Backlight the future?
LED backlights are poised to make the transition to large format displays. By Vanessa Knivett.
The march of the led, it seems, is unstoppable. In lighting applications, the technology is being adopted for car headlamps, street lighting and camera flashes, and in some display applications, it is now ubiquitous. Taking in mobile phone screens at first, then MP3 players, small gaming devices, pdas and ruggedised handheld devices, the led overshadows other backlighting choices in small screen applications. But its popularity wanes sharply with larger screen sizes.
Amongst the advantages of using leds over conventional light sources such as ccfl are: long life, ruggedness (leds are solid state) and their environmental credentials – they don’t use mercury. But with price, power consumption and thermal efficiency seen by Hemsley as the main considerations when specifying a display, leds win points in handheld designs because of their low power consumption and high thermal efficiency.
