Written on August 29, 2008 – 8:54 am | by Bogdan Alex |

IFA ’08 is swarming with new HDTV display, each bringing new features and improvements over the last generation. Sony presented a 9.9 mm thick display and a series of new LED displays that are capable of 1,000,000:1 contrast ratios and stirred things quite a bit, but Philips immediately stroke back witht a 8 mm thick display and a new LED display capable of 2,000,000:1 contrast ratios.

The new technology responsible for thise impressive contrast ratios is called LED LUX and can be inside the new 42PFL9803 HDTV. According to Crunchgear, LED LUX relies on LED backlighting to produce more natural dark colors. The impressive contrast ratio of 2 million to 1 is possible through 128 areas that can be individually dimmed. The dimming areas should not produce the artifacts seen with Sony’s first LED-backlit displays.

In this respect, the press release mentions that “the LED LUX system comprises 128 segments of LED’s (1,152 LED’s in total) in 8 rows containing 16 segments. Nine LED’s are assigned to each individual segment and these LED’s can be individually dimmed to precisely control the output of each pixel. So, even if a segment contains both bright and dark portions, the pixel values of the dark portions can be dimmed to deliver optimum contrast performance.”

The improved black color provided by the LED LUX technology is also augmented by Philip’s Ambilight Spectra 2 system, which produces ambient lighting along the right and left side of the display based on the colors in the adjacent sections of the image on the screen.