More affordable mini-LED just can’t match the depth of OLED’s images, despite all the other things to love.
There’s always a gap between ‘in theory’ and ‘in practice’ – everyone understands this. So it’s not damning the technology to point out there’s a gap between the theoretical advantages of mini-LED technology and the way it performs in practice – or, to be specific, there’s a gap between what the Samsung QN85B I’ve been testing promises, and what it delivers.
I wrote a whole guide on what mini-LED is, but for the ‘TL;DR’ among us, let’s have a little overview. Mini-LED uses much smaller LEDs than is usual for the backlighting behind an LCD TV screen. Because they’re much smaller, there can be many more of them and, consequently, many more individual dimming ‘zones’ that can be switched on or off as the on-screen content requires. So, in theory, the overall brightness of the panel can be improved, and the areas where it needs to dim can be more precise.
And in practice, the QN85B makes good on the theory in some ways.
