What is a QLED TV? The

Choose

a new tv

means encountering an onslaught of the latest tech terms - and one term you may have seen more frequently these days is QLED. This upgrade to traditional LED designs could be a potential replacement for your old TV, but we think you should know the details first. Here is the rundown.

What is QLED?

QLED is a proprietary display panel technology, short for "quantum dot LED". Quantum dot technology

was originally announced by Sony

via a partnership with QD Vision, but Samsung quickly brought its own version to market and currently owns the QLED brand, working with various specialist manufacturers to assemble the panels. The first consumer QLED displays started appearing several years ago Now, the technology is relatively mainstream and affordable - if you take a look at the best TVs available today, most of them are probably QLED.

Samsung

What does QLED actually do? It solves a problem that traditional LED TVs have struggled with for years. For a TV's color filter to produce the most vivid and accurate colors, it must start with a white light source. very pure full-spectrum. But how do you improve color accuracy when even the best white LED backlights produce light that isn't perfectly white?

QLED solves this problem by adding a layer of quantum dots to the LED backlight of a TV (thus the Q in QLED). These quantum dots are tiny phosphorescent crystals that possess an almost magical quality: when exposed to light, they emit their own light with a very high level of efficiency. The light they emit can be tuned to specific portions of the color spectrum.

Thus, QLED TVs replace white LEDs with blue LEDs, then superimpose quantum dots tuned in red and green. Quantum dots absorb blue light from LEDs and convert it into red and green light. When blue light from LEDs combines with the red and green light emitted by quantum dots, you get a very pure full spectrum white light. This gives the color filter the starting point it needs, and due to the efficiency of quantum dots , almost no brightness is lost in the process.

This gives an LED TV the ability to display more colors with greater accuracy and (if the LED backlight is powerful enough) incredible brightness. This benefits standard dynamic range (SDR) hardware, but it's particularly useful when displaying high dynamic range (HDR) video, which relies on high brightness and contrast.

So it's only available on Samsung TVs?

No. Samsung helped popularize quantum dot technology and established the QLED brand, but most TV makers these days have quantum dot-based TV models.Samsung

created the QLED Alliance

partnered with Hisense and TCL to promote the term QLED to TV buyers, but so far these three companies remain the only ones to use it in their marketing.

Other companies use their own terminology. Vizio adds the word quantum to models that use quantum dots, for example

Vizio P-Series Quantum

, while Sony and LG tend to avoid the term altogether despite using quantum dots in some of their LED TVs.

Is QLED better than OLED?

They're very different display technologies, so comparisons between the two are a little tricky. For a deeper dive, we suggest you take a look at

our article on QLED versus OLED

.

For a quick overview, here's how it works:

OLED stands for Organic Light Emitting Diode

.This type of display panel completely replaces older LED designs with a thin panel of pixels that can produce their own light and target colors as needed without depending on the backlight used by LED panels.

OLED panels are slim and deliver incredibly vivid colors, exceptional contrast levels with the deepest blacks, and no light bleed issues. If you're primarily interested in contrast, this is probably your best bet for a TV .However, OLED also has disadvantages compared to QLED.Although prices have come down, it is still an expensive technology compared to alternatives.OLED can also have image retention/burn-in issues depending on TV usage and has innate limitations when it comes to brightness levels.

Does QLED work with 4K?

QLED advances the operation of LED backlighting and color filtering, while 4K (UHD) is determined by the number of pixels on the panel. As such, QLED technology can be used on 4K, 8K or any other resolution that arises.

How much do QLED TVs cost?

QLED TVs come in a wide range of prices. They are currently more expensive than traditional LED TVs and a bit more affordable than OLED TVs. If you take a look at

our list of the best QLED models

, you'll see they can range from around $5,000 for a high-end 8K version to around $1,300 for a budget 4K model.

Is QLED good for gaming?

Because QLED improves colors and brightness, it can make all genres of games more enjoyable, even if you settle for a lower resolution. No one thinks game modes are inherently better on QLED TVs.

If you're thinking about QLED versus OLED for a gaming TV, that's a tougher question. Super refresh rate, which is ideal for fast-action titles. However, gaming TVs are more likely to stay on the same screen for long periods of time, which can exacerbate the risk of OLED burn-in. don't have the same problem.

What is Neo QLED?

This is a newer and more advanced form of QLED that Samsung offers. It replaces the traditional LED array with a mini-LED backlight system. We

discuss mini LEDs in more depth here

, but it's essentially a panel of extra-small LEDs that can deliver incredibly precise areas of illumination for enhanced image quality.

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