If you look at our picks for the best TVs you'll see that two technologies dominate: OLED and mini-LED. Both offer incredible picture quality and are the cutting edge of TV tech. As great as they both are, they each have particular strengths and weaknesses that might make one better than the other for your home. So if you use your TV for mostly watching movies, playing games, watching sports or a mix of everything, you'll want to check out the pros and cons of each tech to figure out which you should get.
While all TVs can show all kinds of content, of course, OLED has better, deeper black levels while mini-LED is often brighter. Both will look better than older LED and even many modern QLED TVs. Weighing their pros and cons, and keeping price in mind, is key. This guide should help you figure out what's best for you.
Read more: Putting the 'Q' in QLEDs: Where Quantum Dots Are Made
CNET Mini-LED Big, bright, with a great image, though not quite as good as OLED Like Bright images
Great contrast
Huge screens Don't like Not quite as good as OLED
More expensive than some other tech Technically, Mini-LED is an evolution from LED LCDs that first came to market in the 2000s. Both technologies use LEDs to create light and an LCD layer to create an image. The difference is the size and number of LEDs. Mini-LED has a lot more LEDs, and they're smaller. This might not seem like a huge difference, but the improvements in image quality and brightness are significant. The main issue with "normal" LED LCDs is that their contrast ratio isn't as good as OLED. As such, the picture isn't quite as good. Mini-LEDs, like all local-dimming LED LCDs, can improve the contrast ratio by dimming certain areas of the screen so dark areas can appear darker. The problem with that is even the best local dimming zone still comprised a fairly large area of the screen. So a small bright object on a dark background -- a streetlight, say -- would raise the level of the surrounding black area, making it appear gray. While engineers have done a lot over the years to minimize this problem, it persists. It has to, it's just physics. With mini-LED, a greater number of smaller LEDs are spread across the back of the TV. In most cases these greatly reduce the size of the local dimming zone, so to a casual viewer the contrast ratio is fantastic. Not pixel-perfect like OLED, but close enough. Mini-LED TVs can also produce some extremely bright images, which can be handy for daytime viewing in brighter rooms. There's also basically no chance of image retention, so for gamers worried about marring their OLED screens, mini-LED is a great alternative. The downside? Mini-LEDs are more expensive than their lesser LED LCD counterparts, but are usually cheaper than OLED. Check out the best Mini-LED TVs.
Looking ahead
Right now, OLED and mini-LED are the cutting edge of TV technology. They offer incredible image quality, but there are other technologies on the horizon that have the potential to be even better. The first is direct-view quantum dots, aka NanoLED. These skip LED and OLED completely, using just quantum dots to make up an image. The tech is promising, with the potential for incredible picture quality. It's still in the development stages, though, so don't expect it for a few years. We've seen some behind-the-scenes research as well as some working prototypes.
The other is MicroLED. Right now this tech is exclusively in the giant display realm -- and it is available now if you've got the cash -- but is more of a projector replacement than a TV replacement. With typical LED LCDs there are somewhere between a few dozen and a few thousand LEDs which create light which illuminates the image. With MicroLED, each pixel is an LED, so this means there's millions of them. As the tech matures it's possible we'll see more TV-sized MicroLEDs (if "TV sized" means 100 inches to you). In addition to being quite expensive it's also energy intensive so, like NanoLED, don't expect a 65-inch MicroLED to compete price-wise with OLED and mini-LED anytime soon.
In addition to covering cameras and display tech, Geoff does photo essays about cool museums and other stuff, including nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, 10,000-mile road trips.
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