QD-OLED technology delivers the kind of TV picture quality we’ve been dreaming about for years. Here’s everything you need to know about QD-OLEDs.
What do you get when you cross a QLED TV with an OLED TV? No, this isn’t just the setup to some silly punchline, but an actual TV tech amalgamation that’s called QD-OLED. This acronym decoded stands for “Quantum Dot Light Emitting Diodes,” and it’s the reason QD-OLED TVs have been some of the best TVs money can buy over the last few years.
It’s the kind of picture quality you genuinely have to see to believe. Thanks to the layer of quantum dots built into the self-emissive OLED screen, a QD-OLED is able to deliver a wide color gamut and intense brightness levels, especially when watching HDR movies and shows. But because a QD-OLED doesn’t actually contain any backlighting (like you’d find on a traditional QLED TV), the millions of self-emissive pixels allow the QD-OLED to achieve the kind of inky black levels you’d expect to see on any OLED TV.
QD-OLED TVs and monitors are still relatively new, though TV brands like Samsung and Sony are already a few years in on this fantastic picture technology. That being said, we thought we’d put together this explainer to walk you through the ins and outs of QD-OLED tech.What is QD-OLED?
Simply put, QD-OLED is a hybrid display technology that takes the already very impressive qualities of OLED TV and improves its brightness and color through the use of quantum dots.
The result is a TV that exhibits the stunning levels of contrast and perfect blacks of OLED while delivering brightness levels that exceed anything we’ve seen from OLED so far.
This “best of both worlds,” benefit was largely theoretical until we got a chance to see it for ourselves at CES 2022. Those impressions survived even once we brought the first two QD-OLED TVs in for testing: first with the Sony A95K, and then again with the Samsung S95B. Both TVs earned a rare 10/10 rating from our TV guru, Caleb Denison.
Fast forward to 2024: After the success of the Samsung S95B QD-OLED, the company would go on to release the 2023 S95C and this year’s model, the Samsung S95D. Sony has also released a Gen 2 version of its QD-OLED tech, billed as the Sony Bravia Series XR A95L. We’ve actually been able to test both of these QD-OLED TVs, and we were completely blown away by what each brand chose to bring to the table for 2024.
Picture improvements aside, it’s also possible that over time, QD-OLED TVs may prove less expensive to buy than similarly sized OLED TVs. We’ll discuss this in more detail later. Since QD-OLED TVs are essentially an evolution of OLED, it’s expected that some of the clever things we’ve seen LG do with its OLED panels, like transparent displays and rollable displays, could be possible with QD-OLED models, too.How does QD-OLED work?
To understand the inner workings of QD-OLED, we need to quickly explain the differences between QLED and OLED.QLED TV
QLED TV uses four main elements to produce its pictures: An LED backlight, a layer of quantum dots, an LCD matrix, and a color filter.
The LED backlight produces all of the brightness you see — and modern LED backlights can produce a lot of brightness, far more than OLED light sources. But achieving that brightness while maintaining a full-spectrum white, is difficult.
The solution: Start with a really bright blue LED light source, then use red and green quantum dots to balance the blue into a full spectrum of white. Because quantum dots can be tuned to emit specific colors and, amazingly, can do this at a nearly 100% efficiency level, QLED TVs get a much-needed improvement to their color accuracy without sacrificing any brightness or needing to use more energy.
From there, the purified white light passes through the LCD matrix (which is responsible for the images you see, and how bright or dark areas of the screen are) and, finally, through the color filter, which converts the white light into the right amounts of red, green, and blue so that we see true color images.
It’s a good system that produces bright and very colorful images. It’s also quite affordable to produce because, except for the quantum dots, all of the components have been around for decades, and are now “cheap” to make.
But it has drawbacks, too. No matter how hard the LCD matrix tries, it can’t block 100% of the light from coming through in dark scenes, so you never get that perfect, inky black that you see on an OLED TV. The LCD matrix also creates problems for off-angle viewing because it tends to “tunnel” light straight outward from the screen.
QLED also has to use more energy to create the brightness you see because the combination of the LCD matrix and the color filter diminishes the light the LED backlight generates. This makes QLED TVs less energy efficient than OLED TVs.
Finally, and this may only matter to decor-oriented TV buyers, all of those elements add up to a thicker overall TV panel.OLED TV
OLED TV uses an OLED light source and a color filter to produce its image.
That sounds remarkably simple compared to QLED TV, and it is. Thanks to the emissive nature of the basic element of OLED TV — the OLED pixel — this one ingredient can take care of brightness and image creation, essentially fulfilling the roles of both the LED backlight and the LCD matrix in QLED TV.
Without an LCD matrix, viewing angles with OLED TVs are as near-perfect as we’ve ever seen. You can sit wherever you like and still see the same levels of brightness, contrast, and color.
And as we’ve already hinted, because OLED pixels can be shut off completely when an image calls for perfect blackness, that’s exactly what you get: No light being emitted at all.
But OLED TV isn’t perfect either.
