Wheres the Blur?
If we keep it simple, you can think of a display as flashing an image, then going dark for a moment, then flashing the next image. These moments of darkness are just the gaps that make each frame a frame rather than continuous light. (This is important, and I’ll come back to it.) No display is really this simple, though. CRTs scan an image from the top left of the screen, back and forth, to the bottom, every 1/60 of a second. The time it takes to do this is fast enough to consider it “instant” in this context. In this case, the amount of time an image is on the screen has more to do with the phosphors’ decay time than the frequency of the electron-gun refresh. Other displays do things differently. I don’t have the space to cover each one, but let’s say that the big ones, like plasma and DLP, use some extent of flashing to create their images. LCDs (until recently) don’t flash; they create continuous light, and the liquid-crystal pixels twist and turn to block as much light as they can.
