After spending a week in KL during the recent school holidays, I cant help but miss the city even more. Although I was born there, I decided to move to Penang for reasons pertaining to work. During this trip to KL, I had quite some time to myself as my in laws graciously took upon the job of looking after my kids. Wandering around high end malls in KL with my best friend in tow was awesome and as usual I didn’t stop drooling on any single cool electronic gadget that I set my eyes upon. I do feel that there rate of introduction of new breakthrough technology has recently slowed down – perhaps due to the recent economic climate as well. But despite that, something which caught my eye was the introduction of LED TVs by Samsung which is being proudly paraded in almost every single electrical store in KL – right from Harvey Norman to SENQ. So now whats really the fuss all about?

It just seems like yesterday that we started seeing LCD TVs and Plasma TVs on the shelves of stores. Although the initial prices were crazy (I almost swore I would never own one during my lifetime) it just took a matter of time before prices started to plummet thanks to our friends in China. Even I am a proud owner of a Panasonic 29 inch LED TV which I bought just around the time that the Beijing Olympics were being telecasted. An absolutely fantastic investment if I can actually look through the poor picture quality while watching astro. A common comment that you might have heard is “Astro looked better on my 10 year old CRT TV!”. Yes, its true! CRT TVs are more forgiving. As for LCD TVs they don’t “forgive” the picture quality as much as their older cousins.

As for plasma TVs, the most common issue is the “burn-in” effect. This actually leaves a shadow or mark of an image which is static on your TV and has been shown for too long. It could be anything like a still picture or even the logo of your favorite channel. Watch it for too long and the logo will show up even if you switch off the TV. Although TV salesmen are quite adamant that this is not the case anymore, you’re better off asking them to prove it to you!

Ok, so lets turn out attention to LED TVs. What are LED TVs actually? LED basically stands for Light Emitting Diodes. As the name implies, these are small diodes that are able to emit white light when there is current passing through them. An LED TV is thus essentially an LCD TV which uses LEDs for backlighting. Confusing? Fret not – let me try to explain. The LED TV still uses LCD technology as its front end to project the picture on the screen, but the backlighting technology is different. Previously there were many other technologies used for backlighting such as CFL but the most recent technology is LED. It is advantageous in the sense that it is able to save space, has better contrast, brighter, offer a wider color gamut and consume much lesser power.

Samsung has really been aggressively promoting their line of LED TVs in the local market. They have 2 models – Series 6 and Series 7. Here are some images and key specifications of both the models:

Both the TVs have very decent specifications and support full HD as well. The Series 7 supports a wider variety of connectivity options when compared to the Series 6. You could actually get more information on the detailed specifications and even some demo videos from the Samsung LED TV microsite. I can almost hear you asking me the price of these babies. The prices range anywhere between a cool RM 10,000 to RM 18,000 (rough figures). You might find different stores throwing in a promotion or two as the technology is relatively new and will take some time to be adopted. Of course there will be cheapskates like me waiting for the price to go down to sub RM 5000 levels before even thinking of buying a set. So for me its definitely not the right time to get an LED TV, but I will still keep stepping into the stores and bugging the salesman.

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