My “Colorful” SID 2013 Impressions

Bron; www.display-central.com

SID 2013 has almost ended and the show floor is closed.  The exhibition featured several large display manufacturers together with many smaller companies and suppliers of specialty materials and components.  This mix of very large companies and small start-up companies makes up much of the charm of this exhibition as all of them address some form of display industry need or product.

Of course displays are all the hype and are shown in all shapes, sizes, resolutions and technologies.  For me, the most common theme this year was the display manufacturer’s focus on improved color performance.  While many high resolution displays were showcased at the various booths, they were not the main topic highlighted by many of the manufacturers.

Expanded color space seemed to have captured more of the marketing message this year. This is of course driven by the focus on OLED displays for mobile devices and TVs.

In general, OLED makers are pushing the extended color capabilities of their respective displays in comparison to other manufacturers and technologies.  In other words OLED is great and LCD lags.  As a general rule, OLEDs achieve 100% of the Adobe RGB color space, while LCDs reach anywhere from 65% to 75%.  Side by side, the OLEDs look much more vibrant than the LCD.  The most important difference lies in the color coordinate of the green primary that creates a significantly larger color space than most LCDs cover today.

But quantum dot technology may change this.  As we have recently reported Time to Buy a Quantum Dot TV), Sony TV using quantum dot technology from QD Vision are now available.  The TVs shown in the QD Vision booth were very impressive as they significantly increase color space and now rivals that achievable with AMOLED.  At the same time, this solution is available at a small cost differential over a standard LED LCD display.  As QD Vision puts it, you can get OLED color at LCD prices.  Since the solution is already available in TV sizes, the race for OLED TVs has become even harder.  While OLED still holds an edge in terms of speed of response and native contrast ratio, that advantage continues to erode vs. LCD.

In the 3M booth, we saw color enhanced mobile displays that not only improved the color space, but also offered a color evaluation metric that combines several key elements of display operation into a single numeric they call the Perceptual Quality Metric (PQM).  This number tries to create a quantitative tool to assess the quality of the display.  They assess the display size, resolution, luminance and color gamut to arrive at this number.

They showed two monitors side by side along with a number of images to assess the viewer perception compared to the calculated PQM number.  In general, most of the viewers agreed with the PQM number in evaluating their preference of one display over the other.  This was not just one display versus the other, but they varied the display drive from one picture to the next, so that sometimes monitor 1 was preferred and other times monitor 2 looked superior.

3M did not release more details on the algorithm they are using, as they are still in internal discussions.  We are looking forward to learn more about this PQM number in the near future.

Insight Media will be publishing more detailed interviews with these two as well as other companies on Display-Central.com very soon.

As it looks, the future displays may not be much brighter but they sure will be much more colorful.