LED Screens on Toughbooks

Since long battery life seems to be a priority, and of course durability for the toughbook, how come we have not seen LED screens on the thoughbooks yet?

when will they come to the ultra rugged?


thanks

 

The CF-U1 has LED backlight, and so does the CF-19 since January.

That being said, has there actually been any good comparison test of LED vs CCFL backlight where everything else is equal? The good way to make LED backlighting is to use blue, red and green LEDs together, but most notebooks just use 'white' LEDs. Those are essentially blue LEDs with a phosphorus coating that converts the blue light into white. As the conversion turns a part of the blue light into heat, you have to pump more power into these to get the same light output as with an RGB-LED setup, thus cancelling some of the power savings. And the phosphorus degrades, causing a colour shift and luminosity fading over time. This makes me a bit hesitant to get a screen like that right now, and I'd prefer to see some long-term experiences first to make sure the manufacturers have this under control.

 

Yeah - I discussed this issue at great length in this forum over a year ago; I'm on my 3rd LED illuminated Personal Confusing device; a Dell 1330 XPS. I'm not very impressed with its performance brightness wise, and my other two devices have shown noticeable loss of brightness in only a couple years use.

The bottom line is this: LED lightbars used to replace CCFLs still generate their light by exciting phosphors, just like a CCFL. The difference is whether you use charged metal vapor to excite those phosphors vs a bed of GaN or sapphire substrate on the verge of lasing. The bad part is how concentrated those phosphors are in a white LED; there is less than 5% as much surface area for those phosphors to reside on as the equivalent CCFL. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that if you're driving the phosphors that much harder to make your light, they're going to wear out faster.

This assertion is born out by my experience with White LED flashlights used by myself over the last 6 years; I've got several which have deteriorated to the point of uselessness, both in terms of loss of luminosity and color shift. One of my first actually shifted to near pure purple color over the years; little Marcus loves it.

mnem
Now where did those pesky photons go?

 

the limited research I did seems to suggest that the power saving are negligible. However I also keep reading that the brightness of CCFL displays decreases over time, which apparently is a reason to go with LEDs. That seems illogical however since the phosphor in the LED screens is driven much harder.

oh well, problem solved I am not interested in LED anymore.

thanks - Dominik Gothe

 

Stay with CCFLs... Besides... They taste better with a little salt!

Seriously though... If you do a little search this has been discussed about every two months... For the past two years...

 

I don't think much will change until OLED displays get robust enough to suit the industrial/mining/military usage requirements that we expect our fully-rugged Toughbooks to have.

Until then, TFT LCD panels will be the norm and unless LED technology changes siginficantly there isn't much economic benefit to shift from CCFL to LED backlighting designs.

I am sure that Panasonic would have people working on this very issue right now.

Craig.

 

From the testing I've seen with OLEDs currently produced, they could ALREADY be implemented in the real world with a simple paradigm shift in the manner one regards the display on a laptop. If one considered them an expendable supply like batteries and manufactured them to be easily replaced in the field, the cheapness of OLED manufacture would soon make them cost effective enough to simply replace the entire unit every year or two to keep acceptable brightness, plus OLED technology is much more readily recyclable than equivalent LCD technology.

Of course the current paradigm DELIBERATELY keeps the cost of the LCD panel HIGH to force product turnover; otherwise we'd have LCD panels with modular CCFLs designed to be replaced by the end user. There really is no excuse for it; the sheer amount of electronic waste in landfills SCREAMS for re-evaluation of such business practices.

mnem
Liars, thieves and blackmailers... and those are the GOOD GUYS!

 

Speaking of nit losses. Is there any cold hard facts to back that up? The reason I ask, is my CF30 just does not seem as bright as it once did. Every once in a while I will hear something about them not staying as bright. I have just a tad over 5K hours on mine.