Macs with LED backlighting coming this year

[Hrvoje Simic]

"We plan to introduce our first Macs with LED backlight technology in 2007."

Steve Jobs on a "Greener Apple" subject on Apple's web site



Pretty good news.

[Bruce Allen]

Yeah, true! LED backlit laptops, yaay... there are a few LED backlit PC laptops already so this is pretty certain.

The only question is how soon they will roll out big LED displays... if they wait too long then we'll be getting one of those 4K Red displays instead!

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

[Jared VanLeuven]

Good, 'cause now that it's been spread that REDCINE runs fine on a MacBook Pro, I'm in the market. If they can just keep those batteries from getting all pregnant.

[Bachman]

I think youll see it first in their small displays only

[GlennChan]

I believe a lot of LCD monitors are moving to LED backlighting because it makes the monitor cheaper to make.


Consumer LCD displays are manufactured under huge pricing pressures. This means that they go for the cheapest solution that can do the job. This is exactly the case with LED backlighting. It saves them a lot of money and complication. It saves monitor manufacturers a lot of money and complication. It eliminates handling glass CCFL bulbs with mercury and the need to have high voltage inverters to drive them.
For the full message, see
http://diforum.org/pipermail/diforum/2007-January/000103.html

2- On the other hand, LED backlighting can have advantages if done right. Using three different colors of LEDs that emit a narrower spectrum of light allows you to increase color gamut. For print work and film work this can be useful.

I believe you can also use LEDs to improve the response time of the panel by inserting black frames into the picture. While the pixel is transitioning (from white to black or vice versa), you can have the LEDs not emit light. This seems to be what Sony is saying their BVM-L LCD monitors are doing.

[Graeme Nattress]

LEDs are a big step forwards. Can't wait for these new Apple monitors!

Graeme

[Hrvoje Simic]

Yes, they are cheaper to make, but there's always that damn issue of getting the most out of current technology (financially) before jumping to the next. I just hate that. Samsung and Sony allready have the step further - OLED, and I was hoping on seeing that soon, but it looks like we'll be using LED for some time before getting to that level.

I just hope they can squeeze them in the same period of 8-core Mac's hardware update. That would be a really great package: 8 cores, G80's or R600's and displays with wider colour gamut, less ghosting, higher contrast, thinner form factor and more uniform light. Another patience test...


Samsung's February LED demonstration that could be directly related to Apple:

"The display's backlight reduces the overall thickness to 0.22 inches while consuming an average of only 3.1 watts. Although no companies were mentioned as using the new part, the screen's 1440x900 resolution appears to confirm earlier reports of LED-based MacBook Pros and similarly-equipped HP notebooks, many of which already use a similar screen size. A formal launch for the panel in finished hardware has not been revealed but is likely to occur in Spring."

"A final panel introduced at the same time was a new, 30-inch model intended for computer displays, sporting a 2560x1600 resolution. As with the 40-inch panel, the company says it focuses on color accuracy: a higher-than-average 900:1 contrast ratio is linked with 111% coverage of the NTSC gamut, suiting the LCD to artists and video editors as well as the mainstream."

more info here (http://www.macnn.com/articles/07/02/01/samsung.leds.and.macbooks/)

[Eugene]

Are LEDs better, or is the change only due to the mercury? What is in the iSight that is so bad for the environment?