Will there a standard for the number of dimming zones on a MiniLED monitor? Or is it the "wild west" now and it's just going to continue to evolve faster than the industry can agree to a standard?
At first glance, I assumed that they would follow the aspect ratio of the monitor, eg there would be some multiple of 16x9 for these (144, 576, 1296, 2304). However, DisplayNinja lists 4 monitors with dimming zones between 336 and 384, 2 monitors with 500 zones, and 2 monitors with 512 zones. Then there's 21 monitors with 576 zones, which makes sense.
For 576 zones on a 27" monitor, each zone is about .5in2 or 3.2cm2. For a 32" monitor, that's .75in2 or 4.8cm2 per zone.
1152 also seems to be a popular number of zones, which is 5762, but that number does not maintain the aspect ratio, so are these zones not square? Two monitors have 1196 zones, which I'm not sure how they got that. No monitor has 1296 zones (4827). But, there are 6 with 2304 zones, which is 64*36, and does keep the 16:9 ratio. Will next year bring 3600 zone monitors? Will there be some sort of standard for each monitor size just like 24"/1080p, 27"/1440p, and 32"/4k has become a sort of standard?
It's also interesting to think about the number of pixels allocated to each zone (although there's probably overlap so to give a gradient instead of checkerboarding?).
Pixels per zone:
- 1080p 576 zones: 3,600. 1296 zones: 1,600. 2304 zones: 900
- 1440p 576 zones: 6,400. 1296 zones: 2,844. 2304 zones: 1,600
- 2160p 576 zones: 14,400. 1296 zones: 6,400. 2304 zones: 3,600 They can keep cramming in more zones, but with diminishing returns. I wonder if costs will come down significantly as they go for more and more zones, so the cost of the panel won't scale with the number of zones. It has to be at OLED on cost and reliability.
Just thinking about these technical details and hoped others would like to chime in for a discussion. Thank you.
No, backlight zones isn't any sort of thing to make a standard out of so I don't see that happening. Adding zones adds cost, and OLEDs are rapidly coming down in price so I think FALD monitors above 1152 are going to continue to be an expensive rarity. Sellers aren't going to want to make them and a year later risk having OLED prices undercut what it cost the vendors to manufacture them.
The InnoCN 32M2V has 1152 zones and is down to $600, same panel as the ASUS PG32UQX. The zones are more like postage stamps, not perfect squares.
Micro-LED sounds amazing, but I've not seen anyone say it won't require the same local dimming zone technology. If it's too costly to make every mini-LED directly controllable then it's certainly too costly to do the same with micro-LEDs I would imagine.