The names may look almost identical since only one letter is different, but OLED and QLED are two entirely different beasts. In our deep dive on QLED vs. OLED we pit the two head to head, dissecting the differences between these dueling TV technologies and help you determine which might be best for you.
There’s a new(ish) kind of TV in town, and it’s called QLED. Samsung coined and trademarked the term, announcing the first QLED TVs at CES 2017, but it isn’t keeping that acronym entirely for itself. Sources at Samsung tell Digital Trends they would like to see other companies adopt the QLED moniker for their quantum-dot infused LED TVs, too. To prove it, the South Korean electronics giant forged a partnership with Chinese manufacturers Hisense and TCL, announcing a QLED Alliance in late April 2017, and TCL now has a QLED line of TVs.
As you may have surmised, an alliance implies there is an enemy, and in this case, that would be OLED. Sounds like it’s time for a QLED vs. OLED TV battle!
OLED TVs have received high praise from tech journalists and reviewers across the board, including Digital Trends; LG’s C8 OLED won our praise as the best TV in 2018, for example. But until recently, LG was the only name in the OLED game, and premium price tags long put them out of reach of most consumers. Now that Sony is bringing competition to the market with its own amazing-looking OLED TVs and LG’s OLED lineup has expanded to include more affordable models, the heat is on QLED technology. Samsung seems poised to meet the challenge, though, updating the technology in subsequent QLED lines to try and close the gap.
For those reasons – not to mention the word QLED looks and sounds a lot like OLED — it’s important to compare the merits of these dueling display technologies. First, we’ll discuss what each technology is — and isn’t — before pitting them against each other in a point-by-point battle for supremacy.
Generally speaking, QLED TVs are just LED TVs that use quantum dots to enhance performance in key picture quality areas. Samsung, however, claims its QLED TVs are special, offering brightness levels that exceed any competing TV technology, better black levels than other LED TVs, and more colors than LED TVs without quantum dots can reproduce.
How? Quantum dots act almost like a filter that produces purer light than LEDs alone can provide. It’s complicated, but you can learn all the science behind QLED here.
To meet the Ultra HD Alliance’s standards for an Ultra HD Premium TV, most LED TVs must use quantum dots in some fashion. Since quantum dots are now deployed so widely across premium TVs, Samsung thinks it would reduce confusion if every manufacturer just started calling them QLED TVs. The goal is to differentiate them from mere LED TVs and push back against OLED, as Samsung has no plans to produce an OLED TV at this time. However, the company does have another OLED competitor in the works called MicroLED. This is a separate technology from QLED TVs, so it won’t factor in here, but based on what we saw at CES 2019, MicroLED has the potential to bring some serious competition to OLED, especially with regards to brightness and black levels.
QLED is not an emissive display technology, like plasma, OLED, or MicroLED. Quantum dots don’t directly emit the colors you see; they’re spread on a piece of film that acts almost like a filter within an LED TV panel. LED backlights beam through this film, the light is refined to an ideal color temperature, and from there, brightness and color are significantly enhanced.
But TV enthusiasts have been hoping for a different kind of QLED TV, one in which individual quantum dots can be turned on and off with electricity like an OLED — no need for a backlight system, and no LCD panel involved. If the quantum dots were producing light on their own, then we could call QLED an emissive display technology – at present, however, it is not.
OLED stands for organic light-emitting diode. Simply put, OLEDs are made with organic compounds that can light up individually when fed electricity — hence the term emissive display. A single OLED is the size of one pixel, so it takes millions of them lighting up and shutting off independently to fill your TV screen. Because of this flexibility, when an OLED TV’s pixels are shut off, they are completely off and appear completely black. While QLED TVs can be made very thin, OLED TVs can be made even thinner, and can even be flexible.
Now we’ll pit the two technologies against one another to see how they stack up in terms of contrast, viewing angle, brightness, and other performance considerations.
A display’s ability to produce deep, dark blacks is arguably the most important factor in achieving an excellent picture quality. Deeper blacks allow for higher contrast and richer colors (among other things) and, thus, a more realistic and dazzling image. When it comes to black levels, OLED reigns as the undisputed champion.
QLED TVs improve on LED display black level performance, but they still rely on backlights shining behind an LCD panel. Even with advanced dimming technology, which selectively dims LEDs that don’t need to be on at full blast, QLED TVs still suffer from an effect called “light bleed,” as the backlight spills through on what is supposed to be a black section of the screen.
