In this study, It was studied about the luminance characteristics of 17 inch direct-type back light using EEFL(external electrode fluorescent lamp) and CCFL(cold cathode fluorescent lamp). The EEFL has a long life time because the electrode is installed outside of lamp. And it is produced in lower price than conventional CCFL. Moreover, it does not need process of installing internal electrode. However, the EEFL technology has several problems such as difficulty of designing driving inverter and preventing this phenomenon along the skin of lamps. We suggested two types of backlight unit for LCD TV application using the EEFL and the CCFL. We found optimized optical design parameters. We set the optical variation parameters such as lamp height, lamp distance, total thickness, and angles of inner walls. We achieved 7580 nits of center luminance, 82% of luminance uniformity by using 20 lamps of the EEFL and 7297 nits of center luminance, 78% of luminance uniformity by using 16 lamps of the CCFL.