

Somewhat surprisingly, the “Light Emitting-Diode” part of that name has nothing to do with an LED backlight. OLED stands for Organic Light-Emitting Diode. Samsung’s 2023 QN900C 8K Neo QLED Douglas Murray/Digital Trends What is an OLED TV? It’s a clever system, but it relies on a combination of dimming the LED backlights and using the shutters to block the remaining light to produce accurate on-screen blacks - and it doesn’t always succeed. The LCD panel - essentially millions of tiny shutters that open and close too quickly to see - in conjunction with the color filters, create the picture you see by letting just the right amount of light and color escape and reach your eyes. It’s these LEDs that give LED TV (and QLED TV) its name.

The backlight shines through the LCD panel, which in turn shapes that light into the images that you see on the screen. Even Amazon has gotten into the QLED game with its latest Omni Fire TVs, and so has Roku, with its new line of Roku-made TVs.Īs cool as quantum dots are, a QLED TV still produces light the same way as a regular LED TV: by using a backlight made up of hundreds (or in some cases thousands) of LEDs, with that backlight layer sitting behind an LCD panel layer. Shortly after that, Samsung began selling its own QLED TVs and established a licensing partnership with other manufacturers, which is why you’ll also find QLED TVs from Vizio, Hisense, TCL, and many small brands too. The technology was originally introduced by Sony in 2013. That perfect white light is exactly what the TV’s color filter needs to generate an accurate palette of billions of colors you see on a TV screen. These quantum dots can be added with such precision that the red-green-blue combo creates a near-perfect, full-spectrum white light, without sacrificing a single nit of brightness. In a QLED TV, the backlight source is made from a layer of blue LEDs, onto which a layer of red and green quantum dots are added. When a TV’s color filter receives less than full-spectrum white light, it can’t do its job (showing you the colors you’re meant to see) with accuracy. But so-called “white” LEDs in reality tend to veer into the blue, red, or green parts of the spectrum.
Samsung smart tv panel price full#
Our quantum dot explainer has the full story on how these nanoparticles work, but here’s a condensed version: a normal LED TV uses white LEDs as its light source. In non-geek speak, that means a QLED TV is just like a regular LED TV, except it uses tiny nanoparticles called quantum dots to supercharge its color. QLED stands for Quantum Light-Emitting Diode.

Once you’ve settled on which TV tech is right for you, check out some of the best QLED TV deals and the best OLED sales available now.

Spoiler: it’s OLED TV - but with a few caveats you need to be aware of. We’ll also share which one we think most people will be happiest with. In this in-depth explainer, we’ll discuss QLED versus OLED, where these competing display technologies come from, how they’re different from each other, and what each one does well (and not so well).
