Can you still believe the tech specs on a monitor? If it's impossible to reach 10 000:1 or 8 000 000:1, what are manufacturers playing at by promising such contrast ratios?
Some monitor manufacturers are worse than Bernard Madoff: they promise you millions but you end up with nothing. How have we come to have such a massive gulf between fact and fiction? How can the specs be so wrong? And is actual dishonesty involved, or are consumers also guilty of naively believing the marketing promises?
The saddest part of this story is that everybody realises the whole situation is ridiculous, but rather than applying the brakes and calming things down, the manufactures are all putting their foot to the floor and racing to outpace the opposition. All of them are guilty of putting out bogus documentation with unreal stats, but everybody claims it's somebody else's fault!
Their claims vs our results
We've found screens with wild claims about their contrast ratio from every one of the monitor manufacturers whose products we've tested, with just three exceptions: Apple, LaCie and Eizo. And we can put the last of those three to one side for the time being, because Eizo doesn't provie any information at all about contrast in the documentation that comes with its monitors ...
When we started this article, we began to single out the screens that claimed to have a contrast ratio of more than 10 000:1--already between 3 and 10 times more than the most hopelessly optimistic expectations. But the problem was, there were far already far too many of them. Instead, we've taken every manufacturer's worst offender, with one each from eleven different firms. Only Samsung managed to get two, but that's the price you pay for being the world leader.
In this chart, we put their claimed contrast ratios (blue bars with red labels) up against the results we actually measured in our lab (red bars with black labels). As you can see, almost without exception, the real figures barely even make it onto the chart.
Red: manufacturers' promised figures. Black: our lab results.
What's immediately obvious from the graph is that, apart from a few exceptions, whatever contrast ratio the manufacturer actually claims in their documentation, the vast majority of monitors have an average contrast ratio of around 830:1 when we test them in our lab. These figures are closer to the 'typical' values which are also sometimes found in the tech specs (see inset).
We're not out to name and shame the monitors that are in the list above. All of the manufacturers we contacted agreed to take part and were happy to have us compare their specs with the real results from our labs. We made the list for several resons:
Whose fault is it?
But why do manufacturers fill up their marketing with meaningless claims about dynamic contrast? What's the point of putting the emphasis on this value, or even including it all, when in reality it has no place there at all? If you agree to let them talk off the record, almost everybody in the industry is prepared to agree that dynamic contrast makes no sense. Instead, they place they blame in four different places:
What is a good contrast ratio?
1000:1 is more than enough for everyday use. At that level, when white areas of the screen are 200 cd/m², black areas are just 0.2 cd/m². For imaging professionals, who tend to set their screens to 100 cd/m², black areas produce just 0.1 cd/m² of light. That's an absolutely perfect result, and anybody who claims any better (apart from the Samsung F2380M), is merely making it up.
Four screens with good contrast ratios--that we've checked ourselves!
The saddest part of this story is that everybody realises the whole situation is ridiculous, but rather than applying the brakes and calming things down, the manufactures are all putting their foot to the floor and racing to outpace the opposition. All of them are guilty of putting out bogus documentation with unreal stats, but everybody claims it's somebody else's fault!
Their claims vs our results
We've found screens with wild claims about their contrast ratio from every one of the monitor manufacturers whose products we've tested, with just three exceptions: Apple, LaCie and Eizo. And we can put the last of those three to one side for the time being, because Eizo doesn't provie any information at all about contrast in the documentation that comes with its monitors ...
When we started this article, we began to single out the screens that claimed to have a contrast ratio of more than 10 000:1--already between 3 and 10 times more than the most hopelessly optimistic expectations. But the problem was, there were far already far too many of them. Instead, we've taken every manufacturer's worst offender, with one each from eleven different firms. Only Samsung managed to get two, but that's the price you pay for being the world leader.
In this chart, we put their claimed contrast ratios (blue bars with red labels) up against the results we actually measured in our lab (red bars with black labels). As you can see, almost without exception, the real figures barely even make it onto the chart.
Red: manufacturers' promised figures. Black: our lab results.
What's immediately obvious from the graph is that, apart from a few exceptions, whatever contrast ratio the manufacturer actually claims in their documentation, the vast majority of monitors have an average contrast ratio of around 830:1 when we test them in our lab. These figures are closer to the 'typical' values which are also sometimes found in the tech specs (see inset).
We're not out to name and shame the monitors that are in the list above. All of the manufacturers we contacted agreed to take part and were happy to have us compare their specs with the real results from our labs. We made the list for several resons:
- to see if we'd got it wrong: maybe we weren't looking at the right specs after all?
- to encourage manufacturers to respond and change their policies
- in the hope that we'd be able to remove monitors from the list one by one as manufacturers decide to swap the place of typical and dynamic contrast (which we'd actually like to get rid of entirely, unless it's handled more reasonably)
Whose fault is it?
But why do manufacturers fill up their marketing with meaningless claims about dynamic contrast? What's the point of putting the emphasis on this value, or even including it all, when in reality it has no place there at all? If you agree to let them talk off the record, almost everybody in the industry is prepared to agree that dynamic contrast makes no sense. Instead, they place they blame in four different places:
- purchasing managers in large IT departments, who refuse to place huge orders unless they see enormous contrast ratios that are as unrealistic as they are useless.
- the competition: as soon as the 'others' start upping the stats, everybody feels like they have to do the same. It's a bit like illegal drugs in sport.
- regular consumers who want to see huge numbers. For Joe Public, the more zeroes there are at the end of the number, the better. Here, it's the same story with the number of Megapixels on a digital camera's sensor.
- salespeople, who with no better arguments to push a particular monitor, fall back on reeling off big numbers to impress clients.
What is a good contrast ratio?
1000:1 is more than enough for everyday use. At that level, when white areas of the screen are 200 cd/m², black areas are just 0.2 cd/m². For imaging professionals, who tend to set their screens to 100 cd/m², black areas produce just 0.1 cd/m² of light. That's an absolutely perfect result, and anybody who claims any better (apart from the Samsung F2380M), is merely making it up.
Four screens with good contrast ratios--that we've checked ourselves!
 |
 |
|
 |
.jpg)
DigitalVersus on...