Now that those large big backed CRT TVs are gone we can just focus on what’s more important. Flat screens!! More importantly, LEDs!! And what the hell is VRR and what does it do?
For those that just clicked the link but was hoping that I would help you find the TV of your dreams through this article, I have posted TVs you might be interested in throughout the article. But I also installed an Amazon.com TV shopping section to make it easier for you to take a look at the Black Friday TV sales. Happy Black Friday!!
The first flat screens had plasma or CCFL-backlit LCD panels. Oh wait, My parents still have a Plasma TV. Must be almost 10 years old now. Still works great. Today we now have pixels. OLED, QLED, and LED, and most commercially available televisions have one of these types of screens. Let’s take a look at these and there competing TV technologies and outline their advantages and disadvantages.
OLED
OLED TVs are capable of deep blacks, high levels of contrast, and realistic colors. Because of that TVs are thinner and have narrower bezels than those that use other screen technologies.
Since each individual pixel can be switched off as needed, black levels are excellent, and backlight blooming is a non-issue. You also get better viewing angles on OLED TVs. One big drawback is that these TVs can’t get quite as bright as a QLED or LED TV, and HDR content naturally doesn’t achieve the peak brightness it’s capable of on other types of TVs. This is usually a small issue though since OLED televisions more than make up for their lower brightness with better picture quality on the whole.
Only one company currently makes OLED TV panels: LG Display. It sells those panels to its sister company, LG Electronics, which uses them to build some of the very best TVs you can buy. But LG Display also sells OLED panels to companies like Sony, Philips, and Panasonic, which is why you’ll see OLED TVs from these companies too. Even though the panels themselves are essentially identical, the image processing that Sony, LG, and others do is proprietary, so you’ll still see significant differences in picture quality from one OLED TV to another.
Also, all of this comes at a price; OLED TVs are among the most expensive in the market today. Premium series, such as the Sony A9G and LG C9 will set you back by huge amounts. Even the most affordable OLED televisions cost just under $2000. This also has to do with the fact that it only makes business sense to manufacture OLED TVs at screen sizes of 55 inches and above. You should consider an OLED TV if you have a high budget and want the best possible picture quality.
QLED
QLED is closer to LED when it comes to the actual technology and hardware involved. The technology was introduced by Sony in 2013, but shortly after that, Samsung began selling its QLED TVs and established a licensing partnership with other manufacturers, which is why you’ll now find QLED TVs from Sony, Vizio, Hisense, and TCL.
The higher cost of manufacturing QLED panels means that they aren’t usually used in smaller TVs, with 43 inches being the starting point for this type of screen. Most modern QLED TVs are made by Samsung, but a few other manufacturers such as OnePlus, TCL, and Vu also market QLED TVs in India; these usually have panels sourced from Samsung.
Curiously, it’s this use of QLED as a marketing term that started a war between LG and Samsung in 2019. In a complaint to South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission (FTC), LG claimed that Samsung’s so-called QLED TVs aren’t real QLED TVs at all. That’s because according to LG, a true QLED TV would use quantum dot LEDs that emit their own light, and not the quantum-dot-film-over-an-LED-backlight that Samsung uses.
In a retaliatory move, Samsung told the FTC it was unhappy with all of the ads LG had been running, which attacked Samsung’s QLED TVs.
The FTC ultimately took Samsung’s side, but with a stipulation: It must make it clear in future advertisements that its QLED TVs use a backlight. Details, details.
The LCD panel — essentially millions of tiny shutters that open and close too quickly to see — in conjunction with color filters, creates the picture you see by letting just the right amount of light and color escape and reach your eyes. 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. We’ll discuss this more below.
LED
If you’re looking for an affordable flat-screen television for your home today, there’s a good chance that your entire shortlist is filled with LED options. More accurately referred to as LED-backlit LCD technology, these televisions typically use TFT-LCD panels with LED backlighting, offering better brightness and colors than early CCFL-backlit panels. The need for a backlight that’s always on means that blacks are never truly black.
Within the LED technology set, there are two major types – IPS (In Plane Switching) and VA (Vertical Alignment). Each type has its own advantages and drawbacks; IPS offers better viewing angles, while VA has better contrast levels and works better in dark rooms. A few years ago, curved LED TVs were popular as well, but this isn’t something we see too often anymore.
Some televisions do offer local dimming, which means that portions of the screen can be made darker to enhance blacks. However, most LED TVs have a single backlight powering the entire LCD panel and therefore aren’t capable of rendering the deep blacks you can see on OLED TVs.
Since this type of TV screen uses technology that has been around for a while now, it’s the most affordable to manufacture and is economical at all sizes and resolutions. You can easily get an LED TV sized at anywhere between 24 inches and 85 inches, and even beyond that. You can also usually get higher peak brightness on a good LED TV.
Mini-LED and microLED
In late 2019, TCL started selling the 8-Series — the very first QLED TVs powered by a mini-LED backlighting system. Mini-LEDs are tiny when compared to regular LEDs. This means that a QLED TV that could normally only accommodate hundreds of LEDs, can now accommodate tens of thousands of mini-LEDs. The result? Way more control over backlighting, leading to black levels that come far closer to OLED than any non-OLED display has ever achieved.
Mini-LED is still in its infancy, but if TCL and other companies continue to improve it (which they no doubt will) the technology could greatly improve QLED picture quality with pricing that should be considerably less than OLED.
And let’s not forget about micro-LED. Conceptually similar to mini-LED tech, micro-LEDs are even smaller than their mini brethren. Samsung made big waves at CES this year with the announcement of The Wall, a nearly bezel-free micro-LED display available in multiple (gargantuan) sizes. While most of us may be hard-pressed to fit a 150-inch TV in our living rooms, it never hurts to try.
Gamer info
Response time refers to the time it takes for a pixel to switch from one state to another. The faster the response time, the crisper the image, especially during fast-action scenes. Though there is likely a speed of response time beyond which the human eye is incapable of telling a difference, we know from standardized measurements that OLED TVs are way faster — orders of magnitude faster than QLED TVs.
Typical QLED response times vary between 2 and 8 milliseconds, which sounds pretty good until you realize that OLED’s response time is about 0.1 millisecond. Yup, it’s no contest.
Input lag, on the other hand, refers to the delay between taking an action (like pressing a button on a game controller) and seeing the result of that action on-screen. As such, input lag is really only a concern for gamers — it doesn’t have a noticeable effect on passive viewing of content at all.
Moreover, the amount of input lag you experience has little to do with one display technology over another, but more to do with how much image processing is happening on your TV behind the scenes. Both QLED and OLED TVs can achieve very low levels of input lag if you turn off all extra video processing or simply use the TV’s Game Mode, which effectively does the same thing.
Refresh rate is another category that will inherently matter more to gamers than casual viewers. The refresh rate is the number of times per second the TV updates what it’s showing on-screen. It’s closely related to frame rate, which is the number of times per second your TV show, movie, or video game sends a new update to the TV.
As long as these two rates are close multiples of each other e.g. a frame rate of 30 FPS and a refresh rate of double that (60 Hz), you’ll never notice a problem. And since regular TV content like movies and TV shows are always delivered at consistent frame rates, this is hardly ever a concern.
But some games running on consoles or PCs will change their frame rate from one scene to another. To keep everything looking as it should, TVs need a feature called VRR or Variable Refresh Rate. This lets your TV alter its native refresh rate to match these changes in frame rate. If your TV doesn’t support VRR, it can cause some unwanted side-effects like screen-tearing when used with the kinds of games that require VRR.
You can find VRR models in both OLED and QLED TVs, and 2020 will see many more come to market. But for now, only LG’s OLED TVs offer G-Sync support — a proprietary version of VRR created by Nvidia. If you’re a PC gamer who wants a big-screen gaming experience, this is a strong reason to look at LG’s latest OLED TVs.
