The Blur Busters Approved Certification Testing program is
open to all panels to be tested (TN, IPS, VA), but they still have to meet the tuning requirements of not being significantly worse than non-strobed.
Any panel can get a
chance at their full, complete, laboratory testing -- and if the GtG heatmap passes the necessary thresholds of the certification program, then it's possible to get a PASS on the
Blur Busters Approved Certification Testing program.
VA is going to be extremely difficult, but theoretically, a 240Hz VA panel may be tunable (with complex Overdrive tricks,
including 256x256 granularity OD LUTs + a temperature compensation adjustment or a 100-level overdrive adjustment). There were certain VA television panels that did an excellent job in year 2013 for 3D glasses use, because they did some rather amazing overdrive trickery
including timing the strobe flash at the correct point in the GtG curve, so there were often some multi-layered overdrive tricks, which are now done much less often nowadays.
Sheer panel speed (1ms IPS and 1ms TN) only require simple Overdrive Gain algorithms to become low crosstalk. But the voodoo arts of advanced overdrive tricks can go a long way to improving a panel -- but many newer engineers at Chinese TCON/scaler vendors don't even understand some of the more advanced stuff done back in the $2000-panel days, for a $300 race-to-bottom pricing of cheap gaming monitors (unlike yesterday's $2000 3D TVs).
Some truly magical things were done to certain VA panels to partially stomp-out those "slow VA colors" during the 3D glasses days on the more expensive TVs.
But one big problem is VA is super temperature-sensitive. The GtG of certain dark-to-dark transitions can change by as much as 10 milliseconds with just a few degrees of temperature change! This is a big problem for VA monitor users in tropics and artic, considering many monitor manufacturers only test VA panels at the industry standard GtG-testing room temperature of 20 degrees C (about 68 degrees F). And tune overdrive based on this.
This is partially why I love monitors with overdrive sliders (100 level overdrive) rather than Overdrive ON/OFF or Overdrive ON/High/Premium or very few Overdrive settings. Fine overdrive adjustments are
EXTREMELY USEFUL temperature compensation adjustments. Overdrive sliders are easy to adjust with an overdrive testing pattern such as
www.testufo.com/ghosting .... Blur Busters can help a monitor manufacturer
build a motion test directly into monitor OSD, to make it much easier for users to adjust an overdrive slider. "Adjust Overdrive To Preference!" (with OSD-based motion test built into monitor).
Many manufacturers try to simplify Overdrive by having too few settings. And many manufacturers cheap out on the overdrive lookup table size (e.g. only 17x17 interpolated to 256x256), which does a disservice to the problematic VA-panel dark-to-dark transitions, as some of those GtG heatmap hotspots are much smaller hotspots than a 17x17 OD LUT, for chrissakes. Sometimes Blur Busters knows things some monitor engineers do not -- they study hard, they work hard, but classes don't even teach this stuff.
Yes, we do teach this stuff (
actual photo of a Blur Busters classroom at a display manufacturer!). Just like a SpaceX rocket gimball engineer may not understand the firmware language of an inertial control unit, Blur Busters has an important advocacy/research role in the refresh rate race to retina refresh rates. In year 2019, I have already been flown over both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans on a contract basis to run these classrooms manufacturers (from PMs to Marketing to engineers).
Two years ago, I wasn't sure IPS wasn't going to be able to speed up this dramatically to narrow the race -- but IPS did -- thanks to faster IPS technology now out. All 3 major panel technologies are currently speeding up, and all horses are valid horses in the refresh rate race.
The bottom line of what I am saying is that the Blur Busters Approved program is it is
open to all panel technologies to be tested. If it's fast enough, and passes the strobing quality thresholds, then it passes. Sure, it will be much harder for VA, but it is not impossible for VA, based on what i've seen already -- I've seen those bad VA colors be almost 10x faster with some really advanced overdrive tuning (not typically found in sub-$1000 monitors).
I also have some new inventions that will make advanced overdrive much easier, but it will require manufacturers to support the
User-Programmable Overdrive Lookup Table initative. Once the first monitor arrives, we will be able announce some dramatic cost cuts on manufacturer overdrive tuning, to massively improve overdrive tuning quality (better than most chinese scaler/TCON vendors), especially for strobe tuning.
Better overdrive quality, with faster GtG without overshoots, for lower prices, even on some existing panels! Ultimately, this will be a one-button easy feature.
But to help speed up this quality, we will need a user-programmable overdrive lookup table feature.