Televisions as with all technology constantly move forward. Bigger, better, brighter, more realistic, HD read, Full HD, flat screen, LCD, Plasma, thinner and now LED. It’s the nature of the beast that television manufacturers want us to upgrade our televisions as fast as they roll off the production line. Never mind that your TV could last you a good 10 years, you are marketed at, you need the latest device. You will be cool if you buy the newest TV. And what could be newer and better than Samsung Series 6000 and Series 7000 LED, also known as the Samsung Luxia Televisions? Nothing. That’s what!

The problem is, are LED TVs a reality yet? Samsung would have you believe so, but their competitors are not so sure. I’ll let you decide, after you’ve read through. See, true LED TVs are more commonly known as OLED TVs are an emerging technology. To be an OLED TV, you screen would need to use only LEDs (Light Emmiting Diodes) to create the picture on your television. If you buy yourself a new television today, chances are it is using an LCD (Liquid Crystal Display). LCD televisions are the most widely produced TVs at the moment and basically, they work by filtering white light. LED displays, work differently; they use an individual LED to represent a single pixel on the screen. Unfortunately, currently, LEDs are much too large to use in consumer televisions so they tend to be kept for large displays such as those in sports stadiums or large commercial locations where the viewer is sitting far enough away from the display to be able to see the image.

Samsung’s Series 6 and Series 7 LED TV don’t actually use LEDs for each pixel. Instead, they are still using an LCD display panel but with LED backlighting. This means that the LEDs are the actual light source for the TV rather than the usual Cold Cathode Fluorescent Lamps used in most LCD displays. In most modern displays, some of the biggest problems are down to the backlighting – these include greying out of black levels in your picture which is caused by the fact that with CCFL backlit panels, a single backlight needs to be shining at all times – this causes some bleeding of light into pixels that should be black, causing the greying out that is so common in the current crop of televisions. This is also the cause of motion blur, because the backlight doesn’t scan, instead it presents a series of static images. Samsung’s idea, instead of continually refining the technology is to do away with the problem altogether – using LEDs as backlights allows the light source to be more finely controlled since you can switch off all light in portions of the screen that should be dark, creating more convincing black levels and better picture quality. At the same time, the LEDs can “scan” properly, creating proper motion and doing away with motion blur traditionally associated with LCDs. The other great advantage and probably the biggest technology leap here is that Samsung have placed the LEDs in the side of the frame of the television rather than the back, so it allows the TV to be thinner and so more aesthetically pleasing.

So is Samsung just using marketing gimmicks to try and get a jump on the game? It is clear that we are not looking at what would traditionally be described as an LED television, rather it is an LCD display that uses LEDs as its light source. Perhaps their marketing line for the Samsung Series 6000 LED TV puts it most succinctly:

Normal televisions use a fluorescent lamp backlight to produce an image. Samsung LED TVs create images by using white, light emitting diodes (LED). It’s the same technology found in laptop screens. This transformative technology has finally made exceptionally slim TVs a reality.