LED V LCD: The differences explained
The LX9900 Full LED TV
Ask most people and they will be able to tell you that LED offers better picture quality than LCD, but most won’t be able to tell you why.
The Facts:
The difference between LED and LCD is all to do with the lighting on the television in question. Both use LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) to produce the picture, but LCD uses fluorescent lighting to illuminate the picture where LED uses, unsurprisingly, LEDs or Light Emitting Diodes. There are benefits when it comes to choosing LED over LCD, for example LEDs are smaller than fluorescent lighting meaning you can have a slimmer television, not to mention an LED television can be up to 35% more energy efficient.
Full LED
Traditional LED televisions have the LED lighting situated around the edge of the picture (occasionally with one in the center), which works perfectly well on a smaller size television. But when you are looking at the bigger size televisions sometimes you can see a lighter patch in the center of the screen as there are no LEDs lighting that part of the set. LG have come up with a solution in the form of fully backlit LED televisions, where specially designed LED chips light the whole of the screen, ensuring no lighter ‘halo’ in the middle of the TV and the deepest blacks as these LEDs can be switched off. For example, the LX9900 active 3D is a Full LED television and is lit by 1200 LEDs, considerably more than an edge lit LED television.
Verdict:
The simple fact is that LED televisions are more expensive than LCD, but the picture quality is generally better so you get what you pay for essentially. But at the end of the day it comes down to what is right for each consumer. Some will prefer the slim design and superior picture quality of LED, whilst others will prefer the lower price of the LCD.
If you want some help picking the right television for you try the LG TV Buyers guide where you will be assessed on many factors to find the right TV for your needs.
LED v LCD? A tutorial on monitor options
To help readers make sense of current LED and LCD monitor options, we bring you a few useful resources:
What is LED TV?
(from http://ledtele.co.uk/ledvslcd.html )
The first thing to know about LED (Light Emitting Diode) TVs is that they are simply LCD TVs with a different kind of backlighting. The screen remains the same but LEDs are used in place of Cold Cathode Fluorescent Lamps (CCFL) that are found in most LCD TVs.
The LEDs can come in two forms, Dynamic RGB LEDs which are positioned behind the panel, or white Edge-LEDs positioned around the rim of the screen which use a special diffusion panel to spread the light evenly behind the screen.
RGB Dynamic LED TV This method of backlighting allows dimming to occur locally creating specific areas of darkness on the screen. This means you see truer blacks and much higher dynamic co ntrast ratios
Edge-LED TV This method of backlighting allows for LED TVs to become extremely thin. The light is diffused across the screen by a special panel which produces a superb uniform colour range across the screen.
Currently LEDs are not small enough to be used for individual pixels in domestic televisions, and so the use of true LED TVs is restricted to much larger screens in places such as sport stadia.
Don't let this put you off however, as there are some great benefits to choosing an LED TV over a standard LCD TV.
• Improved brightness and contrast levels, with deeper blacks.
• The use of Edge-LED lighting allows the TV to be thinner than standard LCD TVs.
• LED TVs can consume up to 40% less power than a LCD TV of similar size
• They can offer a wider colour gamut, especially when RGB-LED backlighting is used.
LED TVs are also more environmentally friendly due to there being no mercury used during manufacture. Overall there are many benefits to buying a LED TV rather than a standard LCD TV. A comparison between LED and LCD can be found here on the LED vs LCD page.
What’s so great about LED backlit displays?
(From: http://gizmodo.com/5271493/giz-explains-whats-so-great-about-led+backlit-lcds )
LED-backlit LCDs are where TV's future and present meet—they're the best LCDs you've ever seen, but they're not as stunning as OLED displays, which will one day dominate all. They're not cheap, but they're not ludicrous either. Most importantly, they're actually here.
With LCDs, it's all about the backlighting. This defines contrast, brightness and other performance metrics. When you watch plasma TVs, OLED TVs or even old tube TVs, there's light emanating from each pixel like it was a teeny tiny bulb. Not so with LCD—when you watch traditional LCD TV, you're basically staring at one big lightbulb with a gel screen in front of it.
The typical old-school LCD backlighting tech is CCFL—a cold cathode fluorescent lamp—which is an array of the same kind of lights that make people's lives miserable in offices around the world. The reason they aren't the greatest as backlights for TV watching is that they light up the whole damn display. Because LCD is just a massive screen of tiny doors that open and close, light inevitably leaks through the closed doors, when they're trying to show black, resulting in more of a glowy charcoal.
LEDs (light emitting diodes) are different from say, an old school incandescent bulb, which heats up a filament to generate light, in that they're electroluminescent—electricity passes through a semiconductor and the movement of the electrons just lights it up. Instead of having one lightbulb in the bottom of the screen, shining up through all of the LCD pixels, you can have arrays of LEDs that shine through smaller portions of the LCD screen, leaving other portions in the dark, so to speak.
OLED—"organic light emitting diode"—is slightly different. Since the electroluminescent component is organic and not a chip, each point of light can be much tinier. That's why an LED TV still needs the LCD screen in front: there's no way to have a single LED per pixel unless the screen is huge, and mounted to the side of a building in Times Square. OLEDs don't: HD OLED displays are made up of red, green and blue dots, no LCD panel required