The Twisted Nematics of DigiDots
Another theme, another watch ;) No, seriously, I struggled with finding something interesting with dots, even though for this theme dots can also be small holes or droplets. The original plan was to photograph the hour and minute separator (the colon) on one of my Casios. Although I was a little in doubt if these counted as dots because on a digital watch these "dots" are squares. But when I got really close to the display with the macro lens, I discovered dots of a different kind: the pinpoints of light of the LCD panel. My "dot-finding problems" were solved ;)
I assume that the panel used for this display is a TN-LCD (TN = Twisted Nematic) because that is what Casio uses for most of its digital watches while the better STN-LCD panels are reserved for the high-end models. TN-LCD was introduced in 1974, and it is still used even for cheaper (UHD) monitors and such. The display of this watch is a negative one which means that its legibility is not the best, especially because this is also a tone-on-tone coloured display made of a very dark, almost black-ish purple as background and a warm rose-tone for the numbers, etc. And unless there is a light source from above (daylight/sunlight works best) checking the time is a guessing game. But since I never wear this watch at home, only outside, the legibility is still good enough, and I bought that thing for its multicolor bezel anyways (please check the first comment where you can find a detail of said bezel which I'd photographed for our "Low Key" theme in September '22) ;)
Setup: The best way to photograph the watch's display was to mount the camera to my repro/copy stand and shoot straight from above. I still had to do some book stacking to get the watch as close to the lens as possible, but that was nothing compared to the days when I had to clumsily balance the table tripod on a (very unsafe) pile of books to be able to shoot straight from above. I also used the Oly's High-Res mode so I would be able to crop out a small part of the image while still retaining a good resolution and a big enough frame. My lightsource was a single photo LED lamp with natural light from the left. Processed in DXO PL6, LR, and Color Efex.
In case you wonder what the diamond-shaped symbol in the lower right corner is: it's the "alarm on" indicator, and it blinks a few times every full hour (and the watch bleeps).
HMM, Everyone!
The Twisted Nematics of DigiDots
Another theme, another watch ;) No, seriously, I struggled with finding something interesting with dots, even though for this theme dots can also be small holes or droplets. The original plan was to photograph the hour and minute separator (the colon) on one of my Casios. Although I was a little in doubt if these counted as dots because on a digital watch these "dots" are squares. But when I got really close to the display with the macro lens, I discovered dots of a different kind: the pinpoints of light of the LCD panel. My "dot-finding problems" were solved ;)
I assume that the panel used for this display is a TN-LCD (TN = Twisted Nematic) because that is what Casio uses for most of its digital watches while the better STN-LCD panels are reserved for the high-end models. TN-LCD was introduced in 1974, and it is still used even for cheaper (UHD) monitors and such. The display of this watch is a negative one which means that its legibility is not the best, especially because this is also a tone-on-tone coloured display made of a very dark, almost black-ish purple as background and a warm rose-tone for the numbers, etc. And unless there is a light source from above (daylight/sunlight works best) checking the time is a guessing game. But since I never wear this watch at home, only outside, the legibility is still good enough, and I bought that thing for its multicolor bezel anyways (please check the first comment where you can find a detail of said bezel which I'd photographed for our "Low Key" theme in September '22) ;)
Setup: The best way to photograph the watch's display was to mount the camera to my repro/copy stand and shoot straight from above. I still had to do some book stacking to get the watch as close to the lens as possible, but that was nothing compared to the days when I had to clumsily balance the table tripod on a (very unsafe) pile of books to be able to shoot straight from above. I also used the Oly's High-Res mode so I would be able to crop out a small part of the image while still retaining a good resolution and a big enough frame. My lightsource was a single photo LED lamp with natural light from the left. Processed in DXO PL6, LR, and Color Efex.
In case you wonder what the diamond-shaped symbol in the lower right corner is: it's the "alarm on" indicator, and it blinks a few times every full hour (and the watch bleeps).
HMM, Everyone!