What is the best dynamic monitor contrast?

When purchasing an LCD monitor, it is important to consider many characteristics and, if possible, have an understanding of them before purchasing. When describing a product, you can often come across a parameter such as “dynamic contrast”, which usually raises many questions among consumers. Let's try to understand what it is and what it means. However, first you need to figure out what else to look for when choosing and which dynamic contrast is better?

What characteristics are used to choose a monitor?

The answer to this question depends on the purpose of the purchase. If you professionally process photographs, certain properties will be important to you; if you work with large amounts of data, others will be important; if you play modern video games, others will be important. Not all the qualities touted in commercials will actually be what you need, and some of them are purely marketing ploys that do not bring any benefit to the consumer.

The main parameters that usually focus on:

• response time;
• viewing angle;
• brightness;
• number of colors displayed;
• permission;
• contrast: static (natural) and dynamic.

We will dwell on the last of them in more detail.

What is dynamic contrast

First, we should answer the question, what does the concept of “contrast” mean? As a rule, this word refers to its static or natural variety. It can be most clearly shown as the result of the formula: “the lightest part of the image/the darkest.” The higher the difference between them, the higher the contrast. In the second case, due to the smaller difference, all dark areas suffered, turning from black to light gray.

ATTENTION! If in the monitor description you see high static contrast values, this does not mean that this is exactly the result you will get.

The trick of the manufacturers is that when measuring the light part, an artificial, maximally bright image is used, which cannot be encountered during normal operation, and when measuring the dark part, they simply turn off the signal. In this case, the only thing you can rely on is online reviews.

What is the difference between dynamic contrast? As the name suggests, it is formed from a picture in dynamics, movement, and this happens automatically, without your intervention. That is, the monitor independently adjusts the backlight level depending on the ratio of light and dark parts of the image at every second of time.

What role does dynamic contrast play?

A simple example: the darker the overall picture, the less light is supplied to the screen and, accordingly, the lighter, the more. On the one hand, this is good; in the first case, the image becomes deeper, in the second, brighter. However, a significant disadvantage is that the opposite part suffers every time.That is, in a dark picture the LEDs do not burn strongly enough to correctly display its light parts, and vice versa, in a light picture they burn so strongly that they also illuminate the dark areas, which are no longer dark.

From this it follows that static contrast is a much more important property than dynamic contrast.

Manufacturers of LED monitors with local backlighting are currently approaching a compromise. This means that when moving, the level of illumination of the screen does not change completely, as in the example above, but in parts: some LEDs light up at full strength, others less, and others do not light up at all. Thus, a high-quality contrast picture with clear black and white colors is obtained.

How to choose

First of all, as mentioned earlier, you should not pay attention to the figures provided by manufacturers and marketers, since they have nothing in common with reality. One might be advised to trust your eyes when choosing in a store, but even here it’s not so simple: the videos shown on screens for advertising purposes are as close as possible to the ideal and are many times higher in quality than what you will observe in real work. The only way out in this situation is to read reviews.

IMPORTANT! Since at the moment a unified standard for measuring contrast has not yet been created, everyone resorts to their own method, which gives completely different results when testing the same models.

The following two methods are most often used:

• measuring the difference between an all-black and all-white test image;
• ANSI method.

The first is much less effective, since in real work you will encounter such pronounced poles extremely rarely. The second one looks much more appropriate, representing the average contrast values ​​of the image with a fragment of a chessboard.