Quality of picture on LCD monitor?

[stream]

I have a Princeton Senergy850 LCD monitor. It's a very nice monitor...does 1600x1200 resolution, all that mess. Here are the specs: http://www.prgr.com/Products/Pages/Current/LCD/Sen850p1.html

However, sometimes during dark scenes in movies, I notice weird splotches of color on the black/grey/dark portions of the screen. I could almost call them "shadows." I know they aren't part of the intended picture being displayed. Does this have anything to do with the fact that my monitor is an LCD, and it has a low contrast ratio?

Thanks guys.

-Jesse

[garryheather]

Apart from the "colour" part, the "splotches" sound like macroblocks, and that is a result of the encoding process. You tend to find LCD's and plasma's show these up more than CRT's because of a number of reasons, like the processing that the LCD / plasma does on the signal, and of course they don't have the same persistence of vision characteristics that the phosphors do in your TV.

If anything you might find the contrast is a bit high - if you whack up the contrast on a conventional TV you will probably see them too, mainly on smooth transitions such as sky.

Basically the encoder will not "see" a lot of the detail in the shadows and will determine areas of what it thinks to be solid mass of any one colour to be just that. When the data making up the picture is thrown away during compression, these fine details are lost.

The way MPEG2 is encoded basically divides up the picture into many small squares, and encodes them instead of doing the whole picture in one go, decribing changes and movement, with only one full I frame thrown in for good measure to allow things to catch up.

If the splotches you see are apparently made up of little squares that seem to stick with subtle movement only to disappear or grow in an apparently random fashion in static parts of the image, you're seeing these macroblocks and unfortunately there isn't a lot you can do about it apart from maybe tweak the odd setting here and there on your monitor, or use some sort of processing on your DVD player if it has such trickery. Results will be subjective - you might find one setting that works better for you, but personally I don't go a bunch on these video "enhancement" modes because they either tend to make the image too soft or lose definition. Your milage may vary.

HTH.

[coyote]

I think the problems you are having with dark backgrounds are simply a problem with lcd monitors (this happens on laptop lcd screens as well).

There really isn't a true black so it is trying to make it from the liquid crystal. And since the background isn't a straight color of black (usually different variations of black) the liquid crystal screws up.

For quality, the old cathode ray still is still much better. Until you start talking about plasma screens (where a small one will cost you a couple of thousand) You should go with a normal monitor or tv.

And one word of warning....the lcd screens rarely talk about the space between the pixels. Make sure whatever you buy has at least .25. Anything more than that will give you really crappy quality. And in this case the smaller the number the better.