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LCD Specs: Useless?

Tested contrast ratios rarely conform to vendors' specs.

By Tom Mainelli, PCW Print   

Lab Notes: What About Brightness?

Brightness or luminance--typically expressed in candelas per square meter (cd/m2)--is at least as important to many LCD buyers as contrast ratio. But in our tests, vendor brightness numbers proved as unreliable as their contrast ratios. More than half the vendors overstated brightness, as measured in our tests using maximized settings (which vendors typically use for luminance tests).

Vendors measure contrast ratio using full-white and full-black screens, and so did we. But few people actually use their monitors this way, and VESA's standard also calls for separate measurements using a checkerboard pattern, which tends to lower the contrast ratio because light bleeds from white boxes to dark boxes. Contrast ratios with our 15-by-15 checkerboard (the most granular our test setup permitted) were slightly lower, but we expect that they would have been lower still had we been able to use smaller boxes. However, even this arrangement is nine times more granular than the 5-by-5 pattern that VESA recommends.

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