@Joerg

You're just a caveman aren't you; staring at the flames

@Joerg

There is actually good thinking behind the Ambilight system. It is attempting to replicate both the felling of a cinema and of old school CRT televisions.

In the cinema the screen is white and reflective - it reflects light from the projector into your eyes. However, since the screen is not a perfect mirror it scatters the light thus there are other paths for light rays to follow to reach the eye. As these light rays are not direct reflections they change drastically with every tiny movement of the projector, your head and even the movements of the building as a whole. Hence you do not see a picture but merely get a wash of the colour components of the picture on the screen. This is actually a reason why cinema's are often painted with dark colours - you don't want too many reflective surfaces making the wash too bright.

From a visual processing point of view - most of your colour perception is in the fovea, while outside the fovea you see mostly in greyscale with the colour being filled in by the brain. Hence the wash effect affects how you perceive the colours outside the area you are focusing on.

Try sometime watching a film outside and see how the experience differs, without walls and similar for the light to reflect off the experience is much worse. For example an explosion on screen no longer lights up the room drawing you in and making you feel closer to the action.

The effect is similar with a CRT, the phosphors on the screen emit in a wide beam (hence why you can see a CRT picture from any angle - unlike a flat screen) and so there are multiple paths for the light to reach your eye and you get the same lighting effect in the room and in your perception of the picture as in a cinema.

Unfortunately because of the way flat screen LCD panels work, using polarised light from a rear mounted source, the light from an LCD is polarised and the vast majority heads out perpendicular to the plane of the panel (hence why it is difficult to see a panel at an angle). Thus you do not get this nice colour wash effect that you get with both CRT and projection. Hence why there is a need to have a system similar to Ambilight for LCD systems - it brings this colour wash effect back into play and enhances the experience. Try it sometime and you will see how much better a system with Ambilight is than a system without. Note than since Plasma display systems do not have the same problems with polarised light there is no need for such a system.

Disclaimer: I don't work for Phillips, I don't currently have an Ambilight TV, I have taken a course in visual processing as part of my IT degree.

@amanfromMars

<Red Pill or Blue Pill ..... or Orange Tab>

---> One Red Pill + One Orange Tab.