John Siracusa

They were the champions because they had perfect lighting control.

They could get really bright and they had huge color volume.

This is sort of an Empire Strikes Back like situation where the televisions with the backlights are saying, OK, we've got a new idea.

It's not really that new, but Sony did it ages ago.

But anyway, in the past few years, it's been like instead of having a backlight that is just a white or blue light, most of them are blue because you can change the blue until the other colors because it's the shortest wavelength.

How about we have a backlight broken up into little regions, but we'll make the backlight itself, like the little lights that are, you know, behind there, the little backlight regions, they will be RGB.

This is like a gamer's dream.

RGB lights, they're behind my TV, right?

And it's really complicated to do that because if you think about it, I'm going to show you an image and you have, you know, 2000 backlight regions and you know what color every pixel is supposed to be.

But for like the one inch by one inch region or the one centimeter by one centimeter region that's behind this particular set of pixels in this like, you know, drawing of a landscape or something.

What color should that RGB backlight be?

Because you just got one R, one G and one B for that little tiny region of the backlight.

What color should we make it?

Well, if most of the pixels are blue, you can just make the backlight blue and then you get super duper blue and it'll be really bright with lots of color volume because you've got a blue backlight going through a blue filter.

It'll be great.

But what if there's like tons of different colors in that little one centimeter region on your screen?

What color should the backlight be?

Now, do you average them?

Like anyway, that's what that's why it's computationally tricky to do that.

But what it gives these screens is more color volume.