SED versus Plasma versus LCD

[Davidgilmour]

http://www.behardware.com/articles/593-1/close-encounters-of-the-third-kind-sed.html

Apparantly Canon has showed its first SED screen, there are some pictures on the link. The pros of CRT combined with very low power consumption and REAL blacks will give this a promising future!

Until then I am happy with my PW7 :thumbsup:

[Jim_Fear]

Its nice to see a comparison for once like the second page.

SED is Nano-CRT i assume?

[StefanoC]

Looks fantastic. Will hold onto my 436XDE for a long while though, in fact the wife thinks we are keeping it for 10 years because it cost so much. I'm being relaistic and thinking 5 years, hopefully by then everyting will be in 1080p and it will be worth buying a 50" SED screen.

[gizlaroc]

SED should be awesomee when it is a couple of years in, really looking forward to it, but that demo is ridiculous! Whose plasma looks like that with a black screen! :)

http://www.behardware.com/medias/photos_news/00/14/IMG0014585.jpg

I wish they would set them up properly and give some credability to the comparisons.

[RHCP]

I've hears mention of SED - but what exactly is it?

[sandstheman]

As good as it looks, it doesn't have that great a peak brightness, only 400cdm, one good thing about it is it looks like it can do near perfect blacks...but i'd rather wait for this ;) :

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2005/10/04/brightside_hdr_edr/1.html

[sandstheman]

I've hears mention of SED - but what exactly is it?

SED stands for Surface-Emitting Electron Display (i think) and is similar to the way a CRT works.

Electrons are fired at a phosphor coated screen, with CRT the electrons were fired by one big electron gun that would scan the screen line by line, which is why CRTS are so big and bulky. SED takes the same principle but shrinks down the electron gun to sub pixel size, so you essentially have an electron gun for every single sub-pixel on the display, thus giving you a CRT equivalent viewing experience in a display of similar size, thickness and resolution as Plasma and LCD

[gizlaroc]

As good as it looks, it doesn't have that great a peak brightness, only 400cdm, one good thing about it is it looks like it can do near perfect blacks...but i'd rather wait for this ;) :

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2005/10/04/brightside_hdr_edr/1.html

But I don't think peal brightness is that important, maybe in the future when every display has the abaility for directors to take advantage, but for now having the lowest light output when displaying black is the most important feature.

That is why I hate contrast ratio on spec sheets so much, I wish they wwould put the light output when showing black, but 95% of them wouldn't dare.

[sandstheman]

you can roughly work out the light output for black, just take your max brightness figure and divide by contrast ratio and and that gets you your minimum brightness level

So for the SED screen peak brightness is 400cdm and contrast rations 100,000:1 so minimum brightness will roughly be

400/100000 = 0.004cdm

[gizlaroc]

But I wish digital displays had to put this in their specs.
Anyone can acheive 10:000:1 on paper, but getting the display down to 0.004cdm is a completely different matter, I think even the new Panny PHD8 is too bright compared with my PHD6, I want them to get darker but they all seem to be pushing up the white level instead.

[sandstheman]

Yeah, i think manufacturers need to start putting more complete specifications on their products now, a min and max brightness level and contrast ratio.

getting pure blacks and whiter whites needs to go hand in hand, they need to get as close to zero light emission as they can without making the screen too dim for the bright areas.

The newer techs don't seem to address this issue directly which is why i'm placing my money on those EDR displays i linked to, they can provide zero light emission for black and a peak brightness of 4000cdm, they just need to get the price down from 50,000 though first :eek:

[Jim_Fear]

They need to get the price down and the size up :)