Notices by 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account (thorthenorseman@octodon.social), page 47

@CobaltVelvet I also don't like to be 100% explicit for fear of humiliation.

@CobaltVelvet Same.

Mastodon is full of all these awesome hackers. I want to hang out with them all...

Laundrycat likes laundry.

@CobaltVelvet You may have noticed that plasma TVs also look more fluid than LCD TVs, and that's because plasma screens refresh in a similar fashion to CRTs, effectively causing them to strobe. Google tells me they have a 600 Hz refresh rate. They strobe each 60 Hz frame 10 times. Not sure what strobe rate is best, really, but it would be nice to have more of a "live" feel to LCD monitors, and that's what you get if you add a strobe.

@CobaltVelvet Film projectors get away with a low 48 Hz strobe rate because of the reduced light conditions in a movie theatre. For brightly lit rooms and offices with bright monitors, the strobe rate would need to be higher. I suspect you'd get much of the same benefit of a 144 FPS refresh rate by simply strobing a 60 Hz monitor's backlight at 120 Hz.

@CobaltVelvet If it didn't offer a considerable improvement, there would be no reason to do it in film projectors. I think it's one of those bits of old knowledge that got neglected in the digital age for various reasons.

CRT screens essentially strobe the image by default, so they don't need the deliberate shutter like the film projector does.

@CobaltVelvet What you get is reduced blur on moving objects. Motion blur on LCDs is in large part due to the fact that when we track a moving object, our eyes saccade at one frequency, while the object moves at another, causing the eyes and the object to move at different times, causing unnecessary blur. By breaking it up with a strobe, the image gets less exposure time on the retina, and doesn't get as much time to smear the image while the eye is moving.

@CobaltVelvet "Refresh rate" is somewhat vague in this context because it'd be unclear if you're referring to the update frequency of the pixels (which remain static as the backlight strobes), or the strobe rate itself.

@CobaltVelvet You're not distinguishing between frame rate and strobe rate. The point is that they can differ, as with the film projector (where the ratio is 2:1) and you won't notice anything but seemingly smoother motion. Electrically, any monitor with an LCD-powered backlight could be modified to do it, but you'd want one with a very bright backlight to begin with, to compensate for the fact that your backlight is only on half of the time.

@CobaltVelvet Then you haven't understood the idea at all.

I'm beginning to think that it's almost better to start your designs in a PCB layout program rather than drawing a schematic first, at least if you've already done a sketch. I completed a 2nd revision of a schematic, and since it's a schematic meant to be converted to a PCB layout, I kind of end up having to think about the layout when I draw the schematic anyway, because the software can't abstract away everything.

@CobaltVelvet Shouldn't be less comfortable than a CRT or film projector. CRTs were only uncomfortable if you ran them at 60 Hz. Back when I used them, I ran them at 85 Hz.

I've always felt that we wouldn't really need such extremely high frame rates if LCDs had strobed backlights. This would of course require those LCDs to have backlights that are twice as bright. This wouldn't consume more power, because they'd be off about half of the time, but it would increase cost, because they'd need to be twice as strong, and many users would probably just want to use a 100% duty cycle to get the extra brightness, and then it *would* consume twice as much power...

However, there is a crucial difference between LCDs and CRTs that explains why LCDs seem to jitter more: CRTs plot the image one pixel at a time and only part of the image is visible on screen at any given split second, while LCDs display the full image constantly. Film projectors do something similar with 24 FPS: They actually flash the same image twice in short succession, effectively performing a crude up-convert to 48 FPS.

You know, common wisdom for decades was the human eye can't see super high refresh rates, so we don't need them...

Cue next generation of LCD monitors with 144 Hz refresh rates. Saw one of those sideways motion demos in a shop, and the difference was super obvious. We may not have 144 FPS eyes when fixating on an object, and our vision might perceive 60 FPS as smooth most of the time, but not when *tracking* moving objects.

@debbie (Sorry, fell asleep and never posted the rest.)