Vizio’s LED lamps are recyclable, and feature a glass-free design to prohibit shattering. The LED lamps are designed to give off a warm hue of light, reminiscent of a natural source. The LEDs product line (see table) will feature triple the lifespan of compact fluorescent bulbs, with up to 25,000 hours of usage. Vizio plans to enter the market in late Q4 of this year.

Vizio high-efficiency LED lighting product collection

Vizio’s partners in the LED lighting space include Epistar and Seoul Semiconductor, two of the world’s top-ten suppliers of LED lighting. “This is a natural progression for Vizio beyond consumer electronics. We look forward to Vizio applying its innovation, marketing and distribution channels to save American consumers even more with its new line of LED lighting,” said Donald Leo, Vice President of Seoul Semiconductor.

“Vizio’s expansion into the LED lighting market stands to challenge the convention in the same way that it has had in the flat-panel television market,” said B.J. Lee, Chairman of Epistar.

As North America’s largest shipper of LED-backlit HDTVs, Vizio realized a 2000% growth in total shipments year over year, with over 2 million units shipped in 2010. From 2009 – 2010, the company’s contribution to energy savings (based on power consumption of 2009 vs. 2010 Vizio HDTV models at an estimated savings of 280,000 MWh/yr) could be viewed as equivalent to the energy needed to power the city of Las Vegas for more than a year.

According to the US Energy Information Administration, the residential sector general service light (A19 type) bulb purchase rate of LEDs will increase approximately 300% between 2010 and 2015 to 100 million units.

These are among the findings in Strategies Unlimited’s new report “LED Driver ICs – 2011.” Sales for LCD backlights will dominate through the period, with growth from edge-lit TVs and monitors. LED lighting applications will be the “next big thing” for LED drivers and driver ICs, beginning with LED replacement bulbs, as a response to improvements in technology and the phase-out of incandescent bulbs.

LED driver IC revenues are threatened, however, by continued integration into fewer ICs, as well as by competition from organic LEDs (OLEDs), compact fluorescent lamps, and other technologies.

Severe price erosion for driver ICs will limit the revenue growth as volumes increase, but new, higher-priced ICs are appearing that reduce the overall bill of materials and also help maintain the average price of the ICs.

Also, AC-LED products minimize the driver and some eliminate the driver IC, but will not have a significant impact on overall revenues through the period, and may even help accelerate adoption of LED lighting.

Lighting market

The production value of drivers for lighting will see strong 40% compound annual growth through the period. The driver is defined as the entire LED circuit, including the driver IC but excluding the LEDs. Innovations in driver design will help take LED lighting mainstream, but the market will quickly shake out those who cannot meet strict goals for dimming, efficiency, power factor, and price.

To meet these goals, large and small companies are bringing innovations to market, such as digital control and novel high-voltage designs. Industry and government are moving toward more standardized specifications that will reduce manufacturing costs and accelerate adoption.

The top 10 LED driver IC suppliers hold more than 55% of revenues, with about 30 IC suppliers and captive manufacturers sharing the other 44%. With the acquisition of National Semiconductor by Texas Instruments, TI is now the number one supplier of LED driver ICs. Winners will be those who can keep delivering innovative products at competitive prices. Fabrication with leading-edge, high-voltage BCD processes and 8-inch (or larger) wafers will play a key role.

Report details

“LED Driver ICs – 2011” is the latest in a series of reports from Strategies Unlimited on LEDs and LED lighting. It takes a fresh look at the LED driver electronics market, with more than 300 pages of detail on technology and application trends. It is a revision of an earlier report, with perspectives on the LED applications, driver technology, requirements on the drivers and driver ICs, and findings on suppliers and market shares. It provides unit, price, and revenue forecasts to 2015 for all LED driver IC segments, and for the overall driver for LED lighting.

Grundig Vanto GLED2407HDC LED TV: Design, features and power

The materials the Grundig Vanto GLED2407HDC are constructed of feel slightly cheap — the plastic bezel around the screen is a bit tacky and easily picks up fingerprints, for example, and the base of the TV’s stand is a simple square of glass — but the TV is solid and doesn’t feel flimsy when standing. The stand swivels over a small range.

We don’t think you’ll be using the Vanto GLED2407HDC with a huge range of digital TV devices, but there are single inputs for HDMI, composite, component and VGA. You can also connect a home theatre system via coaxial digital audio. A USB port also allows a small range of media files to be played back, with support for MP3, WMA and JPEG. If you’ve got a large enough USB memory stick you can also record digital TV and play it back later through the Vanto GLED2407HDC.

The Grundig Vanto GLED2407HDC is very light on power — it has the enviable combination of a small screen and efficient LED edge-lighting. According to Grundig, running the Vanto GLED2407HDC for ten hours a day for ten years would only cost $204. At 40W max power consumption it’s more efficient than even a laptop computer or incandescent light bulb, so we doubt you’d notice a big impact on your power bill. When we tested the Grundig Vanto GLED2407HDC on a power meter and took an average power reading over an hour of TV, it sat at 37W.

Grundig Vanto GLED2407HDC LED TV: Picture quality

The Grundig Vanto GLED2407HDC is a Full HD 1080p 24in panel, and Grundig quotes a 1000:1 contrast ratio. In practice this means when you’re playing a Blu-ray movie or watching an HD digital TV channel, the amount of detail you can see on-screen is impressive. The screen does need a fair bit of tweaking from its default settings to display the best picture quality — we dropped sharpness significantly, as well as lowering brightness and contrast. When we ran through our test Blu-ray movies of The Dark Knight and Terminator: Salvation, we were happy with the amount of detail that could be seen and the colour and contrast of the movies.

The screen did struggle a little with the opening scenes of The Dark Knight where pin-pricks of bright white light are contrasted against a deep black background — but this is common to almost all LCD and LED TVs. Apart from this one foible, the Grundig Vanto GLED2407HDC does a good job of displaying video. Only a small amount of detail is lost in especially bright and especially dark areas of the screen.

Grundig Vanto GLED2407HDC LED TV: Conclusion

When we tested the Vanto GLED2407HDC, we thought it had good picture quality as well as good power efficiency. It is reasonably cheap even at its recommended retail price, so if you can find it discounted it’s an even better deal.

So says the Institute of Energy Economics, a research group overseen by the country’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

IEE analyzed the benefits of switching to LEDs following the March nuclear disaster in Fukushima. Meltdowns prompted the country to abandon expansion of a nuclear industry that has provided 30% of Japan’s electricity with 54 reactors – 35 of which remain shut for safety.

IEE’s findings surfaced this week in the Mainichi Daily News.

“Promoting the introduction of LED lights will serve as energy-saving measures that have immediate effects and sustainability,” the Tokyo-based online paper quotes an IEE representative as saying.

LED light bulbs use only about 10%-to-20% of the power consumed by incandescent light bulbs, and about 60% of fluorescents, including common energy-saving compact fluorescent bulbs. IEE figured that Japanese homes, offices and manufacturing sites use some 1.6 billion bulbs, annually eating up 150.6 billion kWh of electricity.

If people replace those with LED bulbs, the country would cut annual consumption by 92.2 billion kWh, to 58.4 billion kWh, according to IEE. It says that’s the equivalent of 13 nuclear reactors, a quarter of the country’s total.

Cost is a challenge. As we’ve noted before, LED bulbs in the U.S. can have retail prices of $40. If you have, say, 40 bulbs in your house, you’d pay $1600 to replace them all at once.

IEE tallied the bill for 1.6 billion bulbs in Japan at ¥15.7 trillion ($194 billion). However, the upfront cost provides long-term savings not only in electricity bills, but also in longevity. Manufacturers say LED bulbs can last for 25 years, although it will take a quarter of a century to find out if that’s true.

Another knock on LEDs, especially for home users, is that lighting designers and architects note that they lack the warmth of incandescent bulbs. But the good news from Japan – 70% of the 1.6 billion bulbs in Japan are fluorescent, to which many people would prefer LEDs for glow.

Sony BRAVIA KDL-46HX820: Design and setup

The Sony BRAVIA KDL-46HX820 looks more attractive than last year’s model thanks to a seamless fascia, using a single sheet of glass along the front panel with no bulky bezel. It’s very reflective glass, which means you’ll need to make sure to position the TV where no direct light sources are hitting it — otherwise you’ll be distracted by reflections and will have to turn the screen brightness up to compensate. It’s an annoying inclusion that limits the locations the HX820 can be placed in a house.

The Sony BRAVIA HX820 has inbuilt Wi-Fi, which meant we didn’t need to run an Ethernet cable to it to enable Internet features. Another feature that’s now integrated is the HX820’s 3D transmitter — in last year’s HX800 the 3D transmitter and glasses had to be purchased separately, driving up the cost for anyone who wanted to watch a couple of 3D movies. Two pairs of 3D glasses are included with the Sony BRAVIA KDL-46HX820.

If you’re planning to use an older video input like component or composite with the Sony BRAVIA KDL-46HX820, note that the TV uses a break-out box to hold some of these connectors. If you’re wall-mounting the TV, the break-out box is another piece of cable you’ll need to hide. All the other connectors you’d expect like HDMI, Ethernet and USB are built into the side and base of the HX820’s rear panel.

We hooked the BRAVIA KDL-46HX820 up to a Sony BDP-S380 Blu-ray player, a TiVo HD PVR, and a Apple MacBook Pro notebook to test picture quality from a range of input sources.

Sony BRAVIA KDL-46HX820: Picture quality

The BRAVIA KDL-46HX820 uses a dynamic LED back-light arranged around the TV’s edge, but there’s no local dimming to vary brightness in different screen areas. Nonetheless the Sony BRAVIA HX820 is able to achieve very deep black levels, soundly beating the Samsung Series 8 plasma when it came to overall blacks. Our Terminator: Salvation and The Dark Knight test Blu-ray discs looked cinematic and delivered rich blacks.

Once you’ve adjusted the Sony BRAVIA HX820 to the room it’s in, it is well-suited to watching movies or any other video. The HX820’s picture processing is of a very high standard and makes high quality video like Full HD Blu-ray video look clean, extremely detailed and almost perfectly vibrant. The screen does take a fair amount of adjustment, though — the default Vivid mode blows out highlights and over-saturates colours. We opted for the Cinema preset but further lowered saturation and brightness, as well as turning off various picture enhancements like the Clear White setting. You also have to sit right in front of the TV to get the best picture — colours wash out and blacks brighten as you move towards the HX820’s sides.

The Sony BRAVIA KDL-46HX820 cleans up low resolution video very well. Streaming content off ABC iView was almost free of compression artifacts, and DVD video was similarly clean and detailed. Noise reduction also works wonders on free-to-air digital TV, which only struggles during scenes of fast motion.

3D video is leaps and bounds ahead of Sony’s efforts from last year. Cross-talk is almost non-existant with good 3D content — we used Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs and a few 3D ocean documentaries. The 3D effect is generally realistic and does offer a noticeable amount of extra depth. The 3D effect does become less prevalent as you move to the sides of the screen. We found it best on proper 3D content, but Sony has also included a 2D-to-3D mode on the BRAVIA KDL-46HX820.

The Sony BRAVIA HX820 handles on-screen motion well for the most part, although 24p Blu-ray video can occasionally look slightly jerky depending on the video being played. We opted to keep the TV’s MotionFlow setting on Smooth for TV and streaming video, but Blu-ray movies looked better with it disabled.

Sony BRAVIA KDL-46HX820: Internet features

All of the features from 2010’s BRAVIA HX800 are still in the Sony BRAVIA KDL-46HX820 — iView is a perennial favourite. These BRAVIA Internet Video services are of a high standard and the BRAVIA HX820 generally makes them look great, so their inclusion broadens the amount of content available to any TV watcher.

Some new features have been included, like a Web browser, as well as Facebook and Twitter access. However, we didn’t like them too much — controlling the Web browser is a difficult exercise with the keypad of the Sony remote control, and logging into Facebook and Twitter becomes a slight hassle. Both Samsung and LG have strong browsing features built into their TVs, and Sony’s effort pales in comparison. LG’s remote control is a Wii-like pointer, and Samsung’s premium TVs come with a full QWERTY keyboard on the back of the remote.

Sony BRAVIA KDL-46HX820: Conclusion

The Sony BRAVIA HX820 is a high quality television when considered on its own merits — it’s got an excellent picture and a wide range of extra features built in. While the video-on-demand services are great, with the only thing missing a direct movie streaming option, other Web features are mediocre. There’s no app interface for users to choose their own content, and the Web browser is eclipsed by Samsung’s (which makes use of a QWERTY keyboard remote) and LG’s (which uses a ‘magic motion’ pointer).

While the Sony BRAVIA HX820 has some strong competition that should also be considered, we do have to applaud Sony for positioning its 2011 TVs at a reasonable price — the BRAVIA HX820 is a full $700 cheaper than the Samsung Series 8 LED that it competes with. The HX820 has great picture quality due to excellent video processing and reasonable Web features.

Back in the days of my computer building era, I used to only trust one brand of monitor. That brand was Envision. They had the highest quality monitors at an affordable price. Yeah, I could pony up for a Viewsonic or Sony, but the Envision gave me that same great quality at a much lower price point. I remember having a huge 19? flat tube monitor sitting on my desk in San Diego. The advent of the LCD monitor changed everything in the world of ergonomic computing. When I first heard of AOC, I had no idea who they were. I later found out that Envision and AOC were one in the same. I was excited to have the opportunity to review the AOC e2243FW LED monitor. It would be my first experience with an LED and also the first time I would setup a secondary monitor to my system.

The stats of the 2243 are shocking. Firstly, it’s one of the worlds thinnest monitors. It’s about as thin as an OLED or a copy of one of those thick issues of Diehard Gamefan at only 1.29cm. It has a dynamic contrast ration of 50,000,000:1. That means very deep blacks and vibrant colors. It’s a low powered monitor and only consumes 15 watts of power. It uses LED touch buttons on the base to control menu options and cycle power. The 2243 is about 21.5? in viewable size. It also has a 16:9 aspect ratio so will be a tad wider than most LCD monitors and also will allow full edge to edge viewing of widescreen 16:9 films.

Samsung T260	AOC e2243
Samsung T260	AOC e2243

Samsung’s 3D glasses.

Owners of 3D LED and plasma televisions from the company’s 2010 and 2011 lines will now have access to music videos; full-length television shows, courtesy of small network Wealth TV; and educational programming via the Explore 3D program. The application is available on the sets’ SmartHub interface.

Samsung’s Explore 3D application has been available to owners of those televisions for quite some time. Previously, users only were able to watch 3D movie trailers.

To further bolster its 3D push, Samsung also said today that it plans to add paid content, including 3D films and documentaries, to the Explore 3D application “later this year.” The company has yet to reveal pricing or availability.

The addition of new 3D content to Samsung’s line of televisions is a welcome advancement for consumers. Earlier this month, IHS iSuppli revealed in a study of the 3DTV market that just 80 live sources of 3D content were available in the U.S. and U.K. last year, leaving consumers with very little programming to watch on their sets. However, this year, the research firm believes 3D content will grow via sporting events, films, and prime-time shows.

The lighting giant said today that the EnduraLED A21 will be available in the fourth quarter for a price expected to be between $40 and $45. It will show off the bulb tomorrow at the LightFair lighting conference, where many LED lighting announcements are expected.

The EnduraLED A21 will be the first general-purpose LED bulb to give off as much light as a 75-watt incandescent bulb, according to Philips. It will be rated at 1,100 lumens and an efficiency of almost 65 lumens per watt.

The bulb itself roughly resembles a crown, a design meant to give off light evenly. LED light sources give off directional light, making them very good at downlights or spotlights, but now manufacturers are designing bulbs to disperse light more in all directions.

The bulb will have a rated life of 25,000 hours, or about 17 years with four hours of daily use. The color rendering index, a measure of light quality, is 80 and the color temperature is 2,700, or a warmer yellow light meant to be similar to incandescents.

Philips last year started selling a 60-watt equivalent LED bulb with the same design and LED light sources, which is available through Home Depot for $39.97. It uses 12.5 watts.

Lighting manufacturers are seeking to boost the brightness and light quality of LEDs to make them attractive alternatives to incandescent and compact fluorescent bulbs. The prices for LED bulbs are much higher but are expected to drop over time.

Philips said that over its lifetime, an EnduraLED A21 could save a home or business $160. There are about 90 million 75-watt incandescent bulbs sold every year in the U.S., and switching to LEDs would eliminate the carbon emissions of almost 1 million cars, according to Philips.

When grilling, it helps to be able to see.

Grilling is all about good times that nobody wants to see come to end. So despite the encroachment of dark, boundaries get pushed as one more item gets thrown on the grill. And then ends up burnt to a crisp because nobody can see when grilling in the dark. Fun in the sun is fun and all, but when the sun goes down, it doesn’t mean the party (or the food) has to end.

The LED Barbeque Grill Light is a heavy-duty model that supplies illumination via 18 LEDs. The 13-inch light mounts horizontally, vertically, or even to angled surfaces up to almost 5 inches thick. The business end of the light is at the end of a flexible gooseneck, allowing for maximum versatility and illumination wherever the light is needed.

Capable of extending the grill session well past the recommended limit (at least as dictated by Mother Nature), the light also features a weatherproof housing. Three D batteries supply the oomph needed to get through the night, and the unit features an automatic shutoff for those who forget. With low heat, bright LEDs supplying the light, and three hefty batteries the power, the oncoming of night doesn’t need to mean the end of the good times–or anymore burnt hot dogs and burgers.

The 8801 chip is small–about the size of a penny–and will be about the same price as existing LED lighting electronics. If Marvell signs on light manufacturer customers, it could bring the very good light quality of some commercial LEDs to more affordable consumer products, said Kishore Manghnani, vice president of Marvell’s Communications and Consumer business. He said the chip, which integrates multiple functions on this single controller chip, is being tested by commercial or consumer light fixture makers now and it takes them about six months to introduce products with new chips.

Light quality for consumer LED bulbs has improved over the past few years but the color rending index (CRI), a measure of quality, is still not as high as incandescent bulbs. With the chip, Manghnani said a CRI of 95, higher than most of the consumer LED bulbs available now, is possible.

The chip can control the current and temperature of two types of LED light sources. So a fixture or bulb maker could use the chip and driver to use LEDs with two different colors, such as white and red, to improve color rendering. Until now, the electronics to control different colored LEDs would be too large or expensive for consumer products, Manghnani said.