IFA is typically not about new technologies, but about when and in what form the refined versions of the novelties announced in Las Vegas at the beginning of the year will appear in Europe. Sometimes, however, there are refreshing exceptions – now, for example, Panasonic has a very interesting demo in addition to new products served. Moreover, with a development related to LCD panels that can solve the technology’s problem with black color and contrast ratio.
Manufacturers currently use local dimming in high-end TVs, which means that the display is divided into zones and each zone gets a unique brightness setting depending on the content being displayed. The idea more or less works, but 4K TVs typically have a few hundred (or at most a thousand) zones per 8 million pixels; that is, it can be seen that overly precise control cannot be solved with this method. Ideally, each pixel would have its own backlight, but this cannot be solved within reasonable limits – or at least that’s what we thought until now. Panasonic’s new prototype works with a double LCD panel, the engineers also placed a monochrome panel behind the normal panel, whose only task is to control the brightness. Since the two panels have the same resolution, this solution enables pixel-level control. In other words, it is roughly equivalent to having its own light source behind each pixel.
With the help of the technology, Panasonic is able to produce a deeper black than the current one, one that even competes with the black of OLED TVs. Meanwhile, the advantages of the LCD panel remain, so the double panel is also characterized by wide color space coverage and high brightness. According to Panasonic’s own measurements, the 55-inch panel made with the MegaCon technology can cover 99 percent of the DCI-P3 color space, and it also provides a brightness of 1,000 nits and a million contrast ratio, without any electronic tricks.
Source: geeks.hu
