On the left, the recently announced Toshiba ZV650, a locally dimmed LED LCD. On the right, Toshiba’s last gen CCFL LCD display (click image for full size pop-up). Both were promised to be configured with the default “sports” settings—no special engineer tweaking.
Local dimming is one of the catchwords of CEDIA—the US’s big home theatre trade show. It’s basically when a backlit LED display completely turns off backlighting in the dark parts of the image, pretty much making black as black as it can be.
Seeing Toshiba’s side-by-side, the TVs produced pretty much identical images in terms of colour, sharpness and dark details. But the blacks were way blacker, even when the lights in the room were turned on. And the difference is even more pronounced in person.
In other words, from Toshiba or any other company, this is what “local dimming” really means when you read it on a spec sheet. The more you know, kids!
matt
Friday, September 11, 2009 at 1:35 PMffs, old news, great work Toshiba and CEDIA, your only a WHOLE YEAR too late, thats how long they have been out from other manufactures.
wish they’d stop f’ing around with this, low res led screen behind a high res lcd screen. just seems like bandaid solutions to the inadequates of lcd vs plasma and even crt. spend the time on oled instead!
ed
Friday, September 11, 2009 at 6:47 PMLocal dimming is like turning down the bass because your speakers can’t handle the thumping; it fixes one problem (i.e. dark grey instead of black) but causes another (i.e. loss of details in shadows + halo affect around a single bright source e.g. moon). I agree it is good to have as an option, provided that it is adjustable (i.e. can be turned off).
rupert
Monday, November 2, 2009 at 1:16 AMTo me it seems like LCD manufacturers keep delaying deployment – maybe they have a backlog of millions of unsold LCDs with CCFL backlights? It has not escaped my attention that it recently became practically impossible to find any mention of a “CCFL backlight” in online tech specs.