This week Samsung was showing off an ultra-thin 40 inch LED TV due out next month, with pictures that show how thin it is and the boast that it’s the thinnest LED TV on the market.
Given that LED TVs are a new genre, this is perhaps not that much of a boast. LED is not the thinnest technology on the market, that’s the promise of OLED and Sony already markets an 11 inch OLED and has shown a 23 inch (as has Samsung) over a year ago which really was 3 mm thick. LED TV almost has the contrast of OLED, and some of the low power requirements, so it’s a step in the right direction. And it looks like OLED TV sets which are cheap enough to make and of high enough quality are at least one year away, maybe two.
Samsung reckons the thing will be out around Christmas, and perhaps it will. The device is actually an LCD flat screen TV, same as many other devices on the market, which is backlit by LEDs (Samsung has a number of these on its web site including the 55 inch UN55B8000XF which sells for about $2,500 right now in the US which is about an inch thick).
The main point of the LED is the incremental control and lower power you can offer over previous backlit LCD screens, where part of the backlight can be turned off or down to save power. We have witnessed this as an emerging trend in more expensive TVs, and the recent Toshiba Cell based Regza 55X1 was also LED backlit, and harnessed the Cell supercomputer on a chip to split out 512 areas of the screen and offer a different level of lighting on each. That TV and a few others out this year, have a contrast ratio of around five million to one, the same as this new Samsung, which it is simply calling the ‘Needle Slim’ LED.
It’s supposed to be 3 mm thick, but that’s just the screen, not the TV, but the picture shows it as thinner than a pencil. The device currently has no official model name, but Samsung says it will use a 120Hz LCD panel
Back on October 16 Samsung issued a release that it was forming a joint venture company with the Suzhou Industrial Park Administration
Committee of China to build an $800 million, 7.5 generation LCD product line China, and Samsung is currently the world number one in flat TV shipments with Sony and LG hot on its heels, so it has plenty of manufacturing capacity now and in the future for this type of TV.