Anyone shopping for a new TV over the past few years has likely seen references to a lot of new screen technologies. It can be confusing, with TV makers promoting an alphabet soup of acronyms, including LED, QLED, OLED, QD-OLED.
The jargon mainly describes how the TV screens are built. LED and QLED TVs fall into one camp, and OLED and QD-OLED TVs fall into another.
Each type of display has its advantages, but what used to be big distinctions in performance are now blurring, at least in high-end TVs. That’s because manufacturers have gone on an innovation spree, introducing more sets with advanced technology such as quantum dots and Mini LED backlights that can improve picture quality.
But some of what you hear is just marketing lingo designed to make certain TVs seem more advanced than they truly are. Understanding the current tech terms can help you decide if a slightly older model will suit you just fine -- and lots of those sets are great -- or if you should spring for a model with the latest features.
What are LED and QLED TVs?
There are only two basic types of televisions: LCDs and OLEDs. We’ll start with LCDs because they account for most TVs on the market.
Here’s how an LCD (liquid crystal display) TV works: Unlike OLED TVs, described down below, LCD TVs all have a backlight that shines through a filter to produce colours. The backlight is always on, and the liquid crystals act like shutters, opening to allow light through for brighter parts of a scene and closing to block light in dark areas. Some light always escapes, though, which is why black tones on many LCD sets look grayish rather than truly black.
You’ll also see lots of references to LED TVs, but these are really LCD TVs; they just use LEDs in their backlights.
The term LED TV surfaced more than a decade ago when companies switched from using fluorescent (CCFL) lamps to LEDs (light-emitting diodes) in LCD TV backlights, mainly because LEDs could get brighter and last longer than fluorescent lamps. They also allowed TVs to be much thinner.
Initially, LED backlights cost more, so some companies seized the opportunity to market the sets to consumers as a new, better type of TV. But they were still LCD sets.
Nowadays, any LCD TV you buy will rely on LEDs. At Consumer Reports, we sometimes refer to LCD/LED TVs to help consumers who have heard both terms, but in our labs, we call them LCD TVs.
That brings us to QLED TVs. These sets are LCD TVs, with one defining difference: They use quantum dots to produce colours.
QLED TVs from companies such as Amazon, Hisense, LG, Panasonic, Roku, Samsung, Sony and TCL use a blue LED light source plus a film embedded with tiny quantum dots, which are nano-size crystals. The quantum-dot film is sandwiched between the other layers of the LCD panel, replacing the colour filter in front of the LED backlight.
When these tiny crystals are hit with the blue light from the backlight, they glow, emitting very saturated primary colours, which vary based on the size and composition of the quantum dot material. The system renders very accurate colours, even at higher brightness levels where colours can start to look a bit washed out.
There are also two newer enhancements to LCD technology that you should know about. One is a feature called local dimming, which divides a TV’s LED backlights into zones that can be dimmed or illuminated separately. This can help improve contrast and black levels.
It works best with TVs that have full-array backlights, meaning that there are LEDs across the entire back of the set. In contrast, many less expensive LCD TVs on the market are edge-lit sets, with LED backlights along the edges of the display. These sets may still use local dimming, but it tends to be less effective and sometimes results in an effect called blooming, where you see halos of light around bright images shown against dark backgrounds.
Local dimming can work especially well in TVs that use Mini LEDs, the latest backlight advancement. Shrinking the size of the LEDs lets companies cram more of them into the backlight. Because the LEDs are so small, you can have many dimmable zones—say, a 1,000 or more instead of the dozens typically found in even the best LCD sets until recent years. And they can be controlled more precisely to help improve contrast and black levels and reduce halos.
This has created a new set of TV acronyms as some companies have decided to give sets that use quantum dots and Mini LED backlights proprietary names. LG, for example, markets its models with these features as QNED TVs (though not all QNED sets have Mini LEDs). Samsung is calling them Neo QLED sets. Hisense uses the term ULED TVs, and in 2025, all its ULED TVs will have Mini LED backlights. Both Amazon (Omni series) and Roku (Pro series) introduced their first Mini LED TVs last year, and all of TCL’s QM-series sets (QM6, QM7 and QM8) for 2025 have Mini LED backlights.
OLED TVs, described below, have some inherent advantages over LCD sets. However, the best LCD/LED TVs now rival OLEDs in terms of picture quality and HDR performance.
What are OLED TVs?
At Consumer Reports, we’ve been evaluating OLED TVs for almost a decade, and these sets have tended to dominate the very top of CR’s ratings.
OLED stands for “organic light-emitting diode.” In an OLED TV, each individual pixel emits its own light, so no separate backlight is required. Because each individual pixel can go from bright to fully off, OLED TVs can generate high-contrast images with truly deep black tones.
Until three years ago, all OLED TVs from companies, including LG, Sony and Vizio used a flavour of the technology called WOLED. (That’s the rare TV acronym that hasn’t been used in advertising, by the way.) These sets have a white OLED light source, plus colour filters that produce the red, green and blue of the colour spectrum. You can see the panel structure of this type of TV in the image above.
Because colour filters absorb some light, these sets add a white subpixel that bypasses the color filter to add extra brightness. The downside is that at the very high brightness levels required for some HDR content, that extra white subpixel can make colours look a bit washed out.
Each year we’ve seen improvements in OLED TV brightness. In the past, OLED TVs have lacked the kind of peak brightness we see in the best LCD sets. Last year, though, we saw a few OLED TVs that can approach the best LCD peak brightness levels. For example, LG’s G4-series sets, such as the LG OLED65G4SUB and the new Panasonic TV-65Z95AP -- which use a new MLA (micro lens array) panel that makes them among the brightest OLED TVs we’ve tested.
In 2025, both these manufacturers are instead using a new “four-stack” OLED technology, where the red and green layers are sandwiched between two blue layers. The companies say that separating the red, green and blue elements enables TVs to produce brighter images with greater colour purity. We’ll be checking out this new display technology when we can get these new flagship TVs into our labs.
What Are QD-OLED TVs?
The desire for extra brightness, especially when displaying very saturated colours, is where QD-OLED TVs come in.
The first two letters stand for quantum dots. Until last year, quantum dots had been used only in LCD-based sets. But both Samsung and Sony introduced QD-OLED TVs in 2022, and Sharp joined the party last year. These sets represent a hybrid approach that marries the advantages of traditional OLED TVs—high contrast, deep blacks and unlimited viewing angles—with the higher peak brightness and more vibrant colours you often get with QLED TVs.
Just like QLED TVs, QD-OLED sets start with a blue light source and use quantum-dot material to produce red and green light. But because they are OLEDs, the light source is actually each individual pixel.
Because these TVs don’t use colour filters in front of the light source, QD-OLED TVs have the potential to reach higher peak brightness levels without losing any contrast.
In 2025, we expect to see continuing improvements that allow both WOLED sets and QD-OLED TVs to hit higher brightness levels and help boost HDR performance. Several TVs this year, including higher-end models from LG, Samsung and Sony, will offer higher peak brightness levels than last year’s sets, enabling them to deliver a very satisfying HDR experience.
One thing that was a bit confusing last year is that Samsung had both WOLED and QD-OLED models within S90D-series sets. The 55-, 65- and 77-inch models used QD-OLED panels, while the 42-, 48- and 83-inch sets used WOLED. As far as we can tell, the QD-OLED models have an FXZA suffix, while the WOLED sets use EXZA. In mid-March, we were still waiting for the details on Samsung’s 2025 OLED TV Lineup.
More broadly, the best TVs in any category these days can combine high peak brightness with impressive black levels, plus vibrant, accurate colours and bright screens. That’s true for both LCDs and OLEDs. If you’re shopping for a television, you have more top-flight choices than ever before.
By James K. Willcox, Consumer Reports
