarly dark background, but the text won't be bright. Again, I can't make the image on your screen darker or lighter, but here's kinda what it would look like:. As you can see, a display with a high native contrast is the way to go, if that's what you're going for.

The night sky is black, but the streetlights pop out. The day sky is bright, but the dark jacket is dark. This is more like CRT, more like film, more like life. The technology with the highest native contrast ratio is Sony's version SXRD comes in a rather distant second. Third is plasma, though some DLP projectors are close. LCD has come a long way in the past decade, but still lags behind the other technologies. Thankfully, the better LCD manufactures know this and have come up with a few ways to mimic the high native contrast ratio of the other technologies.

The best way to get a high intra-scene contrast ratio with LCDs is with local dimming. It's not done on a per-pixel level, but LED zones are generally small enough that the overall effect is quite good. It's far better than what the LCD panel can do itself. The downside is an artifact known as "halos" where the LEDs are lit behind small bright areas of the screen, but these areas are visible because the other parts of the screen are dark.

Full-motion video ratio is, therefore, most common in home theaters, business screening rooms and broadcast post-production settings. Before I elaborate on why we are looking at adding a fifth viewing category, I recommend reading an excellent article by James Fife, "The race to black. In September , James Fife published a brilliant piece on how important the black levels are when you want to achieve high contrast ratios.

His article is related to optical projection screens and how much they add to contrast, but the same applies to direct view displays with very deep blacks, too. With new display technology, such as OLED , enabling deep blacks and hence very high contrast ratios, there is a clearly defined need for a higher standard of contrast. Imagine that you are creating content and your screen has contrast ratio as well as decent black levels. What happens to the content you have created if it is shown on a display with contrast and deeper black levels?

Worst case, your gorgeous content is displayed with noise and artefacts in the dark areas of the content. The name of the fifth category is currently named Content Creation for Corporate Communications, and has a contrast ratio at There's a solid reason for the higher ratio for content creation here: it gives the headroom needed when content is played back on new displays with high contrast levels and deeper blacks.

That's also why we debated whether we should require a maximum black level on the display. The ANSI standard combines important aspects — such as display brightness and ambient light — in a complete system ratio.

Depending on what you want to achieve from your installation, you need to consider which of the system contrast ratios is most applicable. By understanding the differences and recognizing your audience's needs, you're headed in the right direction.

Topics: digital projection , direct view displays , contrast ratio , ansi standards , piscr , dvdiscr , installation. By: David Aleksandersen. David Aleksandersen has extensive experience from the audiovisual industry and is an active blogger.