Gadgetory

remember when smartphones and stereoscopic dual screen systems like the 3ds weren't the order of the day and portable gaming meant enjoying your original Gameboy and all its monochrome glory well that was only glorious until the Sun went down because it was impossible to see the screen without shining a light on it because it was an LCD display with no backlighting you see LCDs whether they're the simple ones and things like a gameboy or a calculator or the more complex ones in modern flat panel monitors and televisions cannot actually produce their own light Oh LEDs are different you can learn more about those here but conventional LCD screens solve this problem by putting a light of some sort behind the panel which shines through the LCD illuminating the image so you can actually see what's going on and even though older CRT monitors didn't have this issue because they used phosphorescent materials that glowed on the screen LCDs quickly became more popular due to their lower weight and power consumption not to mention their smaller size and eventually higher image quality so back lights became a fixture in modern displays earlier flat panel monitors used back lights called cold cathode fluorescent lamps or see CFLs these were basically just tubular bulbs like the ones you'd find installed in an office but smaller installed behind the LCD and they're actually pretty similar as well to the cold cathode tubes that modders use for case lighting see CFLs were cheap and easy to install and displays but had a number of limitations they were heavy they consumed a lot of power and they couldn't regulate the brightness of small areas of the screen with any precision whatsoever since it was only a few bulbs that would illuminate the entire screen resulting in issues with black levels and image accuracy that left a lot to be desired see CFLs also had the issue of taking several minutes to achieve full brightness at you turned them on much like a lightbulb can take some time to warm up and even though some see CFLs were marketed as wide Gannet meaning they had different phosphors inside the bulbs that could produce more colors LED displays quickly displaced see CFLs when they hit the market due to their lighter weight lower power consumption and greater black levels but even with these advantages there were still some kinks to work out a run-of-the-mill LED monitor replaces those bulbs with LEDs which is cool but it uses blue LEDs with yellow phosphorous to create white light which makes a nice enough looking picture but because the LEDs themselves are blue the backlight still emits a lot more blue energy than red or green making colors inherently a little lopsided so for a while wide gamut see CFLs for all of their flaws still offered better color reproduction than LED backlit panels until more recently when these wide gamut see CFLs were dethroned by either RG phosphor monitors which use red and green phosphorus combined with blue LEDs or the higher-end RGB LED displays which have red green and blue LEDs in the backlight both of these technologies enable the monitor to emit more pure red green and blue energy making for more accurate color without the drawbacks of C CFLs but LED backlights differ in more ways than just color as some consist of a full array of LEDs behind the screen while others are only edgelet with LED bulbs around well the edges of the display edgelet displays use a special layer called a diffuser to spread the light out over the entire screen area and are commonly found in smartphones and less expensive desktop and television displays full array LED backlights tend to give higher picture quality but are a little bulkier not to mention more expensive than their edge it counterparts some LED displays use their full array nests to enable a feature called local dimming which means that they can actually adjust the brightness of small portions of the screen on the fly for more accurate black levels and color saturation but regardless of exactly what type of LED screen you end up buying try and find out whether it uses PWM or DC for its backlight dimming whether it's for local dimming or just for turning down the overall brightness of the image coming out of the display now you might be familiar with these terms if you've shopped for case fans for example but what they mean for monitors is this a PWM display dims itself by making the backlight flicker a certain number of times per second the light is always on at the same brightness it's just actually off some of the time and so you'll perceive it as dimmer and while PWM is easy for manufacturers to implement some people do find this super fast flickering distracting and fatiguing on their eyes which is why some companies market their DC that is voltage control backlight monitors as flicker free but hold on a second line is cut back length that's old technology OLED generates its own light and is becoming increasingly popular well that's true but for now the vast majority of displays out there use backlighting of some sort and they tend to be cheaper than Oh LEDs without some of the longevity and burning concerns that come along with OLED technology so while uh you know getting a fancy OLED screen might seem kind of appealing to you you got to make sure that you monitor just how much money you have in your bank account before you go for it and speaking of terrible jokes audible.com is not a terrible joke that the leading provider of audiobooks with more than 180,000 downloadable titles across all types of literature including fiction nonfiction fanfiction actually I don't know how much fanfiction they have unless you count like fifty shades but they've got periodicals and audiobooks are great to listen to when you are oh I don't know let's say assembling computers it's kind of a mindless activity at a certain point once you get pretty good at it so having some earbuds in you can catch up on your reading all day at work without 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