Samsung introduces three LCDs at IFA 2006

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

At the IFA 2006 Samsung has officially introduced its first LCD television that uses the LED Backlight technology. The latter increases the panel life compared to the previous technology used and also improves the uniformity of the lighting.

The 40-inch display, named LE40M91, thanks to the EISA Innovation Award winner features a higher color gamut (146% instead of 127%), a great contrast ratio (10,000:1) and a 450 cd/m2 brightness rating.

The higher color gamut means that the Samsung LCD can represent a wider range of colors (CHECK) and coupled with the improved contrast ratio is a great improvement over the previous models. The impressive ratio is possible thanks to the High Dynamic Contrast Ratio technology that was developed internally by Samsung.

This new LCD TV features the Samsung’s 100 Hz technology that inserts a frame between two other frames by using a motion estimation and compensation process (instead of simply duplicating a frame). This helps reducing the blur originated by fast moving images without having to reduce the viewing experience quality.

One thing that this display lacks is the support for the full HD resolution so it has to scale the image to fit. This will become a crucial feature for the LCDs in the future and it is strange that one of the main Samsung products showed at IFA lacks it.

One of the reason for this may be that the display will be launched in Europe first and in several countries HD still does not have the penetration that it has in the US.

Fortunately they presented two other LCD panels that are able to support the 1920x1080p resolution: the LE40F7 (40-inch) and the LE46F7 (46-inch). They lack the LED backlighting or 100Hz technology though and have lower values of contrast ratio (6,000:1), color gamut (127%) and brightness (450 cd/m2).

All the three panels come with the Samsung's Wiselink "10-in-3" technology that allows connections like Multi Memory Slot (MMS), USB, Printer Port and 2HDMI to connect at the same time two devices that provide a HD signal.