Microsoft’s dimming technology for displays could be doing more harm than good
A new patent from Microsoft has surfaced, unveiling a concept called Pixel Luminesce for Digital Display technology. This product would theoretically allow users to control every pixel on a display, essentially allowing you to selectively dim your display based on preferences and needs.
While this concept sounds like an accessibility dream for people who suffer from vision problems, light sensitivity and other conditions, it can also be a case of technology that is usually too good to be true.
According to the patent (and reported by Windows report), individual pixels would be controlled by a component called an EM gate driver. It sends the pixels a signal to determine how bright or dim they are, and then a luminance controller tells the EM gate drivers to send a different kind of signal, a pulse-width modulated signal, to the rows of pixels.
Because the signals can alternate between off and on, part of the screen may be brighter while another part is at standard brightness or darker. This also allows other features such as color accuracy, refresh rate and even power consumption to be adjusted if necessary.
The dimming technology may not be ready to see the light yet
However, there are several potential drawbacks to this technology that could seriously impact playback. Firstly, the real benefits would be limited to LCD monitors, as OLED and QLED can already produce local black dimming. Secondly, constantly changing pixel brightness can negatively impact the overall lifespan of your display by shortening it.
Therefore, if Microsoft were still planning this device, it would be difficult to make it work well enough to justify it, especially for such a limited range of display types.
There’s one bit of good news, and that’s that the Pixel Luminesce can work for digital display if you’re willing to be a little more flexible about what you can properly use with it. Gaming laptop screens are ideal for this dimming technology because the EM port driver requires local processing to function. A screen with dimming cannot use an HDMI connection, but instead a USB-C with both data stream and display pass-through. However, a laptop screen completely bypasses this requirement thanks to local processing.
This patent is not a product that happens in stone production, but a product that could potentially happen. If so, there are too many downsides to using a separate monitor that would outweigh the positives. Only if it is rethought for a laptop screen could the concept succeed, but even then OLED and QLED are already on the market, meaning there is very little return on investment.
We’ve reached out to Microsoft for comment and will update this article if there is anything new to report.