Searching for the preferred backlight intensity in liquid crystal displays with local backlight dimming

Local backlight dimming is one of the most promising techniques for reducing power consumption and improving contrast characteristics of liquid crystal displays (LCD). In practice, due to light diffusion and a smaller number of backlight sources than pixels, local backlight dimming must often trade-off between leakage of light in dark pixels and clipping of luminance in bright pixels. Only few studies have analyzed the subjective preferences between different luminance and contrast levels. In this paper, we present a method for defining the perceptually optimal backlight level via subjective experimentation. As expected, the results show a clear correlation between image brightness and optimal backlight intensity; however, a large range of individual preferences was observed.