There’s a huge amount of excitement about Samsung’s new LED screens, and rightly so. For the first time in many years a true paradigm leap has been achieved in screen technology. The end result is a picture that far surpasses that of any other screen type. Indeed, it is difficult to image a better looking image.

THE SAMSUNG SECRET

The secret lies in the way the pixels on the screen are illuminated. Pixels are the tiny dots of colour that make up the overall picture. A Full HD screen has over 2 million pixels. Each can display red, green or blue, or black and white and shades of grey. These each change colour many times a second to give you the picture that you can see on your screen.

A traditional LCD screen must also be ‘backlit’. That means an additional lighting system that gives a screen its brightness. LCD screens use something called ‘CCFL’ (or Cold Cathode Fluorescent Lamps). Think of them as a series of fluorescent tubes behind the LCD panel. These provide a uniform sheet of light that gives the LCD screen its brightness. But that uniformity can hamper the reproduction of a perfect image. In a typical scene there will be areas of the picture much darker than others (blacks). CCFL’s flat spread of light means there will always be a compromise between the bright areas and dark areas, with neither displaying exactly as they should.

ULTIMATE COLOURS

In short, blacks are never quite truly black, and the brilliance of light areas is never fully realised. Ideally, a screen should be able to let bright areas shine, but also allow darker areas to be exactly the shade they should be, so the picture is a faithful rendition of what you’re watching was intended to be. This is ‘contrast’ – the degree of difference between black and white. On a traditional LCD, night scenes or dark areas like an actor’s hair were never quite right. On some LCDs, the backlighting would also often ‘spill’ over the screen’s edges in dark scenes, which showed up as annoying blotches of irregular light. Samsung’s LED range solves all this and delivers a picture with startling realism.

WHAT IS LED?

The secret behind Samsung’s state of the art LED screens is an all-new way of backlighting the LCD panel. Nestled behind the screen are hundreds of white LEDs. An LED is a tiny dot of light – the power-on indicators on most electronic devices are LEDs, for example.

You have also probably seen LEDs grouped as panels on newer traffic lights and on the brake lights of luxury cars. They provide pinpoint light which can be very bright indeed, but without the ‘spill’ that you get from fluorescent lighting.

As used by Samsung, LED backlighting gives a perfectly even light where it’s needed, across the whole screen. But that’s only half the magic! The real breakthrough by Samsung is that each LED is individually controlled on the fly. That means that on a typical image the lighter areas will have their LEDs glow brighter, while in darker areas those LEDs will dim. This happens many times each second.

So, what you see on screen is a near-perfect reproduction of an image, regardless of ambient lighting conditions, and without the annoying backlight poking its head out from the edges. It solves the contrast problem to a spectacular degree, allowing dramatic variation between whites and black at the same time. That difference is called the ‘contrast ratio’, and on other screens a contrast ratio of around 5000:1 is considered very good. LED from Samsung, delivers a staggering contrast ratio of up to 3,000,000:1!

A REAL BEAUTY

While that covers the nuts and bolts of LED, like a good car, the engine is only part of the overall package. Samsung has innovated in many other areas, all adding to the superb quality of the image and the TV itself. It all stacks up to create what are truly some of the most advanced TVs in the world.

Let’s step back from the image technology for a moment and appreciate the sheer beauty of these screens. A TV should have a subtle beauty that accentuates your living space, but without overpowering adornments that distract from the viewing experience. Samsung’s designers have come up with an all-new style that can truly be called beautiful. It uses sophisticated manufacturing and materials techniques to realise the dreams of some very talented designers.

It’s called Crystal Design, and you’ll find it across Samsung’s new range of home entertainment products.

It starts with the edges, where a special dual-injection moulding method allows a soft transition from deep blacks through to soft colours, then completely transparent at the edges. It’s a gentle and harmonious effect, accentuated as lighting conditions in your room change. An elegant and unobtrusive stand completes the effect, creating a look that’s tasteful and attractive.

Combining a Samsung Crystal Design HDTV with a Samsung Home Theatre unit, also created with Crystal Design, makes for a uniquely impressive centrepiece to your home.

HEY SLIM

If you thought flat screens were cool, wait until you see the new Samsung screens! The 2009 range LEDs are up to 70 percent slimmer than a conventional LCD – they’re only 1.16-inch deep and yet incorporate the latest digital tuner technology! Now you really can hang them on your wall with a look no different than a framed picture. Fire up the in-built picture gallery – or load up your own, and it really is a work of art.

SMOOTH OPERATOR

Motion Plus is Samsung’s way of making moving images smooth and fluid. Sports fans and gamers in particular will appreciate the technology, which prevents the blurring common on earlier screens. It cleverly increases the number of frames displayed every second to provide an effortlessly natural motion.

Motion Plus’ 100Hz equates to 100 frames per second, which in practice means fast camera pans without blurring and rapidly moving objects that appear lifelike. In another world first from Samsung, the LED 8-series introduces 200Hz Motion Plus for the ultimate viewing experience.

THE CONNECTED VISION

A TV is no longer just a TV. Samsung’s 6, 7 and 8 series LEDs integrate a host of new technologies that allow you to bring together all your digital media, with the TV as both a display device, and controlling hub for it all.

The 6 series features WiseLink, which in practice is a familiar USB port on the screen, into which you just plug a device to display media. The device could be a flash drive (or ‘USB key’), a camera or MP3 player. Then it’s a simple matter of using the remote to access and play the content. You can create image slideshows too; imagine the delight when a friend or family member visits with some photos – just plug and go to enjoy big screen images with top shelf quality.

WiseLink Pro is available on the 7 and 8 series LEDs, and adds video playback functionality.

For a complete home-integrated setup, you’ll want to take advantage of the ease and power of DLNA Wireless. It’s a feature of the 7 and 8 series and is rapidly becoming an industry standard, so compatibility with devices from other manufacturers is assured.

We all have collections of pictures and movies that are important to us, but watching them is usually a less-than-ideal experience – picture the whole family crowded around a PC screen, or small and expensive prints. What DLNA Wireless does is seamlessly connect as many PCs, network storage drives or DLNA-compatible devices as you want to your TV, letting you enjoy that content on the best screen in the house – your Samsung LED.

SAVING YOU MONEY

A nice bonus is that Crystal Design uses no harmful spray paints during production, and on top of that the LED screen itself uses no mercury, a toxic substance common in other screens. Power consumption is way down, too. Samsung LEDs use as little as 103W in operation. That’s less than half that of a typical LCD. It all adds up to save you money in the long run, and is doing the environment a much-needed favour.