[LINK] LED Backlight LCDs may save power

[Tom Worthington]

Stilgherrian wrote Jul 26 09:36:05 EST 2007 (was: "Blackle: turn 
Google black to save the planet" 
<http://mailman.anu.edu.au/pipermail/link/2007-July/075185.html>):

>... Blackle ... front-end onto Google which turns the website 
>background black. In theory,
>this saves energy because a monitor uses more power when displaying a
>white/light image than a black/dark one. ... http://www.blackle.com/about/ ...

I was skeptical of this saving power on modern LCD screens. But some 
new LCD screens have local LED back lighting. This switches off the 
backlight for the parts of the image which are dark. It is done to 
increase the quality of the image 
<http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,117629-page,1/article.html>, but 
as a byproduct it should also save some power.

However, with a search of Amazon.com, I could only one brand of  TV 
<http://astore.amazon.com/universalservice/?node=283> and one model 
of computer monitor 
<http://astore.amazon.com/universalservice/?node=314> with this 
feature. There appear to be no details as to if they actually save 
much power and at present these screens are VERY expensive.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                      http://www.tomw.net.au/
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, ANU