[CEATEC 2010] Hitachi prides itself in making the best TVs (that’s their official pitch), but when using LCD technology, there’s always a challenge when it comes to contrast: LCD TVs “black” colors tend to be gray-ish, although things have been getting a lot better over the past few years. Anyhow, Hitachi wants to take it to the next level with this backlight panel. The general ideas is to add more light where its needed in the image, and keep it low when things should be dark/black. Hitachi can control the light intensity for each block (it seems like a gross approximation, but it works fairly well). The weird pattern visible on each block is there to spread the light evenly (I suspect) – this is quite an interesting technique because using a more opaque diffuser would probably dim the light. In the end, this is very cool technology, but in the real-world it’s hard to measure how much “better” it is when compared to the competition.
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