John Siracusa

It's very difficult, again, to keep the light.

The other parts of the monitor don't have any backlight turned on, so they're totally black, but the little pixel has a little bit of bloom around it, so you try to turn the backlight down a little bit and combat bloom.

And anyway, that's one whole section of television switches.

We cannot turn on individual pixels and make just the pixel emit its own light.

We always have to turn on some portion of the backlight behind the pixels that we want to show up.

And those regions have been getting smaller and smaller.

It used to be like, oh, we divide it up into like five regions, 16.

Now there are thousands of backlight regions on like modern displays, not the studio display.

But, you know, Apple's Pro Display XDR has, what, 570-something backlight regions?

And that's like a six-year-old thing.

The monitors we were talking about from CES are like 2,000 zones.

But, of course, how many pixels are there on a 5K display?

Way more than 2,000.

So...

That's one side of things and the other side of things are the technologies that allow per pixel lighting control And the one that is most commonly used in television these days is oled But just like on your phone or on the new ipad pro Oled you can turn on a single pixel because the pixels themselves emit their own light There is no light behind them that's shining through them and big chunky thing.

The individual pixels make their own light um and

There are trade-offs between them because OLEDs can't get as bright as those other ones because when you've got the big light behind everything, you can crank up the light real high.

More recently, the battle between these two different kinds of technologies has advanced to the point where it's not just brightness anymore.

It used to be, okay, well, OLED has the best picture, but LCD TVs with backlights can get brighter.

And the competition is now in something called color volume, which is like, okay, how many colors can you show?