QLED TVs are some of the brightest and most colorful sets on the market, but what companies make them, and what does that Q even mean? Let’s find out.
If you haven’t bought a new TV in a long time, there’s a world of TV tech acronyms to learn about. Some of these terms and phrases — like HD, 4K, and LED — you may already be familiar with, but TV tech has evolved quite a bit over the last several years, leaving us with new monikers like OLED, QD-OLED, and the focus of today’s explainer, QLED.
What is a QLED TV exactly? Well, it can be a lot of things, as each TV manufacturer brings a bit of brand-specific ingenuity to the table. The short answer, though, is that a QLED is an LED-LCD TV with a layer of quantum dots built in. When activated by LED lighting, quantum dots can be used to enhance your QLED’s peak brightness levels and colors. And that’s really just scratching the surface.
For the rest of this guide, we’ll be exploring the ins and outs of QLED tech while also discussing some of the best QLED TVs you can buy today.What is QLED?
QLED is a proprietary display panel technology short for “quantum dot LED.” Quantum dot technology was originally announced by Sony via a partnership with QD Vision, but Samsung rapidly brought its own version to market and currently owns the QLED trademark, working with a variety of specialized manufacturers to put the panels together. The first consumer QLED displays began showing up several years ago. Now the technology is relatively common and affordable — if you take a look at the best TVs available today, most of them are probably QLED.
What does QLED actually do? It solves a problem that traditional LED TVs have wrestled with for years. In order for a TV’s color filter to produce the most vivid and accurate colors, it needs to start with a very pure, full-spectrum source of white light. But how do you improve color accuracy when even the best white LED backlights produce light that isn’t perfectly white?
QLED solves this problem by adding a layer of quantum dots to a TV’s LED backlight (thus the Q in QLED). These quantum dots are tiny phosphorescent crystals that possess an almost magical quality: When they’re exposed to light, they emit their own light with a very high level of efficiency. The light they emit can be tuned to specific portions of the color spectrum.
So QLED TVs swap out white LEDs for blue LEDs and then layer red- and green-tuned quantum dots on top. The quantum dots absorb the blue light from the LEDs and convert it into red and green light.
