I have 3 tvs in my house I often find myself watching tv in the basement where my Plasma is just because the LCD looks terrible in the dark why is this so
In: Technology
There are a lot of close/reasonable answers below. It’s about the backlighting.
You have two panels on LCD/LEDs…one with the color, and one that lights it up from behind. In cheap LCD/LEDs, the whole panel lights up. If your panel was showing a night sky in a horror movie, you’re going to have the color from one panel, and see that color because of the backlighting…EVEN IF THAT COLOR IS BLACK. This is where you get the lighting washed out. The only reason you’re seeing color is because of the lighting behind the panel.
They then created “zones”. Your back lighting will create a gradient where it turns off in areas where the entire screen is black, but you’ll get brighter areas where there are colors, creating vertical lines in dark scenes. It’s ugly.
They then made these zones smaller and smaller. The most reasonable ones are “array-based” lighting because it increases brightness in smaller, targeted areas, decreasing how washed out dark areas appear.
The reason OLED (like plasma) looked so good is because the color being displayed is also the light. So the if the area is supposed to be dark, there is no light being emitted. If it’s supposed to be green, a green pixel appears. If it’s orange, same thing. Therefore, your picture looks substantially better because it’s not washed out and therefore more brilliant to the human eye.
Plasma was tough because in order to get it brilliant, you risked “burn in” with the panel. Playing a video game for too long, or watching a particular channel with a chyron at the bottom could make that area of the screen permanently disfigure. OLED CAN have the same burn-in, but they are new enough to intelligently encourage you to shut the TV down before doing damage, or introduce a screen saver that flexes the pixels to avoid them getting burnt in.
I’ve been disappointed in my TV purchases because of not understanding the array-based backlighting and how important it is. I have a dozen LED/LCDs in the house that aren’t very impressive, of varying models, sizes, generations, and pricing. My OLED operates at a completely different level.
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