Philips To Introduced Led Backlighting

[Skid_MacMarx]

Philips ditches Aptura backlight tech for LED

Philips has canned the stroboscopic backlight in its flat televisions in favour of LED technology

This puts an end to the technology designed to dramatically reduce motion blur and smear on flat LCD televisions, a notorious problem with those types of TV sets.

Instead of emitting constant light, like in current LCD TVs, Philips' scanning backlight emitted bursts of light, which tricked the human eye into seeing sharper images.

Philips had touted the technology called Aptura as a major innovation and a potential cash cow for the lighting division which has been repositioned as one of Philips' growth engines.

'If we want to continue developing this backlighting technology, we'll have to make

new investments. At the same time, LEDs (light emitting diodes) are getting ripe for the market and they enable thinner TV sets, so we've chosen to invest in those,' said a Philips spokeswoman.

Philips unveiled its intention for a flickering backlight several years ago, and started selling it commercially last year together with LG.Philips LCD which makes the LCD panels for which the backlights are needed.

Some expensive flat television sets already have LED backlights, but it will probably take several years before they are cheap enough to be put in mainstream flat televisions, the Philips spokeswoman said.

LED are solid-state lights, used in car indicators, bicycle lamps and increasingly in buildings. They require no bulb, which makes them sturdy and long-lasting, and they also consume less energy per lumens - a measure of light.

Philips Lighting has a unit called Lumileds which is the world leader in bright LEDs, one of the fastest growing business segments in the lighting division with 25 percent annual revenue increases.

Philips is the world's biggest lighting maker, a top three hospital equipment maker and Europe's biggest consumer electronics producer.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/107108/philips...ch-for-led.html

[Roderick]

Yes, it's sort of ironic that Philips is ditching flourescent light sources, when the pollies in Australia are urging all Australian to throw out their incandescent light bulbs in favour of compact fluoros .

However, LEDs are definitely the lighting of the future for all sorts of applications, including home lighting. I see that someone has managed to produce a light bulb that is based around a blue LED, but uses "microdots" to convert the blue light to a soft white light. The output intensity is supposed to be twice that of a 60 watt bulb, with efficiencies are a lot better than compact fluoros. They last forever, as well.

It's probably just a matter of a few years before LED home lighting begins to take oer from compact fluoros. You can buy them right now, but they are a bit too expensive, and their light output is generally quite low. They will improve a lot quite soon.

There is talk of lluminescent flat panels based on LEDs, that use microdot technology. Could be what Philips is after. Interesting article on this at the "Smarthouse" Web site.

Rod