When buying a liquid crystal monitor, it is important to take into account many characteristics and, if possible, have a concept about them even before the acquisition. When describing a product, you can often stumble upon a parameter such as “dynamic contrast”, which usually raises many questions among consumers. Let's try to understand what it is and what matters. However, first you need to figure out what else to look for when choosing and which dynamic contrast is better?
The answer to this question depends on the purpose of the purchase. If you professionally process photos, some properties will be important to you, if you work with large data arrays - others, play modern video games - the third. You will not really need all the qualities touted in commercials, and some of them are exclusively marketing moves that do not bring any benefit to the consumer.
The main parameters that are usually emphasized are:
- response time;
- viewing angle;
- brightness;
- number of colors displayed;
- resolution;
- contrast: static (natural) and dynamic.
We will dwell on the last of them in more detail.
First you need to answer the question, what does the concept of "contrast" mean? As a rule, this word refers to its static, or natural variety. It can be most clearly shown as the result of the formula: “the lightest part of the image / darkest”. The higher the difference between them, the higher the contrast. In the second case, due to the smaller difference, all dark areas suffered, becoming black from light gray.
ATTENTION! If in the description of the monitor you see large indicators of static contrast, this does not mean that you will get exactly that result.
The trick of the manufacturers is that when measuring the light part, an artificial, brightest image is used, which can not be found during normal operation, and when measuring the dark, the signal is simply turned off. In this case, the only thing you can rely on is online reviews.
What is the difference in dynamic contrast? As the name implies, it is formed from a picture in dynamics, movement, and this happens automatically, without your intervention. That is, the monitor independently adjusts the backlight level depending on the ratio of light and dark parts of the image in every second of time.
A simple example: the darker the overall picture, the less light is applied to the screen and, accordingly, the brighter the more. On the one hand, this is good, in the first case, the image becomes deeper, in the second - brighter. However, a significant minus is that each time the opposite part suffers. That is, in the dark picture, the LEDs are not strong enough to correctly display its light parts, and vice versa, in the bright picture they burn so much that they also illuminate dark areas that cease to be dark.
It follows from this that a much more important property is static contrast than dynamic.
Manufacturers of LED monitors with a local backlight function are currently approaching a compromise. This means that in motion the screen illumination level does not change completely, as in the example above, but in parts: some LEDs light up at full power, others less, others do not light at all. Thus, a high-quality contrast picture with clear black and white colors is obtained.
First of all, as mentioned earlier, you should not pay attention to the numbers provided by manufacturers and marketers, since they have nothing to do with reality. You could be advised to trust your eyes when choosing in a store, but it’s not so simple either: the videos shown on screens for advertising purposes are as close as possible to the ideal and are many times superior in quality to what you will observe during real work. The only way out in this situation is to read the reviews.
IMPORTANT! Since at the moment a single standard for measuring contrast has not yet been created, each resortes to its own method, which gives completely different results when checking the same models.
Most often, the following two methods are used:
- measuring the difference between a completely black and a completely white test image;
- ANSI method.
The first is much less effective, because in real work with such pronounced poles you will encounter extremely rarely. The second one, which represents the average indicators of the image contrast with a fragment of a chessboard, looks much more appropriate.
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