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How does a screen work?

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572 points chkhd | 3 comments | 13 Jul 25 14:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.634s | source
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ksec ◴[13 Jul 25 17:15 UTC] No.44551894[source]▶
LCD on paper you see lots of drawbacks, in practice modern state of the art LCD for TV is pretty damn good. We will soon have RGB LED Backlight LCD with WHVA+ Panel that is about as wide angle as IPS, 95%+ REC 2020 colour, and 1-2ms response time.

Phosphorescent blue OLEDs should reduce current OLED display energy usage by 20-30%. But it still seems to be way off for phones and mass usage.

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kec ◴[13 Jul 25 18:22 UTC] No.44552346[source]▶
None of that really helps LCDs primary downsides of poor contrast ratio and relatively high energy consumption. Backlit displays will always inherently score worse on these metrics vs self emissive displays.
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1. cubefox ◴[14 Jul 25 11:13 UTC] No.44558762[source]▶
The energy efficiency of LCDs is very good, typically better than OLED screens, except on very dark content.
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2. kec ◴[14 Jul 25 18:36 UTC] No.44563689[source]▶
LCDs as a transmissive display technology work by emitting a bunch of photons and then selectively filtering some out to achieve the desired color / pixel brightness. Any filtered photon is wasted energy, this is inherent to the display technology and is not limited to dark content, just exacerbated by it.

Given that, all things equal there is no way for LCD to equal the efficiency of a self emissive display, at best it's a question of when will the luminous efficiency of OLED exceed that of white/blue backlight LEDs... and honestly we're likely already at or past that point.

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3. cubefox ◴[14 Jul 25 20:30 UTC] No.44564902[source]▶
> Given that, all things equal there is no way for LCD to equal the efficiency of a self emissive display

The backlight LEDs are just much more efficient than OLEDs. The power consumption of TVs / monitors is a well known quantity.