What is the difference between monitor has 8 dimming zones and another has 1000+ dimming zones ?

[Mark65428]

What is the difference ?

[Dedayog]

8 vs 1000.

 

Smoothness.

[PDifolco]

1000 zones allow for a better balance of light 

With a few zone a big part of the screen will be lit at once even if some part is supposed to be dark

[Middcore]

Do you understand what dimming zones are?

 

This is an honest question.

[Eigenvektor]

Think of the monitor's panel as being subdivided into 8 areas. For each of these areas the brightness of the background light can be controlled independent of the other zones. This allows the monitor to turn some part of its panel darker for dark content and brighter for bright content in that area.

 

The monitor with 1000 dimming zones has a lot more areas it can control individually. This means it has much finer control over which parts of the screen are lit and which aren't.

 

The best variant of this are monitors where each pixel is its own light source, i.e. OLED.

 

OLED can achieve true black, because it can control the brightness of each pixel individually. Meanwhile, the monitor with 1000 dimming zones has to dim brightness for 1/1000 of its pixels at a time and the monitor with only 8 zones has to do that for 1/8 of its pixels at a time.

 

To put some numbers to this: A 1440p monitor has 2560 x 1440 = 3.6M pixels. If that monitor is OLED, it can control the brightness for each of these 3.6M pixels individually. When the monitor with 1000 dimming zones changes the brightness of a zone, it affects 3,686 of its pixels at the same time. The monitor with 8 zones meanwhile affects 460,800 pixels any time it changes the brightness of a zone.

[jaslion]

To add onto @Eigenvektor's excellent explanation.

 

8 dimming zones may as well be 1 dimming zone as theres basically no difference. Since if the zones would be drastically different in brightness you would be able yo see the borders very clearly.

 

You'd also think oled would be the default best here. HOWEVER oleds cannot achieve the high brightness lcds can and this has a BIG impact on movie watching experiences with and WITHOUT hdr. However oled has other advantages that ips cant do like pure black.

 

Then lastly if this is about buying a hdr screen. Anything thats under hdr 1000 is just not worth it at all and barely noticable. Hdr 400 may as well not exist, 600 is a bit better but also you may not even notice it being off, hdr 800 will start showing more but its still too low contrast to show in most scenes. 1000 is when things get noticable all the time.

[Eigenvektor]

44 minutes ago, jaslion said:

You'd also think oled would be the default best here. HOWEVER oleds cannot achieve the high brightness lcds can and this has a BIG impact on movie watching experiences with and WITHOUT hdr. However oled has other advantages that ips cant do like pure black.

To add some more to this: Because OLED can do true black, it has unlimited contrast. So even with less maximum peak brightness, it is often considered the gold standard for HDR, as long as you aren't in a room that is too bright. Otherwise an LCD monitor with 1000+ nits of peak brightness may still have an edge.

 

A monitor that is DisplayHDR 400 certified ("participation trophy") is effectively useless for HDR. Meanwhile VESA considers a monitor with "DisplayHDR True Black 400" certification to be a tier above even DisplayHDR 1400! (True Black is effectively only achievable by OLEDs because it requires insanely low black levels) See: https://displayhdr.org/performance-criteria/.

 

An LCD monitor can only do black if every pixel in a dimming zone is supposed to be black, by turning off the background light in that particular zone. But as @jaslion out, that might not actually be a good idea. If neighboring zones contain a mix of bright and dark content and their background light can't be turned off as a result, that one zone might look weird next to zones where blacks look more grayish.

[Stahlmann]

There have been some excellent explainations, but I have some things to add.

 

The software algorithm behind the dimming zones and panel technology also have a big impact though. So for example VA displays with a few hundred dimming zones can look better than IPS displays with >1000 zones. That's because VA has natively higher contrast, and if native contrast is higher, local dimming becomes more effective aswell. This is also the reason why practically all high-end LCD TVs use VA panels instead of IPS.

 

And on the TV side Sony is known for their best-in-class local dimming, even though their TVs often have less dimming zones than their competitors. Their software algorithm just does a better job.

 

So in the end, you can't just look at the spec sheet and say more = better. There is more that plays into how good local dimming is. The most important factor is how well the monitor performs in reviews. The best sources for monitor reviews are Monitors Unboxed (YouTube) and RTINGS.com.

 

The only thing that basically guarantees good dimming performance is OLED. And since OLED also doesn't need to run a dimming algorithm, they also have significantly better input lag compared to LCDs running HDR with their local dimming algorithm.

[Doobeedoo]

Granularity of backlight basically. 1000+ is what can be decent.