this flashlight claims to Output 1.3 million lumens and this this is my new
gaming
monitor jealous don't be this monitor
only works for a few minutes at a time would likely damage your eyes if it
worked any longer than that and because of its backlight here it carries a
nonzero risk of burning your house down the things we do for science or not just
for science you see the latest Trend in display manufacturing is towards
brighter and brighter monitors and TVs
but just like the previous fads like making them thinner and pumping up the
resolution there's a point where more is
not necessarily better and what better way to demonstrate this than to reach
that point and keep on sailing we
started out with a regular old Gaming monitor and turned it into the brightest
one the world has ever seen we expected
to have a lot of fun and we did but what we didn't expect was the discoveries we
made along the way so let's begin our
journey to lumino City by very carefully
tearing down an LCD
monitor right after this segue to our sponsor nexo their anniversary sale is
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that
out W okay that's a joke it was already
cut in half the point is that inside a modern LCD display there's a lot going
on but for our purposes we only need to understand four main parts today
starting with what sits closest to us the liquid crystals the LC's of our LCD
these sit sandwiched between two polarizing filters that are configured
to prevent any light from passing through you can actually see the same
principle at work with a variable ND filter like this one for a camera in
this configuration we can see through it just fine and in this one it blocks
pretty much all the light and turns black so wait if these are configured to
keep light from passing through how does any get through well you need a third
layer in between the two polarizers a layer that can control polarization
electronically that is your liquid crystals as voltage gets applied to them
they rotate the polarization of light enabling an image to pass through things
can quickly get more complicated with different types of LCD panels but the
same principle applies from an original iphone all the way to a brand new 100in
LED TV light passes through the display stack and is
filtered by the LCD layer to create the final image but where does that light
come from well you've got options on older or cheaper LCDs there can be a
material that is placed behind the liquid crystals that's designed to
reflect ambient light back toward the user some of you might remember the
struggle of trying to catch a street light while you played with your Game Boy in the back seat or you might not
know what a Game Boy is and that's totally okay too I'm not
the point is that more modern displays typically remove that reflective layer
in favor of a light that is behind the screen but not all backlights are
created equal they've undergone a massive Evolution from the early days of
using bulky power hungry fluorescent tubes to highly efficient LEDs to well
this it's glorious you guys you've
outdone yourselves and it's also really dumb and frankly a lot more primitive
than modern TVs but it is built using
similar principles as you can see here most modern backlights use LED lights
which makes sense they're small they're energy efficient and they're cheap and
those LEDs are either distributed along the edges of the display like this one
or more ideally along the entire surface
behind the panel not only does that produce more even luminance but modern
backlights can alter the brightness of indiv idual LEDs or at least groups of
LEDs to selectively dim or brighten parts of the screen to achieve the best
possible image now we're saving our deeper dive into dimming zones and
backlight control for our next attempt next attempt at this oh
yeah apparently so for now we're going to move on to what LEDs we're using
today we tested about 10 different varieties with the aim of finding
something that balanced cost quality and
size and we ended up going with the cre
cxb3590 its compact square shape and
high light output made the approximately $28 per unit price pretty
attractive there are some
compromises but look at it go my
goodness how is it so flipping
bright well I'll tell you a secret this
isn't just one LED in fact if you look
much much closer you can see it's actually an array of over
150 LEDs cob LEDs like this one or chip
on board LEDs simply means that multiple
LEDs are mounted to one substrate and while that makes wiring them up dead
simple each one still requires an arrays
worth of power so that's right each one
of our individual cobs here is going to draw sorry is this right more than five
times the original power consumption of the monitor it could draw more if we
wanted it each one of these
yeah huh how many do we have
40 that's like 3500 Watts ah I see why
there's so many power supplies rigged up to the chassis now and five different
Breakers we could have bought a single expensive 3500 watt unit to power
everything but we liked the flexibility not to mention the cost Savings of
splitting the load between 10 350 W
meanwell power supplies we'll have a link to these as well as everything else
we used in the video description now it's time to talk about cooling although
LEDs are significantly more power efficient than incandescent lights they
still waste about half of the power they draw as heat meaning that our new gaming
monitor here is going to throw off something like 1,700 wats of thermal
energy that is more than the limit for a residential electric space heater here
in North America thankfully another advantage of cobs is that they're
designed to be cooled from the backside fun fact by the way our original plan
was to Thermal goop each of these to a CPU Cooler to keep our design time down
but then we realized we would need 40 CPU coolers so instead our resident
maker extraordinaire Justin designed this absolutely gorgeous custom water
block out of aluminum and acrylic that uses our industrial Chiller here to pump
coolant at a chilly 16 degrees C
now the flow path is not optimized but
it does seem to be sufficient for moving heat away from the back of our cobs here
what it doesn't do is overcome one gigantic design oversight see our cobs
go back here right and then our display
goes at the front of our shroud here but the thing is that other 1,700 watts of
light energy well it's going to hit something and turn into thermal energy
and when you've got refle Ive myar glued all over the inside of your 3D printed
shroud it's like a Hot Pocket and not
the delicious kind I like to describe it as the Easy
Bake Oven from hell that's why our next iteration added
some server fans and venting at the cost of some light bleed but we found out
that still wasn't cool enough which is where this box fan came in yeah it's
kind of Jank but remember guys this is just a proof of concept for now what are
the doing here uh the box fan wasn't good enough and so we have these fans oh
my God go to LMG Dogg Floatplane if you
guys want to hear David and Justin talk a little bit more about what we learned
that could help us execute on our original idea which was to build the
world's brightest TV one idea they had was to modify the
layers of diffusion next time rather than just reusing the original ones like
we did with this one but enough jibber jabber do I finally really get to see it
yep it's time they've been working on this in
secret like I'm only finding out about all this crap now do we have a fire
extinguisher on hand we that's what we need okay good they made me do the
entire shoot today without even being allowed to turn it on yet like they
showed me the lights but that's why the intro doesn't have the actual monitor on
it or anything because they're like oh lonus isn't allowed to see it until the
moment when you can see it oh yeah to put on this oh
really yeah you need it you even for one
when we were testing we made sure that we all had welding goggles cuz uh 1
second of exposure and you're seeing those lights for the next 20 minutes 20
minutes it's pretty bad is it dangerous I don't know if it's it's all fun in
games till you get crab RVE burned into your
eyes oh my God even the SE page around
it who this plast
stick is seethrough oh I can see I can
see it I don't it's so
hot it's getting hot in here do we have
the Fleer can we check how hot they're getting we do have the Fleer this is
flipping crazy you guys is the chiller even on though
oh uh here we
go oh my God okay so hold on they're at about 19 now okay oh okay they're going
up 30 turn 35 50 oh my God I can't even
see the display once uh the light is something is smoking we're going to have
to turn it off really cuz they're not they're not hot Something's Cooking
they're all under 50 every single one of them huh are you sure it's not just flux
I I'm going to grab some ISO and wipe it down sure but like none of the wires are
getting hot yeah it's got to be flux you guys these are they're not hot okay I
say we I say let's see how hot we can push it we go for gold you guys dare me
to look into it they said I don't have any more Shoots for the rest of the day
so like whatever it's like what I need to drive home or what
135° C oh is like the max dude dude
we're good here we go here we go here we
go like my skin is at
38° like the light turns into thermal
energy when it hits something right so things that it shines at are hot but the
LEDs themselves they're still at about
60 on the hottest ones okay it's starting to smoke up real
good now cut it okay okay are we going to put the Shroud on
for you anything before we do that how about some speeds and feeds like how
bright is our backlight before we put the LCD in front of it well each cxp
3590 puts out around 12,000 lumens which
means we are sitting at just shy of half a million lumens total 3.42 six lumens
is one nit meaning that our backl is rated at
14,15 nits for context the brightest TVs on
the market are around 10,000 nits of
course that's all theoretical we don't have a tool that can measure anything
that bright so we're not even going to try to measure the brightness until we
put our LCD on it and I think this goes this way huh the scaler and Power supply
for the monitor you can see it's just kind of like taped to the bottom of
it can you give me something oh yeah it's outputting okay
it's outputting we're good thank you for that I should
legitimately not be sitting
here whoa is the cart going to move oh
my God the cart moves yeah that's why we
have the commuter backpack here today is to hold
it oh my God okay yeah fine I'll talk
about it we put a sandbag in the long awaited LTT commuter backpack which is
available now on LTT Store.com we took
the best features of our original LT backpack and we put them in a smaller
sleeker more stylish package it's got a reinforced dual layer bottom a
convenient Tech compartment that folds out for quick access to your laptop and
tablet and it's built with a durable waterresistant reprieve canvas that is
made of recycled water bottles it's the backpack that's built to support your
day every day and you can grab this fantastic 20 L bag for
$149.99 at LTT Store.com I was joking
with the guys like this right here is the difference between us and Mr who's
the boss like his his like biggest iPhone in the world or whatever was so
clean so Sleek man love the collab with
DIY perks this is like
like this peak LT okay here we
go it's my first time getting to oh my
God you guys it's actually kind of
awesome yeah right I was expecting it to suck
it's like direct sunlight is shining off
of these rocks dude it's actually awesome did you
know it was going to be awesome
holy this isn't even HDR content
yet obviously the LCDs even in their
black State cannot properly block all
the light right like that so you don't get the same kind of
contrast but it's like the sun is the sun holy all right we got death oh
God turn it up oh no it's dying did we kill it wait no it's kind it's healing
again it'll be fine we just got to cut it off before before game it's too bad they'll come back it's good that blew my
mind I mean I remember having this conversation this was with you Andrew at
CES this year oh yeah remember when we were on the bus oh yeah and we were
talking about what is the Practical limit of like how many knits we need to
have in a display for it to really match the real world and I remember us talking
about it because we had actually just seen that high sense TV there and we
were like wow 10,000 HS that's wild but then we were watching the light glinting
off of one of the hotels in Vegas and we were like that is so much brighter than
that TV that we just saw like how many nits do you think that was and we were
kind of having this conversation Andrew I think this is it I think this
is the answer I think we actually need
this level of brightness to really replicate what it feels like to look at
the sun reflecting off of something TV
manufacturers I was wrong
we are nowhere near the end of the brightness War of the Practical benefits
of more now we no no but we would never want to see the entire display at that
level of brightness that would be painful but what we need is outstanding
backlight and filter layer control so
that you can have just pin Pricks of
that level of brightness to give you the Sparkle and Dazzle of light reflecting
off of metal or off of the peaks of the waves on the water like
I okay did you guys know that this was this awesome we knew it was awesome but
we didn't expect this nice of a reaction dude this needs to be a
thing I was completely wrong I thought
it's I thought this was stupid oh oh dude we get to try a game we're gaming
yeah let's play some all oh my God see
that's the thing is if you're in a dark room and there's a bright light source
like that it will Dazzle you now our content would need to be mastered
differently to account for this level of
brightness being available to it like otherwise everything's just going to be
blown out and too bright which is kind of what we're looking like in the game
but with it done properly with the dark parts of the scene as dark as they're
supposed to be light sources would be
dazzling and it wouldn't be like when the game artificially has you walk into
a bright space and then you just like see your eyes adjust to it your actual
eyes would adjust to the capabilities of the display and I got to
say this level of brightness makes the
lighting even though the lighting engine didn't change it makes it feel more
natural and true to life because when you're close to something like that it
is blinding and when it's farther away it's not till your eyes not to the
in-game camera that's the difference
they're going to have to completely change the way they handle it because
you can see when something is like too close and when you oh oh no it's dying
again wait oh my God here's what we're
going to do if we had a glass layer and
then we ran water through it and then we
had a glass layer and then we sealed it
we could actually have a water tank behind the panel as long as the water is
not creating ripples or anything it's just solid it shouldn't it shouldn't as
long as there's no bubbles so maybe we could cool the TV panel that
way oh tilled there tilled there in the
Box could work okay we got ideas boys world's brightest TV is
going to happen oh my God look at it
it's glorious it's like the difference between looking through a window and
looking at a monitor like it shocked me when I watched crab ra for the first
time like in that first little scene where they're coming out of the cave into the bright light and like it
shocked me it's like wow it's like you're looking out of a cave into direct
sunlight crab Reeve has no right to look that good no not at all I've never tried
Counter Strike with a controller so I have no idea oh you just want me to
flashbang myself oh my God the sun okay here we go
oh no
oh wow this really is just like looking
into direct sunlight it's too much I
need sunglasses where's my there's a
sunglass pouch in the commuter bag oh
that's more like it oh no biggie it's
just sunny today that's not a problem with my setup that's just an equipment
problem skill is isue I just need my
sunglasses see no
biggie oh my God
a oh it's so bright oh there she goes oh
she's dying she's dying dude I'm adjusting this looks
great oh really it looks so good we've
talked about this in the past but one of the key elements of a display's color
capabilities is is actually its luminance capabilities that's why we can
have monitors today that have 100%
coverage of whatever color gamut but they don't look like real life because
they don't have enough luminance to create the full threedimensional
color volume that we can
see I unadjusted for a second there and
that was pretty rough
all right let's do it let's find out how bright she
is sp 26,000 n we did
it we made the world's brightest gaming
mod oh my God great job guys let's go
let's go the power of the Sun in my arms in
conclusion the brightest commercially available monitor that we could find was
about 5,000 nits and the brightest we've
ever measured on a display was an outlier hotspot of 20,000 nits on the
110in Ed from high sense we beat them
all and I think we can do even better
anyway enough of that for now though I'm going to go lie down in a dark room for
a bit my eyes are dying and I'm dying to tell you about our sponsor a bonus your
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a cronis cyber protect if you guys want us to make the next version of this
maybe a TV next time give this video a thumbs up and if you love janky
solutions to ridiculous problems why don't you watch the one where Alex and I
attach a car turbocharger to a laptop it
was somehow more dumb than this yet
brilliant in its own way