14 DAY TRIAL // One of the first things that come to our mind whenever we think of Samsung is the image of a widescreen display, either plasma or LCD. However, the company is also quite actively involved in the development and manufacture of LCD displays for notebooks and that's exactly the specific area Samsung's latest announcement refers to. Thus, the Koreans have just developed three new LCDs for notebook PCs, two offering a true 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio for viewing movies, TV shows and new-age gaming, while the third features active White-LED (light-emitting diode) backlighting that boosts picture clarity and reduces power consumption.
The new 16:9 aspect-ratio displays, which have a 16-inch diagonal and an 18.4-inch diagonal respectively, deliver, according to the company, the same vivid colors as those provided by an LCD TV with color saturation levels of 60 percent for the 16-inch model and 90 percent for the 18.4-inch model, compared to the 40-50 percent range seen in most notebook monitors today. Moreover, they both sport an 800:1 contrast ratio, 8ms (millisecond) response time and 262,144 colors.
As mentioned earlier, Samsung has also announced the development of a 15.4-inch diagonal LCD with an active, White-LED backlight. The new 15.4-inch display operates on 40 percent less power than a typical LED backlight, as it's quite a well-known fact that backlight units (BLU) using LEDs can operate on less power than conventional BLUs, which use cold cathode fluorescent lamps (CCFLs).
This is because CCFL BLUs remain fully lit all the time, while an active LED BLU illuminates the screen selectively, according to the image being displayed. Light areas project varying degrees of light, while dark areas are turned off. As a result, power consumption is reduced and the contrast ratio is very seriously improved, since, for example, Samsung's new 15.4-inch LED backlight unit has ten times (10,000:1) the contrast of a typical notebook PC display.
The three new notebook displays will be incorporated in several future notebooks, but it remains to be seen (and tested) just how well they behave when subjected to real-life conditions.
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