The market for high bright screens for digital advertising has increased greatly in the last few years. Many manufacturers are now entering this arena with their own high bright offerings. But just putting more light behind the screen is only a part of the solution. Brightness without high contrast and colour calibration produces cold, burnt out images. If your application is a timetable or information display then an entry level screen is probably OK, but if you are in looking to use it for advertising, fashion or any market where image quality is paramount then you should consider a high-end screen to produce the best looking results and the difference in price may not be as great as you think.
Colour Calibration is an important factor for any screen. People instantly know if colours look off, especially when looking at skin tones, landscapes or other familiar objects. LCD panels have becomes much better at colour reproduction and improved off-axis viewing angles. However there is still a tendency for some screens to exhibit a blue cast giving images a rather cool appearance. By calibrating them correctly to D6500k colours appear natural and most importantly uniform across all your displays.
In order to produce a high bright screen you need to push more light out of the screen to counter the light coming in. Anyone who has taken their laptop outside will know the frustration of having the screen washout and become near impossible to view. The problem with pushing more light through the screen is that dark areas become washed out. The LCD panel does not block 100% of the light when set to black. In order to produce deep blacks you need to implement a full LED backlight with local dimming. This allows the screen to turn down areas of the backlight which fall behind the dark areas of the image, in turn producing deeper blacks and higher contrast levels.
Here is a recent comparison photograph we took comparing three different screens in the full midday sun. It illustrates quite well the differences between a non-high bright screen, a basic high bright and a high-end high bright monitor.
In this example the high-end screen is outputting twice the level of brightness as the budget screen and yet it is still maintaining deep blacks and high contrast levels. On the entry level screen the blacks are washed out and in the brightest areas the detail is being burnt out. It does however still produce clearly visible results in extreme sunlight and therefore provides a great solution for certain applications.
This picture only tells part of the story. It is very difficult to reproduce with a camera what you see with your own eyes. This is why we always recommend a personal demonstration so you can see the screen quality for yourself. If you are looking for high bright screens then give us a call and we would be happy to discuss the available options and help you find the best screen for your application.
See details of our high bright screen here.