Patent ID: 7961168

Claim:
A drive method to drive a display device including an active matrix substrate provided with a plurality of pixel electrodes arranged in a matrix and hold capacitors associated with the individual pixel electrodes, the hold capacitors being grouped into a plurality of block areas to be driven independently, an opposing substrate provided with a transparent opposing electrode, and a liquid crystal layer held between the active matrix substrate and the opposing substrate, the drive method comprising: detecting a second gray level characterizing the brightness of an image on an entirety of a display area on the basis of an image signal per unit time; detecting a first gray level characterizing the brightness of the image in each of the block areas on the basis of the image signal supplied to the pixel electrodes belonging to that block area per unit time; computing the gray level difference between the first gray level and the second gray level; setting, on the basis of a setting table defining the relationship between the gray level difference and a variation signal, the variation signal for each of the block areas based on the gray level difference; and supplying the image signal and the variation signal to the pixel electrodes and the hold capacitors, respectively, thereby applying an effective voltage signal to the liquid crystal layer, the effective voltage signal being generated by modulating the image signal using the variation signal, the setting table defining the variation signal so that the gray level of the effective voltage signal becomes greater than the gray level of the image signal in accordance with an increase in the gray level difference.