If LED, QLED, OLED, and mini-LED don’t already confuse you, there are now two different types of MicroLED TVs. Here’s what you need to know about the latest television display technology.
TV terminology has gotten a bit more confusing. Recently, most high-end TVs could be distinguished as OLED or QLED models. Then, mini-LED backlights entered the mix, and most TVs with that technology also use QLED. Now, MicroLED has become a common term, and it’s being used in two entirely different ways, so we’re here to demystify the moniker and help you understand how it fits in with similar-sounding TV technologies. Back to Basics: Understanding LED vs. Mini-LED vs. QLED
To explain MicroLED, we must first take a step back and understand the basics of light-emitting diode (LED) technology.
An LED is basically a very tiny light bulb (most modern light bulbs comprise bundles of LEDs). LEDs are used in most TVs as the backlight for the liquid crystal display (LCD) that produces the picture. The LCD controls the colors of the individual pixels of the screen but doesn’t generate any light, and LEDs behind the panel make the pixels glow. The LEDs are much bigger than the pixels, so each one lights up many pixels at a time. This can cause light bloom, where light bleeds over edges and makes some pixels look lighter than they should, producing a glow or halo effect.
Good LED TVs have many zones and can control the brightness of each zone to improve contrast. TVs that use a large number of tiny LEDs to form hundreds or thousands of individually adjustable zones are called mini-LED TVs. They’re still LED TVs, just with smaller LEDs and in greater numbers.
The LEDs that light up these TVs are almost always one color. White is the standard color for cheaper LED TVs, though higher-end QLED TVs use blue. QLED is short for QD-LED, or quantum dot LED. Quantum dots are tiny particles in the LCD layer of high-end TVs that react to and change blue light into a much wider range of color than typical LCDs can show with white light alone. Most mini-LED TVs are also QLED TVs. OLED: Tiny Glowing Cells
If you want to get the lighting perfect on a pixel-by-pixel basis, you need to use a different type of display technology. OLED stands for organic light-emitting diode, and is mechanically and chemically wildly different from the LED and LCD combinations discussed above.
basically act like glowing LCD panels, where each pixel is a tiny cell that doesn’t just change color but also generates its own light. This technology is considered some of the best because it can show an incredible range of colors with perfect black levels on screens that are much thinner than LED-lit LCD panels can be due to their backlights. Some of our top TV picks, like the LG Evo G4 and the Panasonic Z95A, are OLED models.MicroLED: A Display Tech With an Identity Crisis
That brings us to MicroLED, which seems to be having an identity crisis of late.
