ccfl or led?

I am not a techy, however can do minor things by myself. My Toshiba laptop screen is cracked. I want to replace it myself, but need to know how to tell the difference between screen types without pulling the whole thing apart. Help?

 

Cheaper "white" LED backlights are also using phosphour (its blue LED with yellow phosphour). So they will not dim so much, but could significantly color-shift over time (as yellow phosphour degrades). Only RGB LED backlights are not succeptible to this problem.
CCFL phosphour will dim uniformly, without color shifting.
Also CCFL could potentially be more comfortable on the eyes than LED (as spectrum is wider). Visual comparison is important, since they vary greatly, there are great CCFLs and horrible LEDs and vice versa.

However, I beleive original question was how to tell the backlight type.
You can do this by looking at connectors on display panel. If it's a ribbon cable and "small white prong" - its CCFL. Its a ribbon cable + 2 small white prongs, its dual CCFL. If its only one ribbon cable or two ribbon cables - its LED.

 

I keep the screen brightness below 50%, actually around 33% is comfortable for my eyes indoors, so the led emitters in the backlight will be running cool, it`s the temperature of the led emitter that degrades the yellow phosphor more quickly, I also have an hardware screen colour calibrator that reminds me to re-calibrate every 14 days to keep my screen as perfect as possible.

 

BTW same trick with reducing brightness will work on CCFL, greatly prolonging their life.
My point is that since their both use phosphour, phosphour life is not that different between WLED and CCFL.
Surely, you could calibrate aged WLED, but this will reduce blue colors to compensate by lack of yellow spectrum from aged phosphour => returning to proper white balance, but reducing total brightness. Therefore you will be in same situation as owner of aged CCFL, only you have the option to keep brightness at the expense of blue shifted white.