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Early reports of the demise of LCDs are greatly exaggerated

LCDs are not going anywhere anytime soon. Many digital signage displays being labeled LED displays are LCD displays with LED backlights.

February 19, 2015 by Glen Young — Sr. Product Marketing Manager, MMD

The great American author Mark Twain once said, "The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated." Well, here's another version of it. The industry's reports of an early LCD death are greatly exaggerated.

More and more people are coming up to me asking about the differences between LCD and LED digital signage displays. Most of them are under the false assumption that LCD displays have disappeared. Nothing could be further from the truth.

LCD and LED — a difference of one letter. But that one-letter difference has caused great confusion among people in the industry. With more and more displays being labeled as LED displays, many assume that LCD is going the way of the dinosaur and being phased out. Again, however, that could not be further from the truth.

For starters, most TVs or displays on the market today that are referenced as "LED displays" are LCD displays with an LED backlight. This means that the actual panel is LCD, and the light source is LED. As such, it's easy to see where the confusion comes from. The simplest way to think about it is this: The LCD screen is the plastic transparency, and LED is what shines through.

Now, there are LED displays that are pure LED, which are the ones you see in stadiums, billboards and arenas. These are made of with an array of LED light bulbs in individual modules, with each light bulb acting as the equivalent of a pixel cell in an LCD screen. The key to the display resolution is the distance between LED light bulbs; however, since most of these displays are viewed from a far distance, resolution does not play a crucial role.

That being said, some LED vendors are trying to come up with an LED TV product to replace the LCD TV, especially in large format (>100 inches). However that is unlikely to happen for the foreseeable future, as the price of an LED TV is still out of range for most consumers, along with a still too-high power consumption rate. Plus, the under 30 feet viewing distance range requires much higher resolution that current LED technology can hardly meet or is extremely high cost.

In the meantime, people will still reference displays with LCD panels as LED displays, and the confusion will continue. Just know that nine times out of 10 when they say LED display, what they really mean is an LCD display that's lit by LEDs.

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