Following up on the eco-friendliness after going carbon neutral, one of the greenest tech companies around has announced that beginning in December, it will start offering LED-lit displays on their laptops instead of the mercury based cold cathode fluorescent backlighting.

The LED backlighting apart from saving power (estimated to cumulate upto 220 million kilowatt-hours by 2010), will also offer a better lighting and contrast, even when light is falling on the screen. These new screens perform much better in daylight conditions than the traditional screens.

The first to undergo the conversion will be the Dell Latitude E-Series, and the Dell precsion M-series. These lines will start shipping the LED versions of laptops from December this year, Dell hopes to convert all of it’s laptops to the LED screens. These new laptops will use only 43 percent of the power being used in the current screens, and being free of environmental toxins, are totally recyclable. The LED screen also considerably extends the life of the battery, with nearly twice the amount of batter runtime as with typical displays. This  is not a compromise in technology, as most green solutions tend to be, instead, it is a leap forward.

Dell’s other green efforts include the retailing the environmentally friendly PC – Energy Star 4.0, participating in the green grid (along with IBM, Microsoft, Sun, HP and Intel) to standardize benchmarking of processor performance per watt, a paymebt system that makes every laptop purchase carbon neutral by donating money to environmental organizations, and a free recycling program for all Dell machines. Dell also introduced the term ‘Re-Generation’ at the 2007 world environment day, like the ‘generation x’ for re-users, reducers and re-cyclers.

If other major manufacturers start following suit, then the world will see a revolutionary change in the usage of computers, leading to a cleaner, greener and healthier world. Kudos Dell… Keep up the great work.