From time to time I think about LED screens.
What screens are you guys using ?
Yes,
But NECs are not LED I think... just IPS?
So? IPS is only a backlight technology....
A great deal of confusion with this.
All monitors are LCD.. not LED. If your monitor says LED on it... that's just the back lighting for the panel.... which is always LCD. They are not LED monitors... you have a LCD monitor.
IPS is NOT a back lighting technology, it's a LCD panel technology. IPS (In Plane Switching) uses different shaped LCD cells and polarisation to give a wider viewing angle without gamma and colour shift. Cheaper monitors are often TN panels (Twisted Nematic) with extremely poor viewing angle resulting in colour and gamma shifts over relatively short angles. There's also VA (Vertical Alignment) panels. IN terms of sheer quality when looking straight at the screen, VA derivatives.. specifically Samsung's S P-VA panels are the best quality. They still suffer from gamma shift though, which is why IPS has becomes the default panels for colour critical applications. IPS isn't perfect though. Blacks are weaker than in VA panels, and they suffer from "IPS Glow" which is when dark areas of the screen glow a grey/blue when viewed from wide angles.
Regardless of panel type (TN, IPS, VA etc), the back lighting is a separate issue. High end monitors use either CCFL (Cold Cathode Fluorescent Lighting) or RGB LEDs than can actually be fine tuned by calibration to different white points. Cheaper monitors will just use white LEDs which can be inconsistent, variable in colour temp, and can not be adjusted. The different types of back lighting's main effect is the screen's gamut, or colour depth. Monitors can fall into two broad categories: Standard gamut, or sRGB monitors, and Wide Gamut monitors. sRGB monitors can only reproduce a range of colour depths similar to NTSC TV in a colourspace known as sRGB. Wide Gamut screens can reproduce a much wider range of colours and they aim to reproduce the Adobe RGB1998 colourspace to enable photographers and graphics professionals to actually see everything as it is at source. A sRGB monitor will not show the full range of colour depths from your camera. However, wide gamut monitors need to be carefully colour managed to avoid user error.
Wide gamut screens wil use CCFL or RGB LED lighting, whereas most sRGB panels these days use white LEDs. Some narrow gamut screens use CCFL though.
I hope that clears this up, and stops people thinking they have a LED monitor with IPS backlighting
