First application is of course for back lighting LCD display. Hardware.fr tested the first display featuring this technology (article in French).
This model is the Samsung XL20. Despite of being thicker than a standard LCD, its improved contrast, color rendering and brightness pave the way for the future success of this technology.
Its price expected to be around 1400€ will not target it for consumer electronics, but its features will strongly interest photo and video specialists.
Sony is not the only company to offer a LED-based notebook (Dailytech). Fujitsu unveiled its LifeBook P7230, an ultra portable notebook model featuring a 10.6" display. Its battery life time is around 6h despite its light weight: 1.3kg. Such performance is obtained thanks to the LED used for back lighting the LCD display, but also by the use of a 1.2GHz ULV Core Solo. The LifeBook P7230 will ship with Vista and be priced 1699$.
LED is becoming such a hot marketing point that we should expect to see Apple to quickly adopt this technology for its notebook and display models, after "Intel Inside" we should soon see "LED Inside".
Of course Apple needs get a manufacturer ready to propose high quality LED-LCD panels that could find their way in future MacBook Pro and Apple Cinema Display models. Well, Samsung just announced many LED products, among them seem to be built for Apple:
- the first one is a 30" panel featuring a resolution of 2560x1600 pixels, brightness of 300cd/m2, response time of 6ms and a contrast of 900:1.
- the second one is a 15.4" display dedicated to notebook, with a resolution of 1440x900 pixels, and a thickness of 5.8mm. Its power consumption is only 3.1W.
So, we should see those LED-LCD displays adopted by Apple, especially for the notebook dedicated panel, as Apple is the only computer manufacturer to use a resolution of 1440x900 pixels to our knowledge. It moved from 1440x960 to 1440x900 with the MacBook Pro to make some space available for the integrated iSight.
So this information could confirm a previous rumor about Apple adopting LED display in MBPro 15".
The NAB, a major electronic media technologies event, will start in a week, and could be a good occasion for Apple to announced some products. Or one will have to wait for the PMA'07, the world’s largest annual international photo imaging trade show,
