Samsung Demos Ultra-Low Power Next-Gen HDTVs

The increased definition of HDTV has motivated consumer premise manufacturers to move to ever-increasing TV sizes. With these increases in diagonal dimension, TV power consumption has grown at a rapid rate. The home TV is now a major consumer of power.

At SID Display Week in Los Angeles, May 17-19, Samsung is exhibiting a technology, developed with its affiliate Nouvoyance, which enhances ultra-low power HDTV display products. In this demonstration, frame sequential color (FSC), PenTile technology, and red, green, blue (RGB) local dimming have been combined to produce a TV display technology that features a wider array of colors, virtually eliminates color breakup, and operates at approximately 25 percent of the power of legacy LCD TV technology, according to Samsung.

Samsung and Nouvoyance have been able to blend fixed color filters with clear subpixels of FSC using a PenTile RGBCW (red, green, blue, cyan, and white) color filter array. A 2D dimming RGB backlight has been highly localized to work in conjunction with the PenTile RGBCW array. The PenTile technology’s white (W) subpixels are clear and capable of crisply transmitting Red, Green, or Blue light from the backlight as needed in any given display zone.

For this technology demonstration, a 15.1-inch 816 x 490 LCD is used, but the panel can be readily scaled to larger sizes and finer resolutions.