40"/42" LED TV

aldente

Hello John Mc,

I am interested in LED TVs and was looking at the Philips web site recently. The main reason for LED TV is the much lower wattage, apart from the spectacular picture quality adverts claim that it achieves.

Would you give me some advice and/or opinion on the current LED TV market trend and near-future prospect? I would like to figure out how long I should wait to buy an LED TV because they still remain relatively too high in price now but I am disappointed by the picture quality of my new 40" LCD TV even after tuning.

Sony, Philips, Panasonic and Sharp are my cup of tea. I am not bothered by yokes like Access to the internet, Ambilight, Applicast, etc. but picture quality and low power consumption are top criteria.

aldente

Richersounds.ie: Ashley

Hi Aldente

I guess I should clarify one point firstly, These TV's are actually LCD TV's with LED's providing the light source and are not infact LED TV - despite what Samsung's TV adverts may lead you to believe..........

We will shortly have 3 LED Backlit TV's in our range soon, a 46PFL9704 a 40PFL9704 and the 40PFL8664.

LED backlit TV's seem to be broken into 2 types now, EDGE (or side) lit TV's and BACKLIT TV's

Without going into too much detail the EDGE lit TV's have the LEDs arranged around the perimeter of the screen shining towards the centre of the screen and reflected forwards.
One advantage of this method is the TV's can be very slim and energy efficient. This type of TV cant locally dim area's of the image to help boost contrast (CCFL backlit TV's cant do this also), they are always on at a constant brightness, even when the image in the screen is black night sky for instance.
Not to mention LED can help produce a wider range of colour over a traditional CCFL back lit LCD TV but they can suffer from brightness fall off if you are viewing off centre.

In my humble opinion(:)) the REAL advantage of using LED's in a TV is when they are arrayed behind the screen shining directly forward, a LED BACKLIT TV.

This is where the fun begins - the LED's, over 1100 of them are are arranged across the entire screen but can be locally dimmed, from full brightness all the way down to off.
So the TV can control the brightness levels independently (to a degree) all over the image - parts of the image that are displaying shadows will have the LED's in that part of the screen dimmed down compared to other parts that have fluffy white clouds in a nice blue sky (the ONLY way we'll see that sort of thing now is on TV......) This is generally know as LOCAL DIMMING.
This method really helps the contrast and black levels on a LCD TV taking it well beyond what a conventional backlight (or Edge lit) LCD TV can achieve. It can really be spectacular!
These TV's dont suffer from the brightness changes/fall off when viewed off centre as you'd find with the edge lit sets.

As you can imagine however this is still an expensive method of back lighting a TV, they are coming down in price but tend to be found only on the top end TV's with better quality native LCD panels and image processing plus other niceties that is expected at that end of the market.

As far as energy usage goes another advantage is lower power consumption. You wont feel bad when you watch it....

I've included the spec's for the 40PFL9704 (on display in the shop by the way!!) as you can see it consumes a lowly 92 watts of electricty compared to another TV of similar spec and size using a conventional CCFL backlight that eats 202 watts.

www.p4c.philips.com/files/4/40pfl9704h_12/40pfl9704h_12_pss_eng.pdf

Hopefully this is of help and not too much waffle!

Call on in and I can show you the advantages on the TV screen itself.

Cheers
Ash

Dr. Nick

Interesting read Ash - I'm interested to know where the new generation plasmas fit in in this?

M00lers

Excellent post Ash.

aldente

Hi Ashley,

Thank you for the excellent detailed information. It was also good to have a glance at some of the latest Philips models in the flesh yesterday. I liked 40PFL9704H, and will consider that LED LCD TV for my next TV

For those who are interested, here is a link to a Philips pdf describing their LED-backlighting technology for this year:

http://www.ifa.philips.com/download/pdf/Philips_2009_LED_backlighting_technology_backgrounder.pdf

aldente

Richersounds.ie: Ashley

Hi Aldente

No worries, your welcome.

Was good to meet you.
Hope to help you replace your S**y TV soon!!

Have a good weekend
Ash

Richersounds.ie: Ashley

Hi Dr Nick

Plasma is a tech that Philips have moved away from over the last couple of years - all their R&D has been put into improving LCD screen technology - and its paying off big time with our latest LCD TV's:D

Just ask anyone with a 7, 8 and 9 Series TV.

LED backlighting is a tech unique to LCD TV's and really helps the black levels and contrast range of the sets that employ this tech - taking them up into the same league as the top end Plasma (that will spark a debate - I must point out I'm NOT in the anti Plasma camp - both methods, when done correctly, are excellent)

atb
Ash