One of the biggest challenges when it comes to representing images on an LCD monitor is the luminance of colors, which has been a challenge that has led to the creation of different types of technologies, including FALD technology with which manufacturers of PC monitors and televisions hope to achieve the holy grail of balance between luminance and chroma and therefore of color representation. Let’s see what it consists of.
Differences between IPS, LED and OLED
Today, IPS technology is considered to be the best technology for LCD panels on the market, on the other hand, when we talk about a panel with LED technology, we are not talking about a specific type of panel as it is. case with TN, IPS or VA technologiesbut to a type of backlight. Which, as the name suggests, consists of the use of LED lighting to backlight the screen, which has become the most widely used type of lighting for different types of LCD screens.
OLED technology, on the other hand, does not refer to any type of backlighting, but to a completely different type of panel from LCD panels. The main difference from LCD screens is that they don’t need any type of backlight to work. Today, OLED technology is considered to be better than any LCD technology, be it refresh rate, response time, accuracy in color representation. Although in exchange for a higher price than LCD panels and having image retention issues.
Local dimming or local attenuation
First of all, we need to understand the concept of local gradation, which in Spanish translates to local gradation. This background technology has no secrets, but it should be clear that a color on a TV comes through two factors, the first is chroma and the second is luminance. Well, as we mentioned before, the light in a scene is not completely uniform and therefore it is counterproductive for the luminance level to be uniform throughout the scene.
In any type of LED display, the luminance of the colors depends on the backlight behind it. This is where local gradation comes in. This allows us to control the lighting level of each of the LED lamps which are backlit. The difference between the different LED display technologies is how the local dimming is implemented and the area of the screen influenced by each LED lamp.
Lights for the backlight should not be placed on the back, there are models where they are located on the back of the screen, but in others we can see that the lighting can come from the edges of the screen, either totally or partially. What is not as efficient as having a backlight behind the screen, so a Full Array LED is best, as it helps cover smaller areas of pixels on the screen and prevents it there are pixels lit by mistake.
What is FALD technology and how does it work?
FALD stands for Full Array LED Dimming, which is based on an array of LED lights placed on the back of the screen, just behind the pixel panel that displays the image. So we are talking about a backlighting system for the emission of light from inside the panel to the screen itself. Let us not forget that the type of internal lighting affects the quality of the image displayed by the panel.
The difference between Full Array Dimming and other LED systems is that it uses more LED lights for the backlight than other solutions that have appeared on the market. With a uniform distribution of lamps over the entire monitor surface, which makes the color shown completely uniform and there are no areas with differences in contrast.
When it comes to controlling the different backlight LEDs, monitors and TVs with FALD technology group them into different blocks rather than evenly. This allows the lighting to be set differently in each zone. Which makes sense when you take into account that in a movie or video game, not all parts of a frame represent areas with the same lighting. It is therefore one more evolution of OLED technology, with which it seeks to improve the quality of blacks, the level of brightness of the image and the definition of the shading of the image in order to obtain a quality. superior.
The limits of FALD technology
The biggest limitation of FALD technology is that the different local backlight zones cannot be turned on and off individually, only the lighting level of these can be changed. Which means that in areas where the lighting should be completely off, it really isn’t, putting monitors with FALD technology at a disadvantage over OLEDs, which allow the backlight to be turned off in specific areas. ,
That is why, to improve the FALD, the miniLED format was created, which consists of an array or array of LED lights for the FALD, but not made up of hundreds of lights to backlit, but of hundreds of lights. This gives you better lighting control in bright and dark areas than with conventional FALD technology.
The evolution continued in the form of MicroLED technology, which was the biggest evolution of this type of FALD backlight. In this document, we are talking about the fact that each pixel on the screen has its corresponding LED bulb behind to control its luminance level. We would no longer speak of screen areas, but of individual pixels to be able to control their level of luminance.
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