Ryan-Thomas Shaw / Android Authority
The display industry has come a long way in recent years. With so many competing standards on the market today, it’s often hard to tell if an emerging technology is worth paying extra for. OLED and QLED, for instance, sound similar enough on the surface but are, in fact, completely different display types.
All of this is great from a technological standpoint — progress and competition generally equal better value for the end-user. In the short term, however, it has certainly made shopping for a new display somewhat complicated.
To help with that decision, we’ve summarized all mainstream display types in this article, along with the pros and cons of each. Consider bookmarking this page and returning to it the next time you’re in the market for a new television, monitor, or smartphone.
LCDs, or liquid crystal displays, are the oldest of all display types on this list. They are made up of two primary components: a backlight and a liquid crystal layer.
Put simply, liquid crystals are tiny rod-shaped molecules that change their orientation in the presence of an electric current. In a display, we manipulate this property to allow or block light from passing through. This process is also aided by color filters to produce different subpixels. These are essentially shades of red, green, and blue primary colors that combine to form the desired color, as shown in the above image. At a reasonable viewing distance, individual pixels are (usually) invisible to our eyes.
Since liquid crystals don’t produce any light by themselves, LCDs rely on a white (or sometimes blue) backlight. The liquid crystal layer then simply has to let this light pass through, depending on the image that needs to be displayed.
LCDs are made up of two primary components: a backlight and a liquid crystal layer.
A lot about a display’s perceived image quality hinges on the backlight, including aspects such as brightness and color uniformity.
You may have noticed that the term LCD has started to disappear of late, especially in the television industry. Instead, many manufacturers now prefer branding their televisions as LED models instead of LCD. Don’t be fooled, though — this is just a marketing ploy.
These so-called LED displays still use a liquid crystal layer. The only difference is that the backlights used to illuminate the display now use LEDs instead of cathode fluorescent lamps, or CFLs. LEDs are a better light source than CFLs in almost every way. They are smaller, consume lesser power, and last longer. However, the displays are still fundamentally LCDs.
So-called 'LED displays' are just LCDs with an LED backlight.
With that out of the way, let’s take a look at the different types of LCDs on the market today and how they differ from each other.
Dhruv Bhutani / Android Authority
Twisted nematic, or TN, was the very first LCD technology. Developed in the late 20th century, it paved the way for the display industry to transition away from CRT.
TN displays have liquid crystals laid out in a twisted, helical structure. Their default “off” state allows light to pass through two polarizing filters. However, when a voltage is applied, they untwist themselves to block light from passing through.
TN panels have been around for decades in devices like handheld calculators and digital watches. In these applications, you only need to power sections of the display where you don’t want light. In other words, it is an incredibly energy-efficient technology. Twisted nematic panels are also cheap to manufacture.
TN was the dominant LCD technology for years because of its inexpensive and power-efficient nature.
The same system can also give you a color image if you use a combination of red, blue, and green subpixels.
The construction of a red LCD pixel.
However, TN displays have some major downsides, including narrow viewing angles and poor color accuracy. This is because most of them use sub-pixels that can only output 6 bits of brightness. That limits the color output to just 26 (or 64) shades of red, green, and blue. That’s a lot less than 8 and 10-bit displays, which can reproduce 256 and 1,024 shades of each primary color respectively.
In the early 2010s, many smartphone manufacturers used TN panels as a way to keep costs down. However, the industry has almost entirely moved away from it. The same holds true for televisions, where wide viewing angles are a critical selling point, if not a necessity.
Having said that, TN is still in use elsewhere. You are most likely to find it on low-end personal use devices like budget Chromebooks. And despite its faults, TN is also extremely popular among competitive gamers because it boasts low response times.
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IPS, or in-plane switching technology, offers a noticeable step-up in image quality compared to TN displays.
Instead of a twisted orientation, liquid crystals in an IPS display are oriented parallel to the panel. In this default state, light is blocked — the exact opposite of what happens in a TN display. Then, when a voltage is applied, the crystals simply rotate in the same plane and let light through. As a side note, this is why the technology is called in-plane switching.
Samsung Display
IPS displays were originally developed to deliver wider viewing angles than TN. However, they also offer a myriad of other benefits, including higher color accuracy and bit-depth. While most TN panels are limited to the sRGB color space, IPS can support more expansive gamuts. These parameters are important for playing back HDR content and are downright necessary for creative professionals.
IPS outperforms TN in terms of viewing angles and color accuracy.
Having said that, IPS displays do come with a few minor compromises. The technology isn’t nearly as energy-efficient as TN, nor is it as cheap to manufacture at scale. Still, if you care about color accuracy and viewing angles, IPS is likely your only option.
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In a VA panel, liquid crystals are oriented vertically instead of horizontally. In other words, they are perpendicular to the panel, and not parallel like in IPS.
This default vertical arrangement blocks a lot more of the backlight from coming through to the front of the display. Consequently, VA panels are known for producing deeper blacks and offering better contrast compared to other LCD display types. As for bit-depth and color gamut coverage, VA is capable of doing just as well as IPS.
Samsung Display
On the downside, the technology is still relatively immature. Early VA implementations suffered from extremely slow response times. This led to ghosting, or shadows behind fast-moving objects. The reason for this is simple — it takes longer for VA’s perpendicular arrangement of crystals to change orientation.
VA panels suffer from the slowest response times of any LCD technology, but deliver the best contrast ratio.
Having said that, some companies like LG are experimenting with technologies like pixel overdrive to improve response times.
However, VA displays also have narrower viewing angles than IPS panels. Still, most VAs come out on top when compared to even the best TN implementations.
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Calvin Wankhede / Android Authority
OLED stands for Organic Light Emitting Diode. The organic part here simply refers to carbon-based chemical compounds. These compounds are electroluminescent, which means that they emit light in response to an electric current.
From this description alone, it’s easy to see how OLED differs from LCD and prior display types. Since the compounds used in OLEDs emit their own light, they are an emissive technology. In other words, you don’t need a backlight for OLEDs. This is why OLEDs are universally thinner and lighter than LCD panels.
Since each organic molecule in an OLED panel is emissive, you can control whether a particular pixel is lit up or not. Take away the current and the pixel turns off. This simple principle allows OLEDs to achieve remarkable black levels, outperforming LCDs that are forced to use an always-on backlight. Besides delivering a high contrast ratio, turning off pixels also reduces power consumption.
Since each molecule in an OLED is emissive, you can control whether a particular pixel is lit up or not.
The contrast alone would make the technology worth it, but other benefits exist too. OLEDs boast high color accuracy and are extremely versatile. Foldable smartphones such as the Samsung Galaxy Flip series simply wouldn’t exist without AMOLED’s physical flexibility.
OLED’s Achilles heel is that it is prone to permanent image retention or screen burn-in. This is the phenomenon where a static image on the screen can become embossed, burned-in, or simply age differently over time. Having said that, manufacturers now employ several mitigation strategies to prevent burn-in.
Eric Zeman / Android Authority
Both AMOLED and POLED are common terms in the smartphone industry but don’t convey any particularly useful information.
The AM bit in AMOLED refers to the use of an active matrix circuit for supplying current, as opposed to the more primitive passive matrix (PM) approach. The P in POLED, meanwhile, indicates the use of a plastic substrate at the base. Plastic is thinner, lighter, and more flexible than glass. There’s also Super AMOLED, which is just fancy branding for a display that has an integrated touch screen digitizer.
Even though Samsung uses the Super AMOLED branding, many of its displays use a plastic substrate too. Smartphones with curved screens would not be possible without the flexibility of plastic. Similarly, almost every POLED display uses an active matrix. The distinction between AMOLED vs POLED has diminished greatly in recent times.
In summary, OLED subtypes aren’t nearly as varied as LCDs. Furthermore, only a handful of companies manufacture OLEDs so there’s even less quality variance than you’d expect. Samsung manufactures the majority of OLEDs in the smartphone industry. Meanwhile, LG Display has a near-monopoly on the large-sized OLED market. It supplies panels to Sony, Vizio, and other giants in the television industry.
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TCL
In the section on LCDs, we saw how the technology can vary based on differences in the liquid crystal layer. Mini-LED, however, attempts to improve contrast and image quality at the backlight level instead.
Mini-LED attempts to improve contrast and image quality at an LCD's backlight level.
The backlights in conventional LCDs have only two modes of operation — on and off. This means that the display has to rely on the liquid crystal layer to adequately block light in darker scenes. Failing to do that results in the display producing grays instead of true black.
Some displays, however, have adopted a better approach recently: they divide the backlight into zones of LEDs. These can then be individually controlled — either dimmed or turned off completely. Consequently, these displays deliver much deeper black levels and higher contrast. The difference is immediately apparent in darker scenes.
This technique, known as full array local dimming, has become ubiquitous in higher-end LCD televisions. Until recently, though, it wasn’t viable for smaller displays like those found in laptops or smartphones. And even in larger devices like monitors and TVs, you run the risk of not having enough dimming zones.
Enter mini-LED. Like the title suggests, these are significantly smaller than the LEDs you’d find in conventional backlights. More specifically, each mini-LED measures just 0.008 inches or 200 microns across.
Visio
Mini-LEDs allow display manufacturers to increase the number of local dimming zones from a few hundred to several thousand. As you’d expect, more zones equals granular control over the backlight. Their smaller footprint also makes them perfect for smaller devices like smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Finally, the abundance of LEDs also helps to boost the overall brightness of the display.
Tiny, bright objects against a black background look much better on a mini-LED display as compared to one with conventional LED backlighting. However, the contrast ratio still isn’t in the same ballpark as OLED.
Mini-LED allows displays to have thousands of dimming zones for improved contrast.
Despite the increased density, most mini-LED displays today simply don’t have enough dimming zones to match OLEDs in terms of contrast.
Take the 2021 iPad Pro, for example. It was among the first consumer devices to adopt mini-LED technology. Even with 2,500 zones across 12.9 inches, however, some users reported blooming or halos around bright objects.
Still, it’s not hard to see how mini-LEDs can eventually deliver better contrast than conventional local dimming implementations. Furthermore, since mini-LED displays still rely on traditional LCD technologies, they aren’t prone to burn-in like OLEDs.
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David Imel / Android Authority
Quantum dot technology has become increasingly common — usually positioned as a key selling point for many mid-range televisions. You may also know it by Samsung’s marketing shorthand: QLED. Similar to mini-LED, however, it isn’t some radically new panel technology. Instead, quantum dot displays are basically conventional LCDs with an additional layer sandwiched in between.
Traditional LCDs pass white light through multiple filters to get a specific color. This approach works well, but only to a certain point.
Many older display types are capable of fully covering the decades-old standard RGB (sRGB) color gamut. However, the same cannot be said for wider gamuts like DCI-P3. Coverage of the latter is important because that’s the color gamut predominantly used in HDR content.
So how do quantum dots help? Well, they are essentially tiny crystals that emit color when you shine blue or ultraviolet light on them. This is why quantum dot displays use a blue backlight instead of white.
A quantum dot display contains billions of these nanocrystals spread across a thin film. Then, when the backlight is turned on, these crystals are capable of producing extremely specific shades of green and red. The exact shade depends on the size of the crystal itself.
Using quantum dots as color filters
When combined with traditional LCD color filters, quantum dot displays can cover a greater percentage of the visible light spectrum. Put simply, you get richer and ore accurate colors — enough to deliver a satisfactory HDR experience. And since the crystals emit their own light, you also get a tangible bump in brightness compared to traditional LCDs.
Quantum dots help traditional LCDs achieve a wider color gamut and deliver a satisfactory HDR experience.
However, quantum dot technology does not improve other pain points of LCDs such as contrast and viewing angles. For that, you’d have to combine quantum dots with local dimming or mini-LED technologies. Samsung’s high-end Neo QLED TVs, for example, combine QLED with Mini-LED tech to match OLED’s deep blacks.
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Quantum-dot OLED, or QD-OLED, is an amalgamation of two existing technologies — quantum dots and OLED. More specifically, it aims to eliminate the drawbacks of both traditional OLEDs and LCD-based quantum dot displays.
In a traditional OLED panel, each pixel is composed of four white sub-pixels. The idea is rather simple: since white contains the entire color spectrum, you can use red, green, and blue color filters to obtain an image. However, this process is rather inefficient. As you’d expect, blocking large portions of the original light source leads to significant brightness loss by the time the image reaches your eyes.
Modern OLED implementations combat this by leaving the fourth sub-pixel white (without any color filters) to improve the perception of brightness. However, they still usually fall short in terms of brightness, especially against high-end LCDs with larger backlights.
QD-OLED aims to eliminate the drawbacks of both traditional OLEDs and LCD-based quantum dot displays.
QD-OLED, on the other hand, uses a completely different subpixel arrangement — these displays start with blue emitters instead of white. And instead of color filters, they use quantum dots. In the previous section on QLED, we discussed how quantum dots are capable of producing extremely specific shades of green and red. The same property comes into play here as well. Put simply, quantum dots convert the original blue light into various colors instead of destructively filtering it, preserving the display’s overall brightness.
According to Samsung Display, another advantage QD-OLED brings to the table comes in the form of better color accuracy. Since these displays don’t have a fourth white sub-pixel, color information is rendered correctly even at higher brightness levels. Finally, quantum dots allow displays to achieve higher color gamut coverage and offer wider viewing angles than color filters.
However, it’s still early days for the technology as a whole. Traditional OLEDs have enjoyed a nearly decade-long head start yet remain relatively unaffordable. It remains to be seen if QD-OLED televisions and monitors can compete in terms of price and durability, especially considering the risks of image retention or burn-in with organic compounds.
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Samsung
MicroLED is the newest display type on this list and, as you’d expect, also the most exciting. Put simply, microLED displays use LEDs that are even smaller than those used in mini-LED backlights. While most mini-LEDs are around 200 microns in size, microLEDs are as small as 50 microns. For context, human hair is thicker than that at 75 microns.
Their small size means that you can build an entire display out of microLEDs alone. The result is an emissive display — much like OLED, but without the drawbacks of that technology’s organic component. There’s no backlight either, so each pixel can be turned off completely to represent black. All in all, the technology delivers an exceptionally high contrast ratio and wide viewing angles.
Brightness is another aspect in which microLED displays manage to surpass existing technologies. Even the highest-end OLED displays on the market today, for instance, top out at 2,000 nits. On the other hand, manufacturers claim that microLED can eventually deliver a peak brightness output of 10,000 nits.
MicroLEDs one-up existing display types in almost every way, but consumer products are still years away.
Finally, MicroLED displays can also be modular. Even some of the earliest demonstrations of the technology had manufacturers creating giant video walls using a grid of smaller microLED panels.
Samsung offers its flagship The Wall microLED display (pictured above) in configurations ranging from 72 inches all the way to 300 inches and beyond. With a million-dollar price tag, though, it is clearly not a consumer product. Still, it offers a glimpse into the future of televisions and display technology in general.
It’s almost certain that microLED displays will become more accessible and cheaper in the coming years. After all, OLED is only a decade old at this point and has already become ubiquitous.
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And with that, you’re now up to speed on every display technology on the market today! Display types can vary significantly and the best type will depend on the characteristics you deem important or require the most. Having said that, you can’t go wrong with any of the cutting-edge technologies on the market today, namely OLED and Mini-LED.
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When it comes to premium TVs, there are two main display types to choose from: QLED and OLED (there’s also QD-OLED, but we’ll worry about that category later). The former is an acronym that stands for Quantum Dot Light Emitting Diode. In layman’s terms, these are bright LED-LCD TVs that are enhanced by quantum dots — chemicals that display ultra-rich colors when exposed to lighting.
OLED, the other guy, stands for Organic Light Emitting Diode. Instead of LEDs, each and every pixel on an OLED screen is self-emissive (the organic part). When lit, you get whatever brightness and color that individual cell is instructed to display. When the pixel isn’t lit, the cell is a pure, inky black.
When shopping for a new TV, QLED and OLED sets are going to make up the lion’s share of your choices. But is one of these TV technologies better than the other? Let’s find out!
The following video comparison from 2021 remains relevant today.
QLED vs. OLED | Samsung QN90A Neo QLED vs. LG C1 OLED
QLED stands for Quantum Light-Emitting Diode. 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.
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. But so-called “white” LEDs in reality tend to veer into the blue, red, or green parts of the spectrum.
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. 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. 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. 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.
The technology was originally introduced by Sony in 2013. 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. 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.
As 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. The backlight shines through the LCD panel, which in turn shapes that light into the images that you see on the screen. It’s these LEDs that give LED TV (and QLED TV) its name.
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 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.
As you read up on certain QLEDs, you might also see some of them touting mini-LED technology. It may sound like a competitor to QLED and OLED, but it’s actually just an improvement of the LED backlighting already used by QLED sets.
Mini-LEDs are tiny when compared to regular LEDs. This means that a QLED TV that could normally 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.
OLED stands for Organic Light-Emitting Diode. Somewhat surprisingly, the “Light Emitting-Diode” part of that name has nothing to do with an LED backlight. Instead, it refers to the fact that every single individual pixel in an OLED panel is a teeny-tiny LED light — but one that is incredibly thin and can produce both light and color in a single element. In other words, OLED TVs don’t need a backlight because each OLED pixel produces its own light. If you want to impress your friends, you can use the industry terms for these kinds of displays: emissive or self-emissive.
There are several advantages to this design, but most people would agree that when it comes to OLED TVs, the biggest advantage is the superb black level that can be achieved. Unlike a QLED or LED TV that must dim its backlight and block the remaining light for dark or pitch-black scenes, an OLED TV simply turns off the pixels that make up the dark parts of the screen. When the pixel is off, it emits no light and no color, making it as dark as when the TV itself is turned off.
Only one company makes traditional 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, Vizio, Philips, and Panasonic, which is why you’ll see OLED televisions 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 differences in picture quality from one OLED TV to another.
However, LG Display has recently been joined by Samsung, which now has its own version of OLED technology, the aforementioned QD-OLED. It’s not quite the same technology, and while it does use what Samsung calls “self-illuminating LEDs,” Samsung uses OLED technology a little differently, and we’ll get to that in a moment.
Now, let’s compare QLED to OLED in the categories that matter most when buying a TV: brightness, contrast, viewing angles, and other notable performance considerations. All of these are important factors when you’re shelling out big money for a new TV.
Contrast is the difference between the darkest part of an image and the brightest part. If a TV can deliver a truly black dark portion, it doesn’t have to make the bright parts quite as bright to achieve good levels of contrast. That’s why, when it comes to black levels, OLED reigns as the undisputed champion — because of its ability to go completely black when it needs to.
QLED TVs, by contrast (ahem), are forced to dim their LED backlights and block the remaining light, something that is very hard to do perfectly. It can trigger something called “light bleed,” as the light spills from a bright area onto what’s supposed to be a black section of the screen.
But is it noticeable? Definitely. If you’re watching an intense action movie and two characters are running through a parking lot at night, for example, you may notice a slight glow on parts of the scene that are supposed to be pitch black or in the letterbox bars at the top and bottom of the screen while watching a movie that uses a wider than 16:9 aspect ratio.
As we highlighted earlier, mini-LED backlights are one way QLED TV makers are trying to improve this situation. It has real potential, but we’re not quite ready to declare it an OLED killer.
For now, OLED comes out on top. If an OLED pixel isn’t getting electricity, it doesn’t produce any light and therefore stays totally black.
Winner: OLED
QLED TVs have a considerable advantage when it comes to brightness. Because they use separate backlights (instead of relying on each pixel to create its own light), these LED backlights can be made incredibly, achingly bright — more than bright enough to be seen clearly in even the most brightly lit rooms.
OLED panels can’t compete on a pure brightness basis. Their light-emitting individual pixels simply can’t produce the same amount of light. In a dark room, this isn’t a problem. In fact, we’d argue it’s preferable because OLED can achieve the same contrast with less brightness, making viewing in a dark room a less retina-searing experience. (That’s in addition to being that much easier on your power bill.) But in well-lit environments, or where lots of daylight streams in through windows, QLED TVs are more visible — especially if you’re playing HDR content under these conditions.
OLED panels have become much brighter over the years, and the very best models are now able to hold their own in bright rooms, but they still can’t match QLED TVs for peak brightness.
When Samsung Display’s QD-OLED was announced, we expected that these TVs would raise the OLED brightness bar, but surprisingly, LG Display has managed to improve its traditional OLED technology at a similar pace — there’s essentially no brightness advantage when comparing the latest LG OLED to the latest Samsung QD-OLED. Check out our full head-to-head evaluation of the LG G3 versus the Samsung S95C to get all of the details.
Winner: QLED
OLED once blew all the competition out of the water in this section, but the use of quantum dots in QLED TVs has allowed it to inch forward in terms of color accuracy, color brightness, and color volume, according to Samsung, which claims that a wider range of better-saturated colors at extreme brightness levels is an advantage.
While there’s no denying the fact that these quantum dot TVs deliver fantastic colors, we have yet to witness better-saturated colors at high brightness levels deliver a real advantage in normal viewing situations — so we’re going to declare it a draw for now. We’ll need to see some tangible evidence to declare QLED a winner.
Winner: Draw
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 milliseconds. 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 onscreen. As such, input lag is really only a concern for gamers — it doesn’t have a noticeable effect on the 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 onscreen. 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 frames per second 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 constant 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.
In the past, only OLED TVs offered VRR, but now it’s available on a wide variety of QLED TVs too. However, given OLED’s unbeatable superiority in response time, we’re giving it the win, even if most people may never notice the difference.
Winner: OLED
With QLED screens, the best viewing angle is dead center, and the picture quality diminishes in brightness, color, and contrast the further you move side to side or up and down. While the severity differs between models, it’s always noticeable — despite TV makers’ best efforts to eliminate the issue.
OLED screens, by comparison, can be viewed with no luminance degradation even at drastic viewing angles — up to 84 degrees. The newest OLED models, which take advantage of microlens array (MLA) technology, go even further, up to an astonishing 160 degrees.
Some QLED TVs have improved in terms of viewing angle, with anti-reflective layers helping, but OLED maintains a clear advantage. So if you like to arrange family screenings of your favorite movies and want to make sure there isn’t a bad seat in the house, an OLED TV is best for you.
Winner: OLED
OLEDs have come a long way. When the tech was still nascent, OLED screens maxed out at 55 inches. Today, you can buy OLED TVs as large as 97 inches and QLED TVs up to 98 inches in size. OLED still tends to be more expensive as screen sizes go up but QLED no longer has the monopoly on extra-large displays.
Winner: Draw
LG says you would have to watch its OLED TVs five hours per day for 54 years before they fell to 50% brightness. Whether that’s true remains to be seen, as OLED TVs have only been out in the wild since 2013. QLED is even newer, but its source of backlighting — the LED — has a long and proven track record. For that reason and that reason only, we’ll award this category to QLED.
Winner (for now): QLED
Both QLED and OLED TVs can occasionally exhibit something called image retention. This is when a TV temporarily continues to display part of an image after the original image has disappeared. It usually presents itself as a kind of shadow — that is when it presents itself at all.
When image retention occurs, it’s usually the result of having the same visual element onscreen for long periods of time. Network logos in the corner of the screen have been known to cause it, as can video games that present the same interface elements throughout gameplay.
Image retention typically goes away on its own once you switch to some other kind of content that doesn’t show the problematic on-screen elements.
Because of their self-emissive nature, OLED TVs are also susceptible to the much rarer permanent version of image retention known as “burn-in.” Burn-in is caused when one or more OLED pixels have their normal brightness permanently diminished to a lower state. The only fix for this is to lower all of the rest of the pixels to the same state, but that’s hardly a good solution.
LG, as the biggest maker of OLED TVs, acknowledges the potential for image retention within its user manuals for its OLED TVs but says that under normal viewing conditions, it shouldn’t happen. LG and Samsung have had beef over their panels’ burn-in potential over the years, most recently over Samsung’s new QD-OLEDs.
So what constitutes “normal” viewing conditions? Well, for one thing, keeping your TV on the same channel for 10 hours a day, two months in a row, is apparently not normal.
Should this scare you away from buying an OLED TV? Absolutely not. But if you’re picking a TV for use as a commercial display in a store or perhaps in a waiting room or a gym, or if you think you’ll use it to play the same video game exclusively for months at a time, it’s definitely something to be aware of.
For an absolute guarantee that you won’t experience burn-in, your best bet is QLED TV.
Winner: QLED
As you’re now very much aware, OLED panels don’t require a super-bright backlight. Those backlights consume a fair amount of power, which means OLED TVs are inherently more energy-efficient. They also emit less heat than QLED TVs.
In the coming years, OLED’s advantage in this area may widen even further as new types of OLED material are introduced that are capable of converting electricity into light with far greater efficiency.
Winner: OLED
In today’s viewing age, it’s possible to spend hours staring at TV screens with few breaks in between. Eye fatigue is a real symptom of the act, and it’s usually caused by excessive blue light production. LED-based sets tend to show more intense blue light than OLED TVs, and this is true even in scenes that don’t feature gobs of the shade.
Is blue light actually bad for you? It depends on who you ask. According to the American Academy of Opthalmology, there is no scientific evidence that blue light from digital devices causes damage to your eye. However, there appear to be good reasons to think that we should limit our exposure to blue light at certain times of the day because of how it affects our sleep-regulating melatonin production.
German safety testing firm TÜV Rheinland has created its Eye Comfort Display certification as a way to identify displays that avoid three problematic areas: flicker, reflection, and blue light emission, each of which can cause eye strain. At the moment, only LG’s OLED panels are Eye Comfort Display certified.
The blue light debate hasn’t gone unnoticed by Samsung. In 2022, it added an EyeComfort mode (no, it’s not related to the certification, but we’re certain the name isn’t a coincidence), which can reduce the amount of blue light emitted by the company’s QLED TVs.
Winner: OLED
Once upon a time, this category would be handily won by QLED TVs, but OLED TVs have come down in cost, and since we’re talking all-premium here, comparable QLED TVs cost about the same (or more, depending on the size).
If you’re shopping around and see QLED TVs for cheap — and some of them are incredibly affordable — keep in mind that, unlike OLED TV, there is a big range in picture quality with QLED TVs because there are far more variables in their design, picture processing, and build. Only the very top-of-the-line QLED TVs are equivalent to OLED in picture quality.
Our winner is still QLED, because on a price-per-inch of screen size basis, it’s still more affordable, but that gap is getting smaller every year.
Winner: QLED
We mentioned Samsung’s QD-OLED technology above, but let’s quickly recap: as the name suggests, QD-OLED combines OLED display technology with quantum dots. Our QD-OLED explainer gets into all of the (very cool) details, but here’s the 101: QD-OLED preserves all of the benefits of OLED that we’ve described above, but is theoretically capable of better brightness and color accuracy.
We can say, unreservedly, that every QD-OLED TV we’ve tested — including the Sony A95L and Samsung S95C — has been nothing short of spectacular. QD-OLED absolutely lives up to the hype. But here’s the thing: LG’s WOLED panels have been getting better every year. They’re so good at this point that if you asked us to choose between the best LG OLED and the best Samsung QD-OLED, we’d probably do almost anything to avoid answering. Yes, they’re that close.
It’s possible that Samsung will be able to improve its QD-OLED technology at a faster rate in the coming years than LG, but until that day comes, we’re just delighted that TV buyers now have two fantastic OLED flavors to choose from.