A Comparison of Alternative High Definition Display Technologies to CRT

Over the last 18 months, high definition home entertainment systems have become available to the US consumer, albeit at a substantial price tag. These systems are based almost exclusively on direct view and rear projection CRT technology. More recently however, a number of manufacturers have made announcements portending the arrival of HDTV projection systems based on alternative display technologies such as transmissive and reflective LCD, and DLP™. Many of these announcements promise excellent image quality, but demonstrations of prototype systems have shown that there is much variability in subjective image quality from system to system. As the incumbent technology, direct view and rear projection CRT have set the image quality standard by which alternative technologies will be judged. Virtually all of the CRT's competitors in the HD arena are based on fixed matrix modulators with substantially different electronic and optical characteristics. It would be of interest to explore how these differences manifest themselves in terms of image quality relative to that of CRT technology. — In this paper, we will examine some of the image quality characteristics of representative samples of several LCD and DLP based projection display technologies as compared to those of CRT-based HD sets. MTF characteristics will be compared, as well as quantitative image quality metrics utilizing several established methods.

Published

1999-11

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/M00324

ISBN

978-1-61482-931-7