QNED? Neo-QLED? Mini-LED? Deciphering the latest TV tech acronyms

If you’re after a great new television, it’s easy to get confused by the latest serving of alphabet soup when it comes to screen technologies.

OLED has long been the gold standard in terms of picture quality, but there’s a growing range of rivals with confusingly similar names like Neo-QLED, QNED and ULED. What does it all mean?

Micro LED TVs, like Samsung’s Neo QLED, aim to offer both brightness and contrast.

All television screens are made up of millions of pixels, which constantly change colour. Most LCD screens have bright LED backlights shining through the pixels, so you can see the picture.

OLED screens, by comparison, don’t have backlights. Instead, every pixel is its own coloured light. Turn one off and it’s perfectly black, even if the pixel beside it is brightly lit.

Each screen technology has its strengths and weaknesses. LED-backlit televisions are generally brighter than OLEDs, sometimes with more vibrant colours. This can be important if you’re watching in a brightly lit room.

The trade-off is LED-backlit televisions can struggle to completely block the backlight, to produce really deep blacks and great contrast. This is where OLED excels, which is why it looks its best in a darkened room.

Over time, OLEDs have become brighter with more vivid colours, while LED-backlit televisions have become better at keeping the backlight in check.

Which brings us to the latest batch of acronyms, which are all marketing terms for a technology called Mini-LED.

Local dimming

On backlit televisions, the light is often broken into zones which can be controlled independently; known as “local dimming”.

Imagine a graveyard at midnight, with a bright full moon in the sky. A single-zone backlight is forced to strike a compromise between light and dark areas when setting the brightness. As a result, the white moon and black shadows all look a bit grey and washed out.

There’s also an unwanted halo around the moon and stars, as the bright backlight peeks out from behind the supposedly dark sky.

With local dimming, different zones can be lit appropriately, with a boost of light behind the moon and dim light elsewhere. Now the moon glows but the shadows remain dark with high contrast, so you can still see a sky full of stars and the vampires lurking in wait.

The more dimming zones, the better the picture, which is where Mini-LED comes in. Its backlight is made up of hundreds or even thousands of miniature LED lights.

Neo-QLED is Samsung’s take on Mini-LED, while LG dubs it QNED and Hisense calls it ULED Mini-LED. Meanwhile, TCL dubs some models Mini-LED and others — which have smaller lights — OD Zero Mini-LED. While they all aim to improve contrast, not all Mini-LED TVs are created equal; the number and size of zones varies widely.

Many Mini-LED televisions also add “quantum dot”, “nano-cell” and “triluminos” filters, to further improve the brightness and colour accuracy in an effort to outshine OLED.

Which television impresses you most will depend on what you want to watch, when you want to watch it and whether you have an eye for detail.

In a brightly lit room, Mini-LED combined with quantum dots looks stunning, matching OLED’s contrast and beating its brightness. But after dark, OLED still has the upper hand when chasing phenomenal contrast and the deepest of blacks.

Keep in mind that none of this affects sharpness, as the picture’s resolution is determined by the number of pixels on the screen. Mini-LED is available in 4K and 8K resolutions, even though there’s nothing yet to watch in 8K. Meanwhile, 4K OLEDs are common but 8K OLEDs are still quite rare and expensive.

There’s no one television to rule them all, so it pays to understand the difference when looking for the best big screen for your lounge room.

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