Addressing customer comments 

06/03/2012

8 Comments

 
We are aware of some comments by customers and the pursuant comments and concerns by others. I'd like to take this opportunity to address some of them.

There are comments based on a photograph of an ST1080 with what's described as "opaque light" and "haze" in dark scenes. This is a 3 part answer.
  1. Manufacturing variability. There is some manufacturing variability in the product. Most customers have not reported this problem. However, the reality is that there are some customers who see this problem and it's real. The severity and pervasiveness of the issue is relatively small at this point. But we are monitoring it carefully both from the customer feedback side as well as outgoing quality control. For those who know and care about quality control, OQC is not a particularly good way to manage quality since it only catches issue before going out instead of finding the issues in the process. We are addressing all quality control methods that we have in place.
  2. Prism delamination. In some cases, the prism component may be partially or completely delaminated from the optics. The partial cases are obvious to detect because you will see a segment within the image where the delaminated part has poor image and the line between the two regions is clear. In the complete delamination case, the overall image will appear to be hazy. We are also addressing this in our manufacturing process where the prism component is assembled to the optical module sub-assembly.
  3. Nature of LCoS technology. The Liquid Crystal on Silicon technology used in the ST1080 is by design a reflective technology with edge LED lighting. This means that like your desktop monitor or HDTV, the edge lighting is always turned on even in dark scenes or when there is no video information to be displayed. So, when viewing very dark screen, the viewing experience is similar to viewing the same scene on your HDTV or desktop monitor in a normally lit room. However, the overall viewing experience should be evaluated through a full range of content including dark and bright scenes. Similarly, any display's overall image quality is not just one factor like contrast, but about the combination of all factors including resolution, color reproduction, display fill-factor, gamma correction, CLUT, etc.


There are also some questions about blurry corners in the display.
  1. Viewing angle. Viewing angle is determine by the angle at which the unit sits on your nose. We supplied each unit with two nose pads (one installed and one in the box), so, one nose pad may give you a better picture and focus. As you can imagine, people's nose and ear geometries and angles vary greatly. We did our  best to accommodate as many variations possible, but it may not be a great fit for everyone. Please note that most wearable displays have this issue.
  2. Distrance to display windows. The distance between your eyes to the display window can also affect the focus. The farther away your eyes are from the display window, the greater the possibility that you will see focus dropping off towards the outer corners and edges. The effect is similar to wearing glasses and looking at object near the outer edges of your glasses. Also, users wearing glasses can also be affected by distance to the display window.
  3. Minimum font size. We recommend a minimum of 12 point font size for viewing near the outer edges and corners.


As we gather more information from users and comments online, we will try to address them to the best of our abilities. We also hope for two things: (1) Please consider the online comments as well as your personal experience together to formulate your opinion of the ST1080. We have many customers who don't read the blog or comment on other websites that are perfectly satisfied with their ST1080 experience. Although the issues raised here and at other places are legitimate experiences, we hope that you will formulate your own opinions. (2) We hope that you will continue to engage with us in this discussion about what is good and bad about the ST1080. We value your opinions and we're doing everything we can to respond to your feedback. One advantage of a small company like ours is that we can respond very quickly. We hope that in addition to our ST1080, our response to our customers will be equally amazing.

Sincerely,
Paul Jin
CEO
SiliconMicroDisplay


8 Comments
 

Contrast vs. Contrast

12/05/2011

4 Comments

 
While contrast ratio is supposed to indicate technical performance of a display system, often times it is confusing. To clear up the confusion, let's start with an important aspect of a display system’s contrast: color performance. For an 8 bit system, a display must have a contrast of 256:1 or better to show all the intended colors. That is, as long as the ratio between the brightest maximum state and darkest minimum state is 256:1, the display will be capable of representing 16.8 million colors in RGB (8 bit x 3 = 24 bit color). Then why do some display products have contrast ratios of 10,000:1 or even 1million:1? And do those products in fact perform significantly better? The answer is that the manufacturer is saying that in a completely dark environment, the stated contrast ratio can be experienced. However, since normal viewing environments are rarely completely dark, such contrast ratios will not be experienced.

Under normal viewing environments, where even the black state of all displays is not truly black anymore due to ambient light reflecting off the screen, the effective contrast may be no more than 80:1. However, that does not mean that display itself will only give a 0.5 million color performance. One would simply see 16.8 million colors with some ambient background. For example, imagine looking at your computer monitor in a completely dark room versus the same with the lights on. With the lights on, you can still see all the colors, but the dark areas will not be as dark.

We state two contrast numbers, one for the capability of our microdisplays (1200:1) and one for the HMD system (100:1) which accounts for the LEDs that illuminate our LCoS displays. This means it will display 16.8 million colors even with 10% transparency. Our HMD was designed to provide a Full HD viewing experience without disconnecting the users from their surroundings and to inspire augmented reality applications.
4 Comments