If you are looking for a television or if you go directly to a store, you will have access to a multitude of televisions. To differentiate their offerings, one of the things many TV makers put on their products is the technology behind them.
It is therefore common to discover technologies such as LED, OLED and QLED. But what do these things even mean? And what are their differences from each other? Let’s see it in detail in this article.
LED TVs
An LED television works on the same principle as the first LCD televisions.
Basically, it’s a flat panel with multiple layers that control light and color . The lowest layer is usually the backlight unit, which illuminates the screen so we can see the image.
Instead of using fluorescent lamps or other types of lights, LED TVs use LEDs, hence the term.
For the TV to produce the picture, there is a liquid crystal layer in front of the white backlight. It relies on an electric current to change the angle of light passing through it.
As the angle of the light changes, it interacts with the topmost polarizing layer, reducing the light reaching the front of the screen to almost zero. A color layer between the liquid crystal layer and the uppermost polarizing layer allows the TV to provide color images.
When the liquid crystal layer adjusts the amount of light that hits each color sub-pixel, it allows the TV to deliver accurate colors. There are several other differences between LCD and LED TVs, but that’s generally how both devices work.
QLED TVs
QLED TV starts with the same principle as an LED TV – a backlight, a liquid crystal layer, the color layer and the display screen .
However, QLED TVs do not use white LED backlights. This is because white LED backlights usually don’t have perfect whites. If we look at LED strip lights, we will notice that they usually have a color tint.
To solve this problem, Samsung, one of the largest TV manufacturers to use QLED technology, used a blue backlight and then placed a layer of quantum dots between the backlight and the LCD layer. The quantum dot layer received some of the blue light emitted from the LED backlight and then converted it to red and green. The quantum dot layer converts red and green colors, as well as the original blue backlight, and then combines to create a perfect white backlight.
This process has allowed QLED TV to provide the most accurate white backlight, allowing the TV to produce more vivid and accurate colors compared to regular LED TVs.
It’s so accurate that Samsung even claims its TVs can recreate a billion colors, basically every possible color the human eye can see.
OLED TVs
In principle, OLED TVs are the same as LED TVs: they use colored pixels to show us an image on the screen . But instead of requiring a backlight for us to see the image, the color pixels themselves light up .
The removal of LED backlighting makes OLED TVs thinner and much more energy efficient than LED and QLED TVs. This is because OLED TVs only power the pixels that need to display an image.
If the area where a pixel is located is colored black, no power is flowing through that pixel. If we compare this to an LED or QLED TV, electricity is constantly needed to power the full backlight layer, and if any section of the screen is black, the liquid crystal layer will simply block the light coming from the backlight layer. backlight.
This is also the reason why OLED TVs have infinite contrast ratios. Because when an area of the screen is black, no light is emitted in that part.
However, despite the high color accuracy and infinite contrast of OLED TVs, it still has several significant drawbacks.
First, it’s not as bright as LED and QLED screens, making it ideal for use only in dark or light-controlled environments. OLED TVs are also more prone to image burn-in (when an OLED screen retains a static image even though it’s not there). This issue is especially prevalent for those who watch a specific show or channel all the time, such as the icon for a 24/7 cable news channel.
Although many manufacturers have recently made technological advancements to prevent this, most still do not offer any warranty against image retention.
LED, QLED or OLED: which is better?
While many say QLED or OLED is the best display technology, there really is no single answer to this question . This is because each TV technology has its own pros and cons.
With a limited budget, it is best to stick with LED TVs. That’s because they’re generally the most affordable models available, although they don’t offer state-of-the-art image quality. Nevertheless, the viewing pleasure that LED TVs give us is more than enough.
QLED TVs, on the other hand, allow us to get the best of both worlds. They are slightly cheaper than OLED TVs while offering better color accuracy than LED TVs. They are also usually the brightest of the bunch.
So, if we have planned to place our TV in a living room with open windows all around, it is better to opt for a QLED TV. Although dimmer than QLED and LED TVs, OLED TVs still set the standard for color and picture quality.
The ability to turn off individual pixels means we get precise, rich blacks and avoids the light leak issue on LED and QLED TVs. And since we don’t need an active backlight that requires power all the time, OLED TVs are the thinnest, most energy-efficient screens we can buy on the market.
To conclude…
Now that you know the differences between the three TV technologies, you can choose the one that will best suit your needs.
First and foremost, we need to determine what is more important to us: affordability, brightness or color accuracy? In the event that we have an unlimited budget, the simplest thing in this case is to opt for the best of QLED and OLED technologies with a QD-OLED television.
