Untangling the Monitor Maze – What You Need to Know

Where do you start when it comes to what you need to know before purchasing your next monitor (especially if you’re not a die-hard tech geek)? Start here:

Your Monitor is an Investment

As with most things, you get what you pay for when you purchase a monitor. The newer features and technologies can improve workflow efficiencies with wider screens that let you run multiple side-by-side applications; advanced visual quality thanks to improved color accuracy, screen resolution, clarity, contrast and refresh rates; an array of connectivity options so you can connect multiple devices at once and ergonomic design, so you can adjust your monitor to your best viewing angle.

Understanding what your particular needs are will help you refine your focus on which monitors to consider.

• Will you be using your monitor strictly indoors or outside, too? High-brightness displays should be considered for outdoor use or bright indoor spaces.
• Visual creative? You’ll want to opt for high-resolution displays that offer a wide color gamut, dynamic range and contrast ratio for optimum color accuracy and crisp details. Portable monitors can be a smart option for content creators, too.
• Gamer? Displays that offer the truest blacks and crisp details should be considered. Also, look for high refresh rates so fast movements on the screen look smooth and seamless.

Demystifying Monitor-Speak

LCD, LED, Mini-LED, OLED, QLED, QD-OLED, pixels, backlights, color gamut, contrast ratio, local dimming, refresh rate…confused? We break it all down for you here, starting with the basics:

Backlight – This is the light source that illuminates the display panels in and allows you to see the images and colors on the screen. Today, most backlights are LEDs and are used in LCD, Mini-LED and QLED monitors. Brightness, color accuracy, contrast and the evenness of the backlight are important viewing elements. Uniform brightness and color temperature help ensure color accuracy and consistency and can even help mitigate fatigue and eye strain during prolonged monitor use.

Color Gamut – Digital devices (cameras, monitors, etc.) can only produce a fraction of colors in the visible spectrum. The color gamut helps quantify the color capabilities of a given device. The wider the color gamut, the better the color accuracy.

Contrast Ratio – This is the difference between the minimum brightness and maximum brightness of a monitor. It determines the range of colors a display can produce, from the deepest black to the brightest white. Deeper blacks improve overall picture quality, which can be found in monitors with higher contrast ratios.

Local Dimming – True, deep blacks are difficult to produce on screens that use backlight technology. Local dimming is a feature that compensates for this by organizing the LEDs into zones, then enhancing the contrast ratio by allowing for specific zones to be darker without affecting the zones that need to be brighter. The results are deeper blacks, and crisper whites. Local dimming is available in both LED Edge-Lighting and LED Full-Array Lighting.

Nit – A unit of light measurement (technically, candela per square meter or cd/m2). The higher the nits, the brighter the screen. Screen brightness capability is an important feature to consider if you plan on using your screen outdoors.

Pixel – Short for “picture element” these are the tiny dots or squares you see on digital displays. These dots are single points of color on a screen and are the smallest unit of a digital image that can be displayed on a screen. Typically arranged in a grid-like pattern, the density of pixels – or resolution – is expressed as PPI (Pixels Per Inch) or DPI (Dots Per Inch). The more pixels, the higher the resolution, the crisper and clearer the image appears on the screen.

Refresh Rate – What looks like a moving image on your display is actually a series of still images brought up multiple times per second, so it looks like seamless movement. Refresh rates are how many frames a monitor can display in a second, measured in hertz (Hz). Most good monitors today offer refresh rates from 60 Hz to 240 Hz. The higher the Hz, the smoother fast movement will look on the screen. 60 Hz is fine for movie viewing. Gamers may want to explore 120 Hz, 144 Hz or 240 Hz. Higher-end monitors may also come with adaptive sync and gaming features that sync a monitor’s refresh rate with the graphic card’s frame rate.

Resolution – A screen’s resolution is defined by how many pixels it has in a width x height format. The more pixels, the sharper the image. Here are some resolution levels:

• HD/720p – 1280 X 720
• Full HD (FHD)/HD – 1920 X 1080
• WUXGA – 1920 X 1200
• 2K – 2560 X 1440 (typical monitor resolution), 2048 X 1080 (official cinema resolution)
• QHD/WQHD/1440p – 2560 X 1440
• Ultra HD (UHD) – 3840 X 2160
• 4K – 3840 X 2160 (typical monitor resolution) 4096 X 2160 (official cinema resolution)
• 5K – 5120 X 2880

LED – Light-Emitting Diode. This is a semiconductor device that emits light when an electric current flows through it, used to illuminate the monitor screen (like very tiny lightbulbs without filaments that can burn out or get hot). Their arrangement behind the screen can vary from Full-Array LED backlighting to Edge-Lighting. All LEDs work in conjunction with separate display technologies such as LCD.

• Edge-Lighting
  Lights are positioned along the edges of the screen and employ the use of integrated light guide panels to spread light across the entire surface of the display. LEDs may be grouped into multiple zones to allow for more control over contrast ratio via local dimming. These are typically lighter and more energy efficient than full-array LED backlights due to fewer lights used just around the edges.
• Full-Array Lighting
  Lights are positioned across the entire back of the screen and, like Edge-Lighting, can be grouped into multiple zones to work with local dimming technology (Full-Array Local Dimming or FALD).

Note: It’s important to clarify that LED refers to a monitor’s backlight, while LCD refers specifically to a monitor’s display (screen), which are different aspects of monitor technology

Different Monitor Types

LCD – Liquid Crystal Display. LCD monitors produce sharp, high-resolution images with vibrant colors and good contrast. They offer wide viewing angles so you can see the screen clearly from different positions without losing contrast or experiencing significant color distortion. LCDs have a response time (measured in milliseconds) that affects how quickly pixels can change from one state to another, with faster response times reducing motion blur. LCD displays are an affordable, reliable option for various multimedia applications.

The liquid crystals in LCDs have light-modulating properties that react when electrically charged. LCDs don’t produce light but alter the light traveling through it. LCD displays are made up of several layers: a backlight; a polarized filter (parallel); an electric field control layer; a liquid crystal or pixel layer; another polarized filter (perpendicular) and a glass layer. Here’s how it works:

• The backlight provides illumination in the form of light waves moving in all directions.
• The first polarized filter (towards the back) only allows certain light waves to pass through.
• The liquid crystals in the pixel layer are sandwiched between 2 transparent electrodes. Without the liquid crystal layer, light filtering from the 1^st polarized layer would be blocked by the 2^nd polarized layer. Each pixel has a color filter in front of it to selectively allow certain wavelengths of light (red, green, or blue) to pass through.
• In the electric field control layer, the electrical charged applied to a specific crystal can change its orientation when electrically charged, which affects how light travels through the polarized filters. The voltage applied to each pixel controls the amount of light passing through to the 2^nd filter.
• The second polarizing filter (towards the front of the screen) is usually oriented perpendicularly to the first filter. Light can only pass through the liquid crystals that are aligned correctly to pass through to the second polarizing filter. Combining different pixels with varying orientations creates the desired colors and brightness levels.

LCD Display Types: IPS (In Plane Switching) and VA (Vertical Alignment)

• IPS panels – Have high color accuracy and wide color gamut or range due to how the liquid crystals lie flat. These displays also look good from wider angles, so you don’t need to look exactly head on at an IPS display to see colors accurately.
• VA panels – Here, the liquid crystals stand up straight, which helps block more light. These displays don’t have quite the color accuracy and gamut as IPS displays, but they do have better contrast ratios (deeper blacks, brighter whites).

Mini-LED – Instead of just one large/or a few dozen backlights, Mini-LED displays contain thousands of LED backlights, allowing more LEDs to be grouped together. This means greater control over dimming/lighting for better contrast ratio and detail. Mini-LED displays typically offer excellent HDR support (anywhere from 1500-2000 nits, with some up to 3000 nits), providing a wider range of brightness levels and improved contrast between light and dark areas of the image, and better brightness than OLED displays. Mini-LEDs are usually priced lower than OLED displays.

QLED – Quantum Dot LED. Quantum dots are tiny, phosphorescent nanocrystals that can either emit or alter light at different frequencies when subjected to electrical energy. Like other LEDs, QLED screens rely on backlighting, but in this case, a blue LED light source is used with a film of quantum dots sandwiched between other layers of the LCD panel, replacing the color filter. These panels can actually make all the colors in the visible spectrum appear brighter without losing saturation.

OLED – Organic Light-Emitting Diode. OLED displays don’t have a backlight at all, which allows for these screens to be flatter than other displays because the OLEDs can be applied directly to the glass. In lieu of a backlight, each pixel in the display contains an organic material that glows when electricity is applied to it. The more electricity a pixel receives, the brighter it glows. Conversely, if the pixel doesn’t receive any electricity, it remains completely dark. This allows for any black in images to be displayed as true black – not dark grey – since virtually no light is coming from those pixels.

Concerns about “burn-in” or image retention if you leave a static image on your display for hours at a time, are waning for OLED, thanks to advances like pixel shifting technology that detects static images and uses alternative pixels for display, and screen savers that pop up after a period of inactivity. OLED screens are not as bright as Mini-LEDs, reaching about 1000 nits.

QD-OLED – Quantum Dot Organic Light Emitting Diode. It’s a hybrid display technology that combines the best of quantum dots and OLED technology – OLED’s excellent picture quality with quantum dots’ brightness. In QD-OLED displays, a layer of quantum dots is combined with blue OLED material. When blue light passes through the quantum dot layer, green and red sub-pixels are created (the RGB color model) resulting in brighter displays than traditional OLED panels and excellent HDR performance.

Liquid Retina XDR (Apple’s mini-LED)

This is an LCD with an IPS panel and high pixel density (what Apple refers to as “Retina”). The density of the pixels is such that it is virtually impossible to see individual pixels at normal viewing distances.

While a standard liquid display uses a panel of LEDs that constantly remains on, the newer XDR models use substantially more, smaller LEDs grouped into zones, and individually dimmed for better contrast ratio. Improved brightness makes this a good option for HDR (High Dynamic Range) work.