Sony shows off radical new 'Crystal' LED TV

Matt Rivera / msnbc.com

By Wilson Rothman

There are LCD TVs that are called "LED TVs" because they use light-emitting diodes to back light the LCD screen. But at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Sony has revealed a TV that uses an array of tiny LEDs to create the picture. Let me explain how that works ? and why it's cool.

Do you know the Times Square Jumbotron, a humongous TV mounted to the side of a building? It produces a picture by lighting up an array of red, green and blue lights, in combinations of brightness, in order to fool your eyes into seeing all the different colors of the visible spectrum. Imagine, then, that the Jumbotron is shrunk down to fit in your living room: The lightbulbs would have to shrink too, so that you wouldn't notice them. That's what Sony did.

The benefit of this is a "self-emitting" display. Like the OLED TVs shown off by Samsung and LG, this TV doesn't have a separate light source, so it can theoretically be thinner. Because each pixel can turn off when it's not needed, the black levels can be truly black, and respond faster than LCD when they are. And because of the way the system uses the red, green and blue lights to create colors, Sony says it has achieved the ability to make more colors, increasing the "color gamut."

Sony is first to say this is just a prototype, and like many concepts shown off at CES, there's no guarantee that it will ever take off. Still, it's fascinating to know what can now be done, and that even after the plasma and LCD revolutions of the last decade, the TV keeps on evolving.

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Source: http://gadgetbox.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/09/10081533-sony-shows-off-radical-new-crystal-led-tv

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