Up until recently, LCDs just couldn’t compete with plasmas when it came to showing blacks or colours. They weren’t just bad, either: they sucked, at least in comparison to plasma. But then came LED backlighting, and things changed.
Backlighting is where an LCD stores all its mojo. It controls the brightness, the contrast, and the overall performance of a display. Not all LED backlighting is created equal though. Fortunately, there’s this great post explaining the intricacies of the different LED backlight types.
According to Wikipedia, the first commercial LCD TV with LED backlighting was the Sony Qualia 005 back in 2004. It used RBG LED backlighting, although it lacked the more recent ability to dim different sections of the screen that many current LED backlit TVs do. This means that these televisions are able to show blacks as true blacks, rather than a dull grey colour, thanks to the ability to turn off the backlight altogether.
Yet despite LED backlit TVs launching five years ago, it’s only in the past 18 months that the market has really started to offer LED TVs. Now, almost all TV manufacturers are promoting LED as the next big thing in TV technology. And until OLED becomes big enough and affordable enough, it probably is…
History of TV is Giz AU’s month-long look back at the development of the world-changing medium and its influence on our daily lives.
matt
November 19, 2009 at 12:23 PM
yeah, wish i’d got one.
oh well, just glad I got 100hz.
It should be made clear though that you DO need a LOCAL DIMMING one for the above to be true. lots of LED tvs currently being marketed, including the Samsung ones all over this site atm, are EDGE LIT. while edge lighting does give a much more even back light than CCFL, and eliminates alot of the ‘bleeding’ problems, it is NOT local dimming, and basically should have the same contrast and black level characteristics of CCFL, that is, ‘dynamic contrast’ is completely BS because it can only dim the whole screen to one level of brightness, so at a given frame, the contrast ratio is still only the true contrast ratio of the set, kind of a HDR for TV, dynamic contrast for a local dimming set is a lot less BS, because it does apply to a single frame.
If you want the true benefits of LED, you won’t be getting one of these 10mm thick ones. Local dimming ones are about average thickness, use a bit more power, and are more expensive. but still lighter, and less power hungry than plasma, and now apparently, better too!
also, I’m fairly certain that the RGB LED top of the range XBR sony’s in aus ARE local dimming.
Report PermalinkMe3
November 19, 2009 at 12:48 PM
Poppycock. No LCD comes close to the no longer available Kuro Plasmas – LED or no.
Report PermalinkShane
November 20, 2009 at 11:40 AM
Plasma especially the Panasonic are still better then the LED LCD TV’s and are cheaper. Why pay more for an inferior technology that is still playing catchup.
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