LED gets ahead
Sunday, 11th December, 2011Making sense of LED / LCD TVs
You see ‘LED TVs’ advertised everywhere: in electrical stores, on the Internet and in magazines. But just when is an LED TV not actually an LED TV?
And when a product has become over-commoditised with prices regularly dropping making profit margins ever-and-more thinner, how can a company boost sales while at the same time raising prices?
One way, known by canny manufacturers the world over, is by changing product names.
This is precisely just what many of the world’s TV manufacturers have done with their long lines of LCD TVs using LEDs to backlight the screen. These nowadays are simply known as ‘LED televisions’.
However, they are not, strictly-speaking, LED TVs. Calling them such makes as much sense as calling existing lines of LCD televisions Cold Cathode Fluorescent Lamp TVs, or CCFL TVs, after the lighting technology which they use. There are some true LED televisions. However, these are pretty thin on the ground because of expensive production costs.
The majority of so-called LED TVs are simply LED-backlit LCD displays. Several agencies, including the United Kingdom’s Advertising Standards Authority, have stated that manufacturers must make a clear distinction of the difference on the product.
“LED” is the acronym du jour, a technology which is all the rage today as a new, perhaps revolutionary, lighting source. It’s as emotive a term as ‘HDTV’ and ‘digital’ were when they were first introduced. As a matter of interest, the first LED-backlit LCD television was introduced in 2004; the first true LED TV four years later.
Bang & Olufsen, by comparison, do not call their televisions ‘LED TVs’, choosing instead to use the term ‘LED’ to describe the LED-backlit process - as with their BeoVision 10:
“The full HD BeoVision 10 is a new exciting LED-based LCD panel with impressive picture performance applying the latest picture improvements technologies. It includes the newest in 200/240 Hz technology combined with sophisticated motion compensation technologies that take the motion performance of the LCD panel to a yet unseen level of smoothness.
“The slim design of BeoVision 10 is, among other things, obtained by applying the new edge-type LED backlight technology and placing the chassis and the loudspeakers below the LCD screen, thus reducing the overall depth of the cabinet.”
“Opposed to the traditional CCFL (Cold Cathode Flourescent Lamp) backlight which consists of an array of fluorescent tube lights, the backlight unit for BeoVision 10 consists of a large number of white LEDs positioned all around at the edge of the panel. The light from the LEDs is spread evenly across the panel by means of an optical light guide system. Besides being incredibly slim, which is extremely important when you’re looking for a dedicated wall mounted TV, one of the advantages of the edge-type panels is that some of the heat is conducted away from the electronics and out into the room thus requiring less cooling of the electronics.”
So now you know the difference as you enter your favourite store to buy your new Festive Season LED-backlit TV.
Also read our earlier article
