Flatscreen TVs and LCD monitors have been developing at a rapid pace over the last few years and there have been made progress in almost every area. Blackness and contrast ratios are starting to approach almost decent values with LCD panels, we certainly don’t need lower access times and the 1080p resolution, the highest video standard of today, is starting to become rather common. At ExtremeTech they have looked ahead and asked where the market is heading and what will be the next big feature that TV and monitor manufacturers will go for.
Close at hand we have 120Hz technology for a smoother picture but the next big thing will be color depth if we are to trust the people at Sharp Electronics. The LCD TVs of today have 8-bit color depth, which enables up to 16.8 million colors, the next step will be 10-bit panels that in theory makes it possible to show more than 1 billion colors. Backed up by RGB LED backlighting it should drastically improve the ability of panels to display a large variety of colors.
Color reproduction can always be improved and hopefully this will spread to the regular monitor market where most people are probably growing tired of just fast response times and high (although just dynamical) contrast ratios.
