QLED vs. OLED (and QD

TV brands use lots of jargon to market their sets. Understanding the terms can help you find a model you'll love at a great price.

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TV shoppers are seeing new technology in 2023. But that can be confusing, with new technical terms being added to what’s already an alphabet soup of acronyms.

The new jargon mainly describes the display technology—how the screen is built. You’ll come across four main terms: LED and QLED TVs, which fall into one camp; and OLED and QD-OLED TVs in another.

Each type of display has its advantages, but the distinctions in performance are 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.

If you take time to sort it all out before buying a new set, you should be able to get a TV you really like and possibly save some money.

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.

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.

You’ll also see lots of references to LED TVs, but these are really LCD TVs; they just use LEDs in their backlights. These days, all LCD sets are built that way.

Here’s how an LCD (liquid crystal display) TV works. Unlike OLED TVs, described down below, LCD TVs require a backlight, which shines through a filter to produce colors. 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.

The term LED TV surfaced about 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 is going to 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.

Source: Samsung Display Source: Samsung Display

That brings us to QLED TV, which is another marketing term. All QLED TVs are also LCD TVs, but they use quantum dots to produce colors.

QLED TVs, from companies including Hisense, LG, Samsung, and TCL, use a blue LED light source plus a film embedded with tiny quantum dots, or nanocrystals. The quantum-dot film is sandwiched between the other layers of the LCD panel, replacing the color 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 colors, based on the size and composition of the quantum dot material. The system renders very accurate colors, even at higher brightness levels where colors can start to look a bit washed out.

There are two newer enhancements to LCD technology that you should also 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, most 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, 1,000 instead of the dozens typically found in even the best LCD sets up until now. 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 2023 all its ULED TVs will have Mini LED backlights.

At Consumer Reports, we’ve been evaluating OLED TVs for almost a decade, and for the past several years they’ve tended to dominate the top of our TV ratings. But the best LCD/LED TVs can now rival OLED TVs in terms of picture quality and HDR performance.

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.

Source: Samsung Display Source: Samsung Display

Up until this year, all OLED TVs from companies including LG, Sony, and Vizio used a flavor 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 color filters that produce the red, green, and blue of the color spectrum. You can see the panel structure of this type of TV in the image above.

Because color filters absorb some brightness, 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 colors look a bit washed out.

Each year we’ve seen improvements in OLED TV brightness. But in general, OLED TVs have lacked the kind of peak brightness we see in the best LCD sets. This year, though, we’re expecting to see a few OLED TVs that can approach LCD peak brightness levels.

The desire for extra brightness in OLED sets 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 more are coming in 2023. 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 colors you often get with QLED TVs.

Source: Samsung Display Source: Samsung Display

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 in this case is each individual pixel.

Because these TVs don’t use color filters in front of the light source, QD-OLED TVs have the potential to reach higher peak brightness levels without losing any contrast.

That, in fact, is what we found in our labs last year when we tested the Samsung S95B QD-OLED. It has a peak brightness level of over 1,000 nits, making it the brightest OLED TV we’ve ever tested. The Sony A95K, which also uses the QD OLED technology, is just below that at close to 1,000 nits. By comparison, the 2022 LG C2 hit 850 nits, bright for an OLED set but below the QD OLED TVs.

In 2023 we expect to see improvements that allow both WOLED sets and QD OLED TVs to hit higher brightness levels and help boost HDR performance. We’ll have more to say when we’re able to get these sets into our TV labs for testing.

More broadly, the best TVs in any category these days can combine high peak brightness with impressive black levels, plus vibrant, accurate colors and bright screens. If you’re shopping for a television, that gives you more top-flight choices than ever before.

James K. Willcox

James K. Willcox leads Consumer Reports’ coverage of TVs, streaming media services and devices, and broadband internet service. His focus ranges from the challenges of finding affordable internet service to emerging display technologies. A veteran tech journalist, Willcox has written for Business Week, Maxim, Men’s Journal, Rolling Stone, Sound & Vision, and others. At home, he’s often bent over his workbench building guitar pedals, or cranking out music on his 7.2-channel home-theater sound system.