what is screen door effect?

Vancouver

Vancouver

Full Audioholic
I think I may have it on my Panasonic plasma but I am not sure. In dark sceens rather then having a solid smooth color black it looks pixelled.

Is that screen door effect? How do you get rip of it?
 
M

Mort Corey

Senior Audioholic
The screen door effect is mostly noticeable up close to the screen. (Three feet or less depending) The screen is made up of pixels on a grid. Depending on how many pixels there are in a given space creates the effect of looking at a screen door. (Hope that makes sense) More pixels=less effect.

Gee zip Vancouver, you still not happy with your new display? It's never going to look like a tube TV so maybe you're expecting too much. Do you have an HD input source and have you tried a new(er) DVD player yet?

Sounds like what you're describing is more related to the source....unless you're looking at the screen way too close. Eight to ten feet (or so) should be about right for your 42" display.

Mort
 
BMXTRIX

BMXTRIX

Audioholic Warlord
That's not actually correct...

What Mort described is the ability to see the individual pixels that make up your image.

Screen door is something that could be confused, but is not the same as seeing pixel structure.

If you think about each pixel on a screen, it is individually fired up... and between each and every pixel there is a small gap that separates it from the pixel next to it. In many commercial projectors and a lot of older projectors the gap between pixels was quite noticable. Since pixels in projection using LCD and DLP are square, the gaps between each pixel created an effect that looked like a screen was put on top of the projected image. Little black lines, gaps in the actual video, were clearly apparent, even at 10+ feet back from an 8 foot screen.

Nowadays, the black lines, or screen door has been minimized to the point where at about 5-7 feet you can start seeing pixels, but not the screen door effect. At about 3 feet you start to see the black lines between the pixels which is the screen door effect created by the LCD or DLP matrix.

I am not sure how much plasma or LCD flat panels suffer from screen door as the pixels are much larger than they are in a small projector where the pixels are converted from a chip that is 1 inch across to a screen that is 92 inches wide. That gap is magnified 92 times! More if it is only a .7 inch (or smaller) DLP/LCD.

Plasma & LCD flat panel displays (FPD) are not magnified so any distance between pixels should really be close to non-existent. You should really need to be just a few inches away from the screen to see any gaps in between each pixel. But, at that distance, each individual pixel is also visible so your image would suck anyway.
 
Rob Babcock

Rob Babcock

Moderator
I think the problem you're getting is called "false contouring", and it's unique to plasmas. BMXTRIX is right on about the screen door effect. It's a problem with LCD, and mostly older ones. It also is a problem with perferated screens with to big of holes.
 
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