Abstract
This paper proposes a method to drive an AC plasma display panel(PDP) with a significantly improved contrast ratio. In the proposed method, during the first sub-field of one frame, all PDP cells are reset by the ramp waveform, and during the other sub-field, only the cells turned on in the previous sub-field are reset. No light is emitted during the reset period of every sub-field except the first sub-field. For a 10-bit picture, the luminance of the dark level for the proposed method is 10 times lower than that for the conventional method, in which the ramp waveform for the reset is used in every sub-field. Accordingly, the contrast ratio for the proposed method is 10 times higher than that for the conventional method. For the 10-bit picture, the measured contrast ratio was about 3080:1 for the proposed method and about 285:1 with the conventional method, a result the contrast ratio has been increased in 10.8 times. This result shows that the proposed method can realize an image with high contrast ratio.