Recycled usable green IT

Do you separate and recycle your household garbage? How many times did you walk to the recycling station wondering where all that plastic would end up?

Did you know that TCO Certified products have been designed for recycling since 1995. They are built in a way so that they are easy to disassemble and all different plastic materials are labeled so that they can be sorted into different containers at the recycling station. All you have to do as a consumer is to leave the product to the correct  recycling facility in accordance with the take back program stated by the manufacturer in the user manual.

Wouldn’t it be great if all this recycled plastic was used for something and got back in the market and replaced virgin materials in new products?

The new TCO Certified Edge display from Lenovo ThinkVision, L2251x Wide is built from 100% recycled plastics. 65% of that plastic is post consumer plastics that have been on the market in other plastic products recycled by consumers. The other 35% is industry recycled plastics.

This display also has a motion sensor to turn it off when the user is not in front of it. That is smart as it saves a lot of energy! Look for the TCO Certified Edge label to find cutting edge technology.

Automatic brightness control

Lately we have started to see displays with automatic brightness control on the market. What is this feature and what is the benefit of it for the user and the environment?

A sensor on the display measures the ambient light in the room and adjusts the brightness of the display to a comfortable level. While working in a normal office room during the day the ambient light in the room may be very high. To maintain readability and visual quality the display automatically increase the brightness under these conditions. As the sun get less strong at the end of the day the display gradually reduce the brightness to be readable even in a dark room without dazzling the user.

Another huge benefit of this technology is the reduction in energy it creates. By reducing brightness when it is not needed a lot of energy can be saved and the lifetime of the display will also be longer.

This is a good example of introducing a feature to both improve the experience for the user as well as reducing the impact on the environment.

One company that have introduced this feature is Eizo:

Some software are designed for a certain aspect ratio and as soon as they are started they force the display into this resolution. If this resolution is not supported by the display vertical or horizontal bands of bad character contrast can occur.

How to avoid this:

• Check the supported resolutions in the specifications of the display.
• Chose a resolution that is evenly scalable to the native resolution if the display.
• Use digital interface between computer and display.
• If using analogue interface use short cable < 3m  with good shielding.
• Check the connector of the graphic card to see that it’s not damaged

The native resolution is the one that corresponds to the amount of fixed pixels in the display. Every other resolution forces the display to scale the picture by merging pixels. Displays manage this with different success. The native resolution is the maximum resolution accepted by LCD displays. It is therefore recommended to use as high resolution as possible on LCD displays. If the text becomes too small to read this can be solved by adjusting the DPI settings in Windows.

So, what are the most important aspects of a display used for computer gaming? Well, it comes down to the question on which games you are going to play. The performance of the display can make a huge difference on your computer gaming experience as it seriously affects your awareness in the virtual world.

Did you spot that guy?

First person shooters, simulators, racing, action

• Fast response time (low motion blur)
• Correct gamma curve (otherwise your opponent melt in with the background)
• Neutral grayscales (This also makes it difficult to spot things in dark settings)

Real time strategy, RPG, Massively Multiplayer, strategy

• High resolution (more detailed view of small characters and items)
• Large screen size (See a greater part of the battlefield)
• Correct colors (Is that magic potion read or purple?)

For an action game the gamma curve and greyscale performance of your display greatly affects how easy you could spot other players in the virtual world. When it comes strategy games screen size and resolution makes you see a greater portion of the game area and in this way you can see more of the things happening around you before other players.

The impact of the display on your performance at the computer is well known by the military, the medical area and several other professions where misinterpretations of the information on the display can be fatal. This is why some displays are tested and verified to have high performance. Take advantage of this!

TCO Certified displays have passed impartial testing on all these aspects and shown great performance. Look for the “TCO Certified” label on the back of the display to get a validated tool and win the game!

The screen communicates with flashing backlight

It’s Friday and time for part 2 of our report on exciting new displays on show at the Society for Information Displays expo.

Reflective displays
Some panels are designed with a reflective layer behind the liquid crystal. This increase readability in strong ambient light as the ambient light enters the display and bounces back out in the same direction as the backlight towards the user. The stronger ambient light the stronger the extra light that bounces back is which make the display readable in almost any ambient light condition. A normal panel only has the light from the lamps to create the picture and when the ambient light is stronger it is not possible to read the display.

 
Smart displays
Samsung also presented a new display technology which can communicate with for example a mobile phone by flashing backlight. The backlight flashes with such a high frequency that it is not visible but it can carry information. This may be used for digital signage to send information about the advertised product directly to the observer’s phone.

TCO’s motion blur study
Also at SID, a TCO funded user study on motion blur was presented. The purpose of the study was to identify a level of motion blur (blur created by moving images on a screen) that is comfortable for the average user. The results will be the base for a new standard for motion blur in the next revision of TCO Certified displays. More information at ww.tcodevelopment.com

First let’s look at the LCD display as a part of your home office or home entertainment system. The display is the interface between you and the content.. It is like the keyboard for the eyes. Would you choose a keyboard that is not comfortable and work with it 8 hours a day, every day?

The way the display presents the information you are working with has a crucial impact on the way you experience it. And let me break the news to you… there can be a huge difference in how displays perform! The problem is that the user rarely realizes that the presented image content is not the correct one. It is often very hard to see unless you can compare the inaccurate display with a correct one. Imagine you have a visual defect. You won’t realize the extent of that defect until you get it corrected with glasses, and then the experience is often astonishing.

So we can assume many users are working with inaccurate or incorrect displays without realizing this problem. It’s like taking a temperature with a broken thermometer… you get a result, but can you trust it?

Here’s my top 3 display performance criteria:  

1. The display should not present misleading image.
Examples are that colors may be wrong, light is not uniform or neutral grey levels get a color tint.

2. The display should not exclude any information from the image.
Examples are when near grey levels are merging and become impossible to distinguish between. Or when the display can not present enough colors to accurately show the image content.

3. The display should not have bad readability in different viewing conditions
Examples are when the characters have bad contrast, when the usable viewing angel is very narrow or when the maximum or minimum luminance of the display is not enough to compensate for the ambient luminance.

So what could be the effect of working with an incorrect display?

Let’s look at the scenario when it is time to buy a new LCD display.

Imagine yourself walking into a shop to choose the best product for your needs. How do you make your choice? Well, based on your budget you have a certain range of products to choose between, and once faced with those choices it can be overwhelming to distinguish between product specifications, labels and technical features. For many users, the decision therefore comes down to the design and appearance of the product.

Some consumers take this one step further and compare the specifications and weigh them against the price tag. They may also evaluate the picture quality visually by comparing different products next to each other with the same picture content.
Before going to the point of sale this group of consumers has checked the internet or magazines for information on the products they are interested in. They may have read comments from other users experience or professional reviews and test results. In this way they know the pros and cons other users have experienced and can weigh that against the price tag.

I would say that the final valuable step is looking for the TCO Certified label on the front or back of the product. This is the ultimate step in ensuring a good purchase. If you only look at the design and appearance of the product at the point of sale you will not be sure how it will perform in your work environment. The display is often tweaked to show very high luminance at the point of sale which may not at all be the setting you want to use at home as it often decreases the image quality. The design may be appealing in a controlled ambient light in the shop but may be disturbing in a home environment.

Even for the users who take the purchase process one step further and compare the specifications given by the manufacturers can not be sure of what they’re getting. Often this is data that the manufacturers have declared themselves and it may not even have been tested or verified. Even if it is tested there is no guarantee that the testing conditions represents the real use of the product and that the data is comparable between different brands of products. A certification system like TCO Certified ensures that all products are tested in the same way.

The user who takes even another step and base their decision on user comments and tests made in magazines and internet sites are better but still not enough. Users tend to not have an objective point of view when they judge performance on products. Users may have had a good or bad experience with previous products of the same brand or maybe have spent a lot of money on the product they are commenting which may affect the way they write their review. Even tests at computer magazines are often made at low cost laboratories where instrumentation and measurement methods are not calibrated and controlled. Results on visual quality parameters can have an enormous variation depending on the quality of the measurement instrumentation and the test engineer. I would say that uncertainties of 50% are not strange for a low cost laboratory when measuring certain visual parameters. This makes the results and comparison between different products less reliable. TCO Certified products are tested at quality controlled laboratories to avoid this uncertainty.

The final step to look for the TCO Certified at the marking label at the back of the product is the only way to be really sure the performance is tested and approved. TCO certified products have been tested for a wide range of performance parameters which are relevant to the way the product is going to be used. The test methods represent the real use of the products and the requirements are often the strictest in the world. All testing has been made at an impartial test laboratory which is further inspected every year by another impartial agency that can shut down the testing business immediately if they notice any lack of quality in the results.

Next blog post I will discuss the performance of displays and the impact it has on the work task or entertainment value you get.