Is it a painting or a television? It’s a hard one to answer sometimes, isn’t it? No longer is the box in the corner encroaching on half the room. Now the clever people at the big electronics manufacturers are finding more and more ways to hide the things we love the most. Samsung are the latest to show off something new and exciting in the world of HDTVs, as they launch their brand new edge-lit LED LCD flat screen panels.

Where Samsung stand out is with their edge-lit technology. In normal flat screen TVs there’s a direct-lit LED LCD display. But the brains at the Samsung HQ have found a way of making the screen much thinner and lighter, which allows them to be hung on the wall just like a painting. The other big bonus is that the LED backlit displays in the new Samsung screens are mercury-free, which means they consume much less energy, roughly 40% less, and therefore are much better for our electricity bills and, more importantly, better for the planet.

Slice a regular LCD panel into four and you will see the thickness of the new Samsung screen. It measures in at a minuscule 10.8mms. The technology behind the edge-lit method for lighting is quite different from that of the direct-lit found on most LCD screen. This method bends light away from the centre of the screen and then reflects it forward through a light-guide plate. This makes the light perfectly focused and consequently provides a perfect picture quality too.