matteo wrote:Thank you very much. Actually panelook is where I found out about this particular panel. 800$/year is a reasonable price, but the problem is that even buying the panel and having a custom controller made for me is such a stretch to my budget right now, that I'm struggling not to hide this project from my girlfriend! Those 800$ would be a much easier investment if it wasn't for the fact that I learned what a vertical blanking interval is just a couple of weeks ago (just as an example). You can't imagine how hard it is form me to grasp even the surface of what I am reading! I should completely rely on someone else not being able to do anything. Nonetheless I'm willing to do it, but I think it will be a slower and less farsighted project (something like buy one component, wait for the money, buy the other one). I have already sent a mail to a distributor who says in the website to contact them if in need of a datasheet. Hopefully they will answer me soon. If the specs are right, the next step is looking for a decent quote!
When your goal is "Helping make it possible" rather than "Capital Funding It All" it can be dramatically cheaper.
For example, over the last few years:
-- Publicizing LightBoost's usefulness for motion blur reduction
-- Blur Busters influence in Oculus founder's deciding to choose a rolling-scan OLED technique (this is little known)
-- Blur Busters directly convincing NVIDIA to add a "ULMB Pulse Width" adjustment to monitor menus. By direct communications by me.
-- Blur Busters directly convincing BenQ/Zowie to add strobe phase/strobe width settings. By direct communications by me.
-- Blur Busters creating of Strobe Utility for BenQ/Zowie monitors. (as a result of the above --
BenQ press release)
-- Blur Busters indirectly encouraging multiple manufacturers to add strobe modes to their displays (due to increased awareness)
-- Much indirect progress. LightBoost's popularity (single-handedly popularized by Blur Busters a few years ago) directly led to making ULMB become standard in many GSYNC monitors.
Things like this all cost us almost nothing (except time) -- as we're the only place online specially dedicated to "Better Than 60Hz" -- and had a tremendous behind-the-scenes impact on providing more flexible motion-blur-reduction.
We often have helped publicize users' creativity such as
-- Forum member StrobeMaster's work on
displaycorner
-- Forum member zis's work on displays
-- Amazing overclock feats such as 60Hz->180Hz LCD overclocks
-- Inspiration of new careers for many visitors
-- etc
Occasionally, some people have teamed up together, or a member moved on to work for one of the big ones (e.g. a monitor manufacturer) or gotten bought out by a big company (e.g. Facebook buying Oculus, to my astonishment, albiet long after my involvement).
One possible 'cheap path' -- if you're just wanting to help make a dream display possible -- rather than bankrolling/capital funding the creation of a display.
-- Reach out to monitor manufacturers (they'll sometimes forward info)
-- Reach out to parties such as zisworks (display hackers)
-- Post in places like this (Blur Busters!)
-- Inform display engineers about new ideas on lowering persistence (not all of them understand how displays create motion blur)
-- Paid LinkedIn membership to more easily directly email people inside display manufacturers
-- Becoming member of SID.org to reach out to those display engineers more directly
-- Unusual attention-getters (e.g. FedEx instead of an email)
-- Etc.
Attempting to cheaply approach this via a monitor manufacturer
Imagine, what if Dell adds a 120Hz mode to their OLED -- how much effort would it be to hunt down the right contacts inside a display manufacturer, finally reach the correct contacts, and then successfully convince them to add a specific feature -- like we did for our advocacy on adjustable strobe pulse widths.
Attempting to cheaply approach this via third party modders
You want to also go via other routes (e.g. zisworks and other parties similar) where someone already sufficiently skilled might say, "...aha, I already have the skills to do this, just gotta buy the OLED...". It helps a lot if they're already familiar with Blur Busters, but not all of them are. They might be busy, but don't leave the stone unturned. Give them the link to this thread, for example.
Attempting to team-up
Finding someone with the skillz that's willing to help out for low cost (or free) in exchange for other things (e.g. free monitor, future cut of revenues, publicity, etc). If you have management skills, community skills, fundraising skills (IndieGoGo, etc), or you're in school deciding which elective to take (Management Studies, Economics, Programming, Electronics, etc), maybe Blur Busters has inspired you to take a specific path that while it takes many years to complete, helps achieve specific dreams.
There are many paths to take (possibly concurrently). Monitor manufacturers (in web logs) even constantly explore Blur Busters, even if for confidentiality reasons they may rarely reveal themselves. The information on the website may be mostly (good) popular science rather than full of math formulas, but more than half of display engineers do not understand the mechanics of display motion blur as well as we do!
The (accurate) popular science that Blur Busters publishes about display motion clarity, really helps many to understand how motion blur is generated -- the voodoo topic of display motion blur can be like quantum mechanics to some of them who just know good FPGA programming (far better than me) but nothing about how to remotely understand the mechanics of properly reducing motion blur (like I do!). The person born in the 1990s who grew up with 33ms LCDs and opaque programming APIs will often have less understanding of rasters/scanouts than the person born in the 1960s and doing Atari 2600 TIA programming of CRT days who had to be pixel-exact with scanout timings ("rasters" / "raster interrupts") just to generate graphics.
There are many wizards (like the people behind NVIDIA LightBoost) but we also see double-strobing monitors of multiple brands that have unremovable full-intensity double-image strobe crosstalks, that doesn't exist even in homebrew strobe backlights (hacker-built displays that surpass the strobe quality of certain manufacturer-built displays!).
Many display engineers are inspired by Blur Busters to make sure they read up "to avoid knowing less than we do", because it's competitively necessary. It's quite useful to remind display manufacturers that Blur Busters exists, and to read up our articles, in order to fill in knowledge-gaps. It's also useful to email all the OLED display manufacturers and panel manufacturers and give them a link to this article, some of them might even run with the ideas.