By James Wells in Berlin

BERLIN: Philips today released a 42-inch television using an LED backlighting system which boasts 2,000,000:1 contrast ratio and two-millisecond response time.

The television, called LED LUX, claims it can deliver blacks that rival the best plasma televisions in the market – traditionally a weakness of LCD technology.

The LED LUX backlighting system comprises 128 segments of LEDs (1,152 in total) in eight rows of 16 sectors. Nine LEDs are assigned to each individual segment and these LEDs can be individually dimmed to precisely control the output of each pixel. When a segment contains both bright and dark portions, the pixel values of the dark portions can be dimmed to deliver optimum contrast performance, Philips claims.

The backlighting system continuously calculates the amount of dimming required by each LED to accurately reproduce the image.

The 42PFL9803 is also the world’s fastest LCD, according to Philips, with its two millisecond response time, which it claims “finally banishes the motion blur problem common with other LCD TVs”.

At its press conference today, Philips said “the Double Frame Rate insertion works with a high 100Hz refresh rate. It increases the sharpness of motion reproduction to more than twice that of conventional LCD, resulting in a performance with a response time of two milliseconds — the fastest refresh rate in the world”.