World's Brightest LCD Panel Unveiled by Samsung

The most important factors in any display solution designed especially for digital signage applications are its size and its brightness, ensuring the fact that the images will be clearly visible even in bright sunshine. However, none of the models currently available on the market will be able to compete against Samsung's latest development, a 70-inch panel touted by its manufacturer to be the world's brightest, with a light output of 2000 nits.

According to the company's statement, this digital information display (DID) is one-third brighter than the previous model and has been designed to optimally accommodate the wide range of lighting conditions affecting outdoor displays. Besides providing around 4 times the brightness of most consumer-grade HDTVs, the device also sports a brightness-control option, which actually allows operators to "dim it down" during nighttime.

Moreover, by using local dimming LED technology, the DID LCD panel manages to keep power consumption as low as possible by adjusting picture brightness in very precise "localized" increments, thereby avoiding having to brighten areas that don’t require it.

One of the main advantages provided by this local dimming technology is related to the contrast ratio, which achieves a very impressive value, of 200,000:1. Other features worth mentioning are the Full-HD (1080p) screen resolution with 16.7 million colors, plus some very good viewing angles, namely 178 degrees on both horizontal and vertical directions.

The panel weighs 80 kilograms, is 1630mm (millimeters) wide by 952mm high by 129.6mm deep, and can be used in either portrait or landscape format, thus making it pretty versatile. Unfortunately, no pricing details have been provided, but Samsung claims that the first samples of this "super-bright" display will be available by the year's end, with mass production most likely scheduled to start at some point in early 2009.