It was cold here last night.
What's that got to do with anything? Well... At about 0C I was tuning in a radio station on my car radio, and it's hard to stop where you want because the display takes a second or so before it displays the "current" number. (In mid-winter, it can take several seconds.)
This started me thinking... Since I know that the display for the car radio is LCD, and it's obviously temperature sensitive for speed, maybe the LCDs are, too. It makes sense, since temperature affects how fast molecules can move, that maybe the "untwisting" effect of the LCD molecules would be faster at a higher temperature than a lower one.
In turn, this got me thinking about LCD speeds, and how they're rated. The cynical and jaded part of me figured that this is a good way to "lie without lying" for marketing departments. ("Yup, 25ms alright! We had to heat it up to 60 degrees C to get it that fast, but it is that fast!") So how fast is an LCD in a projector...
I don't have any objective way to measure, but I'm going to try this:
Turn on the projector. Move a window around the screen very fast, watch for signs of motion blur before the LCD gets a chance to get really warm.
Slow down my fans. Wait until my LCD gets near it's maximum operating temperature. Repeat high speed dragging.
I figure that there are 2 possible limitations on speed.
1. LCD reaction time. This is the only thing that I think will be affected.
2. Transistor speed. I don't think that this will be affected by temperature.
Of course, since semiconductors also have temperature ranges, it also occurs to me that the temperature operating range specified for the LCD may refer to the operating range of the transistors, and not the LCD panel itself. While this doubtlessly has a range of temperatures that it can tolerate, the car stereo display untis must tolerate much higher temperatures from time to time, for cars which may be started when the interior temperature is well over a tolerable temperature. (Hopefully not for long, but I know that I've melted cassette tapes hanging out of my cassette deck -- and the radio comes on as soon as my car starts. This may explain why an LCD that was allowed to go WAY overtemp (One user who left the lamp on, fans off overnight and melted his fresnels!) was still able to be powered back on and work! If the transistors weren't in harm's way... Not that I want to put this theory to the test...