Your Guide to Untangling LED TV Technology

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by: BarryKnightly
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Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2011 Time: 10:16 PM
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There is often confusion about the difference between a LCD TV and a LED TV. The following guide will explain in simple terms just what the fuss is all about so that you can make the right choice when shopping around.

Explaining LCD and LED Technology

The High Definition Television family is what takes a home entertainment system to theatre quality levels. Firstly, a LCD TV is a flat panel television that uses Liquid Crystal Display technology to produce truly crisp images and it has already been used for some time in computer monitors, mobile phones and camcorder viewfinders. LCD chips and pixels process images and allow for a sleek hardware design but they don't produce their own lighting to make the display visible. They need to be 'backlit' by an external light source and traditionally they have used fluorescent-type backlights for this.
Now to introduce LED (Light Emitting Diode) technology - LED refers to a new type of backlighting that illuminates the display in a more advanced way than the previous fluorescent tubes. This makes all the difference in terms of enhanced colour, brightness and contrast quality.
Thus, LED TV's are actually LCD TV's but with higher-end backlighting to produce the best viewing quality to date.

The Two Types of LED TV's

The two main types of LED TV's are defined by how their LED backlights are arranged in the LCD flat panel:

Edge-Lighting
This refers to the LED lights being placed along the outside edges of the screen for illumination across the entire display. Because of this particular arrangement, the TV itself can be made extremely slim. The downside however is that Edge-lighting produces black levels on images that are not as deep and the edges of the screen have a tendency to be brighter than the centre area.

Full-Array or Full-Matrix
Also simply known as Full LED, this arrangement sees the LED lights being placed evenly in several rows behind the entire surface of the screen. This allows for 'local dimming', which means each LED or a particular group of LEDs can be turned on and off independently to better control the brightness and darkness of specific display areas as you choose. While this produces a better picture quality than the Edge-lit method, it also means the TV itself needs to be slightly bulkier to accommodate the light distribution.

Cost, Longevity and Power Usage of LED TV's

While the cost of buying a LED TV is admittedly a fair deal more than the more traditional LCD television models, the price also depends largely on the screen size you opt for. Currently, sizes range from 46 to 70 inches.
When it comes to the lifespan of a LED TV, generally manufacturers set their longevity at approximately 100,000 hours. Because LED technology in TV's is relatively new on the marketplace, they don't as yet have much of a track record to be able to fully confirm this however. Suffice to say, a LED backlight will usually a last long time and suffer less degradation over an extended period than the fluorescent lights in an LCD TV, which have been reported to experience a mild change in colour as they get older.

All in all, the energy consumption in edge-lit LED TV's rates the most economic out of most TV technologies. Full-array LED models use more electrical power than both edge-lit models or LCD TV's of the same screen size because of the local dimming feature, however they still use less power than plasma TV's.

Conclusion

Now that you understand what a LED technology means as it applies to your telly, you can set to work on your research and comparison of the different models currently available on the marketplace. When it comes to buying the best LED TV, you need to consider not only your home entertainment system preferences, but the price bracket that fits your budget.

About the Author

Barry Knightly owns a LED TV and electronics repair business.