I'm hoping someone knows because I've never found a definitive answer. I've heard a white CCFL and I've heard while LED's but never found out for sure if there are variants of both or just one of the two, and I don't want to risk killing mine taking it apart to find out.
Almost all TFTs and large LCDs use white ccfls as backlights. Smaller screens like e.g. cellphones commonly use white LEDs. Other small ones may also use EL sheets.
I'd venture to guess that it's substantially less than that, given the need for low-power components in a huge array of devices. That said, I think that EL and LED backlights are much more used than you give them credit for.
TFT LCD's from laptops are mostly (99.99%) lit by CCFL's. Smaller monochrome LCD's are mostly lit by edge LED arrays although Crystalfontz delivers their graphical 240x128 and 320x240 units with CCFL backlights. LED array backlighting (as opposed to LED edge backlighting) isn't used that much anymore given the number of used LEDs (I just helped a guy on OCAU forum with a 40x4 LCD with a 120 LED array backlight!!!). The biggest advantage of LED backlight is his extended life span (about 100000 hours) as opposed to CCFL (about 15000 hours) and EL (about 5000-10000 hours). CD Edit for spelling....
No mention on what particular LCD he was talking about, all options viable until (yet again) further details are enlightened upon us.
Are your CCFL numbers right? Thats just over 3 years of use at 12 hours a day, seems a bit off to me, but if its right, makes me wonder about my SGI 1600sw, maybe ill have to put a new ccfl in it soon
I found the 15000 hours CCFL lifetime in a technical document at Powertip's website (a monochrome LCD manufacturer). Further searches gave me 20 to 50000 hours for standard color TFT's for computer displays. Note, this is the lifespan when luminosity has decreased to 50%. CD
