Building on its success in LED-backlight TVs

Vizio, a leading supplier of LED-backlit LCD HDTVs, announced it will enter the LED lighting market with a series of replacement lamps using LEDs supplied by Epistar and Seoul Semiconductor.

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.

Monitor LED backlight kit is easy on the eyes

You know that end-of-the-day feeling when you’ve been staring at the computer for eight hours and your eyeballs feel like you’ve been face down in a dune in the Sahara desert? It’s just the price you pay for having a desk job in the exciting era of modern technology.

I never thought much about how I could give my aching eyes a break until Antec’s “soundscience bias lighting halo 6 LED kit” showed up in my mailbox. That’s a long lowercase name for a long strip of USB-powered LED lighting. The $12.95 kit just launched today.

It’s a pretty simple concept. You remove the adhesive backing and slap the strip onto the back of your monitor. It’s good for up to a 24-inch display. Plug it into a USB port and it emanates with a gentle glow from behind your monitor. The LEDs can be pretty subtle, especially with daylight streaming through a nearby window. As it gets darker, the effect is more pronounced.

Monitors with built-in LED backlights have been around for a bit. The Apple LED Cinema Display is a prominent example. What’s new with the halo 6 kit is the idea of adding your own LEDs after the fact to any old monitor you have hanging around.

I’ll admit, my eyes did seem to feel a little better than usual after a few days of using the halo 6. I can’t offer up any hard scientific proof, but there’s something comforting about having a display that glows from behind. I’m thinking of attaching some little feathery cherub wings to complete the look.

I can see the halo 6 kit becoming part of gamers’ arsenals. Gaming computers have long been at the forefront when it comes to components that glow. A little light can be helpful if you like to spend hours in a darkened room blasting aliens off of their home planets.

I can’t help but think of other ways this LED gadget could be put to work. Landing strip lights for an RC helicopter would be cool. Spruce up your office with a little mood lighting. I successfully hooked it up to my iPad 2 using the USB adapter from the Apple Camera Connection Kit. Tinkerers could have a blast coming up with creative side projects.

LED Backlighting

It is said that energy-saving flat-panel television sets are about to become common in shops, spawning a whole new range of technical words to understand in Berlin.

Most manufacturers believe the best way to reduce TV power consumption is to change the type of lamp at the back of the flat panel, as well as to devise clever ways to reduce wasted light output.

The newest liquid-crystal-display (LCD) television sets are to feature LED backlights instead of the cold cathode fluorescent lamps (CCFL) which have done the job in the past. LED stands for light- emitting diode.

That is where the confusion starts, because at the same time, the electronics industry has been trying, without much success, to develop TV-sized displays where the image itself is formed by a matrix of LEDs.

LED backlighting has got nothing to do with that technology: all it changes is the light source that shines through the LCD screen.

Word has been spreading for a decade that LED light bulbs are more efficient than fluorescent lamps, so it is no surprise that TV manufacturers are also turning to this new light source.

Philips, for example, claims an energy saving of 40 per cent on its televisions.

The different ways of configuring this new type of backlight are sure to set off more confusion.

The simplest way to deploy the LEDs is around the four edges of the screen and let the light diffuse across the back of the screen. This is cheaper, and salespeople will make a point of explaining that these ‘edge-lit’ displays are even thinner than their predecessors.

‘For the bigger screens, this requires about 500 LEDs,’ explains Peter Koch of LG Germany.

More expensive are the so-called direct LED backlights. Instead of being placed around the edges, these LED lamps are arrayed right across the back of the screen. Direct-LED backlighting is a smart idea because the intensity of the light can be dimmed behind dark parts of the image. This ‘local dimming’ creates deeper, more natural blacks.

‘If the image is of people under a night sky,’ all the LEDs behind the sky will be turned off so that it really seems dark,’ explains Sascha Lange of Toshiba Germany.

This matters, because LCD televisions are often thought to be a degree inferior when compared to plasma flat-panel televisions. The black on existing LCD screens is generally a dark grey, and colours generally seem washed out when viewed off-centre.

Over time, local dimming also helps to save electricity and keep the TV set cooler.

The new backlights generally use LEDs that give off white light, but there is a third variant, the so-called RGB backlight system, which uses a mixture of red green and blue LEDs.

This will only be offered in the most expensive sets, aimed at buyers who want the very best. In fact, television broadcasts do not demand such a subtle graduation of colours, but the difference will be visible while watching the highest-quality high-definition films from Blu-ray discs.