Although it was invented 12 years ago by Japanese baseball trainer Kazushi Tezuka, the gyroball has had the status of a baseball myth to those who had heard of it, at least in the U.S. In Japan, it was the subject of video games and cartoons, which didn’t add to its credibility outside the country. But the gyroball is real, as demonstrated yesterday by its inventor at the San Francisco Giants training camp in Scottsdale, Arizona, and as reported in a front-page story by Lee Jenkins in today’s New York Times.

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor

If you’re interested in gyroball aerodynamics, I’ll refer you to the Jenkins article. What interests us here is that new backlighting illumination sources appear even less frequently than new baseball pitches. In fact, we are in the process of losing a significant supplier of one sub-flavor of backlight illumination. That is, we’re not gaining a gyroball, we’re losing one.

A recap. There are two basic sources of light for LCD backlights: fluorescent tubes (FTs) and light-emitting diodes. Keypads and watch faces are sometimes lit with powder electroluminescent (EL) materials, and development work is being done with organic LED materials and even field-emission technology, but these are not significant for LCDs at this time. One alternative approach that will be developing significant traction this year is the flat fluorescent lamp (FFL), which builds a serpentine pathway between two flat sheets of glass. Think of it as integrating a bunch of fluorescent tubes into one flat panel.

LEDs have been the standard BL solution for LCDs up to four inches and they are rapidly working their way upward. Tubular fluorescent lamps, particularly of the cold-cathode variety (CCFLs), dominate for notebook PCs, desktop monitors, and LCD-TVs - but you will see significant penetration by LEDs into notebooks this year.

There are two other flavors of fluorescent tubes, the external electrode fluorescent lamp (EEFL) and the hot-cathode fluorescent lamp (HCFL). EEFLs are simple to make and can share inverters (the power supply used for FLs), so they offer both cost and power savings. They are used now in commercial TV modules and you’ll be seeing more of them.

HCFLs can offer greater surface luminance, and lifetime issues have been solved by carefully controlling cathode temperature and voltage. Philips has been using HCFLs in their well-publicized Aptura scanning-backlight system, which significantly reduces motion blur on LCD-TVs.

Here’s where we lose our backlighting gyroball. There was an unconfirmed story a couple of weeks ago that Philips Lighting was discontinuing production of HCFLs at its Roosendaal plant. Insight Media has now been able to confirm from a reliable source within Philips that this story is true. Although the picture quality of Philips 32- and 42-inch LCD-TVs using the Aptura system was well received, the tremendous price pressure from CCFLs made it difficult for Philips to expand the HCFL business profitably. (LED backlighting activities will continue through the Philips Lumileds subsidiary, our source says.)

What wasn’t said is that the LCD-TV panel industry is rapidly standardizing on frame-rate doubling (120Hz frame rate) as the most cost-effective way of reducing motion blur. So HCFL for backlighting was not only more expensive, it was losing its main raison d’etre.

Going forward, there is virtually universal agreement that LEDs will be the backlighting technology of choice in all major LCD segments. How the LEDs will be utilized and how quickly they will penetrate each of the various segments are issues that Insight Media will be tracking carefully. But until LEDs become the universal backlight illumination source, there will be lots of juggling between the remaining fluorescent alternatives.