TN Film (Twisted Nematic + Film) panels are the mostly widely used in the TFT market, with smaller sized screens (15", 17" and 19") being almost exclusively limited to this technology. The TN Film panels are made by many different manufacturers, with the big names all having a share in the market (Samsung, LG.Philips, AU Optronics) and being backed up by the other companies including BOE HyDis, CMO, CPT etc. TN Film has always been so widely used because it is comparatively cheap to produce panels based on this technology. As such, manufacturers have been able to keep costs of their displays down by using these panels. The other main reason for using TN Film is that it is fundamentally a responsive technology in terms of pixel latency. It has long been the choice for "gamers" screens and response times have long been, and still are today, the lowest out of all the technologies (at least on paper).
TN Film is characterized by it's low response times, and with the advent of overdrive / RTC technology, grey to grey transitions are also very fast now. The problem with TN Film is that viewing angles are pretty restrictive, especially vertically and this is evident be a severe darkening of the image, especially if you look at the screen from below. Movie playback can be a bit noisy too and black depth is also not as good as with other panel technologies due to the crystal alignment. However, in recent years, black depth has improved somewhat and is generally pretty good on modern screens, especially where dynamic contrast technologies are also used. TN Film is only a true 6-bit technology, but is able to offer a 16.2 million, and now even a 16.7 million, colour palette thanks to dithering and Frame Rate Control methods.
VA (Vertical Alignment) technology was developed by Fujitsu in 1996. Small viewing angles were its main disadvantage. This problem was solved by dividing each pixel into domains which worked synchronously. This lead the birth of….
MVA (Multidomain Vertical Alignment) technology, developed by Fujitsu in 1998 as a compromise between TN Film and IPS technologies. On the one hand, MVA provided a full response time of 25 milliseconds (that was impossible at the time with IPS, and not easily achievable with TN), and on the other hand, MVA matrices had wide viewing angles of 160 - 170 degrees, and thus can compete with IPS in that parameter. The viewing angles are also very good in the vertical field (an area where TN panels suffer a great deal) as well as the horizontal field. MVA technology also provides high contrast ratios, which IPS and TN Film can't quite meet (without technologies like DFC at least).
In MVA panels, the crystals in the domains are oriented differently, so if one domain lets light pass through, the neighboring domain will have the crystals at an angle and will shutter the light (of course, save for the display of white color, in which case all the crystals are placed almost in parallel to the matrix plane).
The problem with MVA panels was that traditionally; the response time is not as good as TN film panels. Sadly, the response time grows dramatically when there’s a smaller difference between the pixel’s initial and final states. Thus, such matrices are practically unsuitable for dynamic games, i.e. for home use. Of course, “suitability†is a subjective category, and some people may be quite satisfied with the image produced by an MVA matrix, but they are objectively slower than TN as well as IPS matrices anyway.
With the introduction of overdrive technologies, the manufacturers launched a new breed of...
Premium MVA panels (P-MVA) and Super MVA (S-MVA) offer improved response times across grey to grey transitions which is a great improvement in the MVA market. While responsiveness is still not quite as fast as TN film panels, the improvement is obvious.
The color-reproduction properties of the MVA technology proved to be deficient, too. Such panels give you vivid and bright colors, but due to the peculiarities of the domain technology many subtle color tones (dark tones often) are lost when you are looking at the screen strictly perpendicularly. When you deflect your line of sight just a little, the colors are all here again. This is a characteristic VA panel contrast shift and some users pick up on this and might find it distracting. The panel manufacturers sometimes claim a wider gamut range, but these are rather qualities of the color filters and backlighting rather than of the matrix. Thus, MVA matrices are somewhere between IPS and TN technologies as concerns color reproduction. On the one hand, they are better than TN matrices in this respect, but on the other hand the above-described shortcoming prevents them from challenging IPS matrices. Traditionally MVA panels offered 8-Bit colour depth (a true 16.7 million colours) but it seems that some modern versions are only offering 6-Bit with FRC (see articles section for more info). Black depth is a strong point of MVA panels, being able to produce some of the deepest blacks in the market.
MVA panels also offer some comparatively good movie playback with noise and artifacts quite low compared with other technologies. The application of overdrive doesn't help in this area, but MVA panels are pretty much the only ones which haven't suffered greatly in movie playback as a result. Many of the MVA panels are still pretty good in this area, sadly something which overdriven TN Film, IPS and PVA panels can't offer.
Advanced MVA (A-MVA) - Next Generation VA Technology
AU Optronics have recently been working on their next generation of MVA panel technology, termed 'Advanced MVA' (A-MVA). This is designed to offer improved performance including reduced colour washout conquer the significant problem of color distortion with traditional wide viewing angle technology. This technology creates more domains than conventional multi-domain vertical alignment (MVA) LCDs and reduces the variation of transmittance in oblique angles. It productively improves color washout and provides better image quality in oblique angles than conventional VA LCDs. Also, it has been widely recognized worldwide that AMVA technology is one of the few ways to provide optimized image quality through multiple domains.
In addition, A-MVA provides an extra-high contrast ratio of greater than 1200:1 (reaching 2500:1 at time of writing) by optimized color-resist implementation and a new pixel design. The result is a more comfortable viewing experience for the consumer, even on dimmer images. This high contrast technology can also achieve wide viewing angles of up to 178 degrees. AMVA, which the Company believes to be the most competitive solution in low color washout technology, has been applied to AUO TV panels ranging from 32" up to 42", and has attracted widespread attention among global brand-name TV customers in the United States, Europe and Japan
