Comparison of detectability of a simple object with low contrast displayed on a high-brightness color LCD and a monochrome LCD

The goal of this study was to investigate the effect of the different luminance settings of a high-brightness color liquid-crystal display (LCD) on the detectability of a simple grayscale object with low contrast by use of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis. The detectability of a high-brightness color LCD with two maximum-luminance settings (500 and 170 cd/m²) was compared with the detectability of a monochrome LCD (500 cd/m²). The two LCDs used in this study were calibrated to the grayscale standard display function. The average areas under the ROC curve (AUCs) and the standard deviations for all thirteen observers for the 500 cd/m² color LCD, 500 cd/m² monochrome LCD, and 170 cd/m² color LCD were 0.937 ± 0.040, 0.924 ± 0.056, and 0.915 ± 0.068, respectively. There were no statistically significant differences in the average AUCs among the three LCD monitor conditions. On the other hand, the total observation time for the 170 cd/m² color LCD was significantly shorter than that for the 500 cd/m² color and monochrome LCDs (p < 0.05). Irrespective of the maximum luminance settings (500 and 170 cd/m²), the color LCD provided a performance comparable to the monochrome LCD for detection of a simple grayscale object with low contrast.