OLED, QLED or Mini-LED: which screen suits your room?

Three kinds of screen in brief

There are two ways to make a picture. With OLED each pixel gives off its own light. LG and Sony put it like this: a pixel that should be black simply switches off. There is no backlight.

QLED and Mini-LED are both LCD screens. Behind the panel sits a backlight made of LEDs, and the LCD panel lets more or less of that light through per pixel. Samsung calls an LCD TV with a layer of quantum dots for colour a QLED TV. In a Mini-LED TV the backlight is made of thousands of very small LEDs, grouped in zones that can be brightened or dimmed separately. Many Mini-LED TVs also have a quantum dot layer; Samsung calls these Neo QLED, and LG calls its LCD range QNED and adds "Mini LED" to the name of those models.

A newer variant is RGB Mini-LED, where the backlight itself is red, green and blue. LG calls it Mini RGB, TCL calls it RGB Mini LED.

A dark room: OLED

If you mainly watch films and series in the evening with the lights off, contrast matters most. Because an OLED pixel can switch off entirely, a bright point has no grey glow around it. You notice it with stars, end credits and dark scenes.

Our catalogue has OLED TVs from LG, Samsung, Sony and Panasonic, among others. LG's C6 series runs from 42 to 83 inches, such as the OLED48C61LA and the OLED55C61LA. Samsung makes OLED TVs too, such as the S83H; which panel type a Samsung OLED model uses can differ per series and size, so check its specifications.

Every OLED model is under OLED TVs.

A bright room: Mini-LED

If a lot of daylight falls on the screen, brightness helps. Manufacturers state it in nits (candela per square metre). For the Mini-LED TVs in our catalogue it is often in the name: Xiaomi gives 1200 nits for the TV S Mini LED 65 inch and 1700 nits for the TV S Pro Mini LED 65. How bright an OLED model gets is in its specifications; compare like with like, as some makers quote the peak on a small part of the screen.

The second figure for Mini-LED is the number of dimming zones. The more zones, the more finely the TV can place light and dark side by side. Xiaomi gives 308 zones for the TV S Mini LED, TCL 2160 colour zones for the 98RM7L. With few zones a faint haze can appear around a bright object on a dark background, because one zone lights a larger part of the picture.

QLED: LCD with a colour layer

A QLED TV without Mini-LED has fewer, larger LEDs behind the screen, along the edge or in a grid. These TVs also come in small sizes, such as the Xiaomi TV A Pro 32. Philips, Hisense, Metz and TCL all have QLED models, such as the Philips PQS7801 55 inch and the Hisense 50Q7S. Every model is under QLED TVs.

Viewing angle and static images

Do several people often watch, some from the side? With OLED, the makers say colour and contrast hold up well at an angle. With LCD it depends on the panel type: the specifications sometimes say whether it is a VA or an IPS panel, or the maker names its own wide-angle technology.

If the same image stays on screen for a long time, such as a news channel with a fixed ticker or a game with a fixed score display, LG and Samsung mention burn-in as a point to watch with OLED: a faint after-image that stays. Their OLED TVs therefore have features that shift the picture slightly or dim a fixed logo, and a pixel refresh the TV runs by itself in standby. With LCD the light does not come from the pixels themselves, so this does not apply in the same way.

Energy label and sizes

Every TV has a European energy label from A to G. For some models it is in the product name, as with LG's OLED42C6ELB. The label gives a class and the consumption for normal picture (SDR) and separately for HDR; with HDR and a bright picture mode a TV uses more.

The technology also decides which sizes exist. In our catalogue OLED starts at 42 inches, while QLED and Mini-LED come in everything from small to very large. All sizes and technologies together are under televisions. Which TV size suits your viewing distance? shows which size suits your room.