With the rapidly advancing personal computer market — everything from laptops and desktops to tablets and smartphones — it’s easy to forget that the television market is moving forward by leaps and bounds of its own. It wasn’t long ago that a television was a bulky, square box with a low-resolution picture — perhaps not even a digital image.

Times change, however, and so do televisions. First came the LCD televisions which revolutionized the television market. The consumer was now able to have high definition, widescreen video at home, and the home theater business surged with new opportunities and innovation. Following this initial burst of new technology, plasma televisions came onto the market and offered even better picture quality, with brighter colors and more natural whites and blacks.

nd, recently, the market has again been upended by a superior technology in the form of LED-backlit televisions. LED televisions offered a highly energy efficient backlight, along with colors equally as vivid — if not more so — as those seen on plasma models. Because LEDs are extremely small and efficient, LED models offered the thinnest televisions ever on the market. They also come in at the lightest — making them perfect for that magazine-like mounted television.
The high consumer demand for these superior television models is driving production up worldwide; coinciding with this increased production, generally, is lower cost for the consumer. As has been the case with all major technological breakthroughs, a drop in price means an increase in consumer adoption. By midway through 2011, manufacturers expect LED penetration rates to reach fifty percent in the US market alone — that’s a huge majority when there are three competing technologies.

LED televisions have also paved the way for LED panels becoming common place in many other applications, including laptop and computer monitor displays, mobile phone screens, and in-dash automobile displays. The LED backlight is simply the lightest, brightest, most color-rich display technology available, with one of the most highly anticipated models in 2011 being Samsung’s LED television sets that offer 3D.

Every once in a while, the technology industry stumbles upon a technology that instantly becomes the best of the best, and truly indispensable for a variety of uses. LED technology is one of those discoveries, and LED televisions are poised to continue their takeover of the world market on account of their superior picture quality, unparalleled thin form factor, and energy-friendly consumption rates.