How LED moniter works

The latest marketing innovation to hit TV's and monitors is the term LED. This is being marketed as a new type of screen to supersede the Plasma and the LCD (Liquid Crystal Display). LED means Light Emitting Diode and relates to the way the display is illuminated. LED monitors still use the same Liquid Crystals as the previous LCD displays. The way the backlight works however with the LED's will lead to a number of improvements in the display as we will discover in this article.

The LED monitor is a new way of lighting a monitor display but there is more than one method being used with relative advantages and disadvantages to them. The three types we will be looking at are W-LED (White-LED), Edge LED, and RGB LED.

You got the concept wrong when you imagined it to be millions of LEDs flashing the different hues of colors to give you a display - all these kind of monitors are made of invariably 2 layers - a front layer of LCD (Liquid Crystal Display or Liquid Crystal Diode) that makes up the dots you see as pixels, along with the display of color.

This LCD layer is then back-lighted using light tubes at the back, giving it brightness. Formerly, LCD displays use to use CCFL (Cold Cathode Flourescent Lamp) as a light source at the back, but however in recent years there has been a marked shift towards the use of LED (Light Emitting Diode) as a back-light source.