FinalTidus
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https://www.techradar.com/news/5-reasons-why-qled-not-oled-might-be-the-future-of-tvs
If there's one thing we've come to expect from the TV market, it's that there will always be competing formats and technologies for the consumer to fret over. A decade ago, it was all about plasma vs LCD, with each technology presenting a number of benefits and disadvantages. Although the differences in today's TV technologies are perhaps more granular and specific, they're no less important.
With many AV enthusiasts currently focused on the high dynamic range format war (pitting HDR10 against Dolby Vision and now HDR10+ and HLG), a new battle for TV tech supremacy has emerged: OLED vs QLED.
While most people are aware of OLED's status as a high-end TV technology (it's been in the public eye much longer than Quantum Dot-powered rivals), there's still an air of mystery surrounding QLED, particularly in regards to how it works and why you might want to choose it over other television technologies.
TV-makers Samsung, Hisense and TCL are all very confident about the technology, with the three electronics companies combining to form the QLED Alliance in an attempt to tackle OLED head-on.
To get more of an understanding of how QLED works, we met up with some of Samsung’s engineers in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam – home of the Korean company's QLED facilities – to get an insider's look at the burgeoning quantum dot-powered technology. We left with a better understanding of the technology and how its implementation has improved since the last year, and we also got to see how it directly compares to the competition.
While many AV enthusiasts consider OLED to be the gold standard in TV display technology (thanks in large part to its propensity for deep blacks and impressive contrast), its drawbacks are less widely discussed.
QLED's strengths include unrivalled color performance – specifically when it comes to color accuracy and color volume – which directly address some of OLED's weaknesses. And in 2018, new approaches to backlighting have also brought QLED closer than ever before to achieving a similar 'pure black' effect to that boasted by OLED.
With that in mind, we've put together a list of the top five reasons why QLED, and not OLED, might just be the future of flatscreen TVs.
Its black levels are improving
Though not inherently related to QLED technology, the combination of Quantum Dots and Full Array Local Dimming (FALD) has resulted in an effect that arguably presents the best of both worlds in terms of brightness and deep blacks. Colors and whites appear brighter and more vibrant, while blacks appear deeper and with less backlight bleed.
FALD employs hundreds of tiny backlights across the entire panel, allowing the television to precisely control the areas of the screen that receive light. These are called 'local dimming zones'.
In contrast to OLED, which uses self-lighting pixels instead of backlights, FALD is able to achieve far brighter highlights, making the difference between black and white areas of the screen even more pronounced.
Last year, Samsung's QLED TVs still relied on older edge-lit backlight technology, which spreads light across the panel from the sides of the display in a less-accurate manner. With the inclusion of FALD in the 2018 Q8F and Q9F ranges, that issue has been tackled head on – with impressive results.
In one demonstration we saw in Vietnam, Samsung shuffled us into a darkened room to witness a direct comparison between its edge-lit QLED models from last year, its FALD QLED models from this year, and an unspecified competitor's 2018 OLED television.
Each television featured a scene from the film La La Land, in which Ryan Gosling's character plays piano to a darkened room – a ray of light piercing in from the corner of the screen to reveal the piano player and a small portion of his audience.
The 2017 edge-lit QLED models came out poorest, showing a very obvious ring of light around the entire center of the image, making it appear as if Gosling was playing the piano from within a hazy bubble. Of course, the OLED television's perfect blacks were on full display, however we were struck by how close the 2018-model QLED came to achieving the same effect. No light leakage or banding was present at all, and instances of obvious light blooming were completely absent.
It has greater color accuracy
A major selling point of Quantum Dot technology is its propensity for achieving astonishing color accuracy. In essence, QLED is quite similar to LED TV technology, in that color is distributed with the use of LED light and the RGB particle. However, things change drastically with the inclusion of Quantum Dot particles.
When light hits the tiny quantum dot semiconductor particles (we're talking anywhere from a few to several nanometers in size) featured in QLED televisions, they emit incredibly accurate red, green or blue colors on screen. Color is determined by the size of the quantum dots.
In terms of how this affects your television viewing, the answer is simple: it allows for much greater accuracy when it comes to rendering colors, which means images are much closer to how things look in real life.
Coming back to our La La Land example scene from earlier, on the lit-up portions of the picture, the 2018 QLED images were bright and clear, while the OLED screens' appeared comparatively dim and muted – skin tones had a slightly greener tinge, making the characters appear somewhat lifeless and unhealthy, and the dark areas of the screen were almost too dark, with less detail present in shadows.
While watching BBC documentary-series Planet Earth II, QLED's advantages became even more apparent. The greens of the rainforest appeared more vibrant and natural, with a real warmth becoming evident in the oranges and brown hues within the image. That warmth was notably less prominent on the OLED display.
It's one thing to look at an image and judge a TV's color by how aesthetically pleasing it appears to be, but the only way to really appraise its accuracy is to compare it to offscreen elements in the real world.
In an effort to put its color accuracy to the test, a Samsung rep placed a Pantone color card against the screen of the quantum dot-powered Q9F television to show how closely it matched the colors on the card (spoiler alert: the colors on each looked exactly the same). Next, the card was placed against the same image on an OLED display, revealing a completely different, darker shade entirely.
Even taking into account things like brightness and color settings, the evidence was fairly irrefutable – QLED leaves OLED for dead in terms of color accuracy.
It doesn't suffer from burn in
Unlike the organic light-emitting diode.....
(Read the full article in the link above!)
Interesting read.
If there's one thing we've come to expect from the TV market, it's that there will always be competing formats and technologies for the consumer to fret over. A decade ago, it was all about plasma vs LCD, with each technology presenting a number of benefits and disadvantages. Although the differences in today's TV technologies are perhaps more granular and specific, they're no less important.
With many AV enthusiasts currently focused on the high dynamic range format war (pitting HDR10 against Dolby Vision and now HDR10+ and HLG), a new battle for TV tech supremacy has emerged: OLED vs QLED.
While most people are aware of OLED's status as a high-end TV technology (it's been in the public eye much longer than Quantum Dot-powered rivals), there's still an air of mystery surrounding QLED, particularly in regards to how it works and why you might want to choose it over other television technologies.
TV-makers Samsung, Hisense and TCL are all very confident about the technology, with the three electronics companies combining to form the QLED Alliance in an attempt to tackle OLED head-on.
To get more of an understanding of how QLED works, we met up with some of Samsung’s engineers in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam – home of the Korean company's QLED facilities – to get an insider's look at the burgeoning quantum dot-powered technology. We left with a better understanding of the technology and how its implementation has improved since the last year, and we also got to see how it directly compares to the competition.
While many AV enthusiasts consider OLED to be the gold standard in TV display technology (thanks in large part to its propensity for deep blacks and impressive contrast), its drawbacks are less widely discussed.
QLED's strengths include unrivalled color performance – specifically when it comes to color accuracy and color volume – which directly address some of OLED's weaknesses. And in 2018, new approaches to backlighting have also brought QLED closer than ever before to achieving a similar 'pure black' effect to that boasted by OLED.
With that in mind, we've put together a list of the top five reasons why QLED, and not OLED, might just be the future of flatscreen TVs.
Its black levels are improving
Though not inherently related to QLED technology, the combination of Quantum Dots and Full Array Local Dimming (FALD) has resulted in an effect that arguably presents the best of both worlds in terms of brightness and deep blacks. Colors and whites appear brighter and more vibrant, while blacks appear deeper and with less backlight bleed.
FALD employs hundreds of tiny backlights across the entire panel, allowing the television to precisely control the areas of the screen that receive light. These are called 'local dimming zones'.
In contrast to OLED, which uses self-lighting pixels instead of backlights, FALD is able to achieve far brighter highlights, making the difference between black and white areas of the screen even more pronounced.
Last year, Samsung's QLED TVs still relied on older edge-lit backlight technology, which spreads light across the panel from the sides of the display in a less-accurate manner. With the inclusion of FALD in the 2018 Q8F and Q9F ranges, that issue has been tackled head on – with impressive results.
In one demonstration we saw in Vietnam, Samsung shuffled us into a darkened room to witness a direct comparison between its edge-lit QLED models from last year, its FALD QLED models from this year, and an unspecified competitor's 2018 OLED television.
Each television featured a scene from the film La La Land, in which Ryan Gosling's character plays piano to a darkened room – a ray of light piercing in from the corner of the screen to reveal the piano player and a small portion of his audience.
The 2017 edge-lit QLED models came out poorest, showing a very obvious ring of light around the entire center of the image, making it appear as if Gosling was playing the piano from within a hazy bubble. Of course, the OLED television's perfect blacks were on full display, however we were struck by how close the 2018-model QLED came to achieving the same effect. No light leakage or banding was present at all, and instances of obvious light blooming were completely absent.
It has greater color accuracy
A major selling point of Quantum Dot technology is its propensity for achieving astonishing color accuracy. In essence, QLED is quite similar to LED TV technology, in that color is distributed with the use of LED light and the RGB particle. However, things change drastically with the inclusion of Quantum Dot particles.
When light hits the tiny quantum dot semiconductor particles (we're talking anywhere from a few to several nanometers in size) featured in QLED televisions, they emit incredibly accurate red, green or blue colors on screen. Color is determined by the size of the quantum dots.
In terms of how this affects your television viewing, the answer is simple: it allows for much greater accuracy when it comes to rendering colors, which means images are much closer to how things look in real life.
Coming back to our La La Land example scene from earlier, on the lit-up portions of the picture, the 2018 QLED images were bright and clear, while the OLED screens' appeared comparatively dim and muted – skin tones had a slightly greener tinge, making the characters appear somewhat lifeless and unhealthy, and the dark areas of the screen were almost too dark, with less detail present in shadows.
While watching BBC documentary-series Planet Earth II, QLED's advantages became even more apparent. The greens of the rainforest appeared more vibrant and natural, with a real warmth becoming evident in the oranges and brown hues within the image. That warmth was notably less prominent on the OLED display.
It's one thing to look at an image and judge a TV's color by how aesthetically pleasing it appears to be, but the only way to really appraise its accuracy is to compare it to offscreen elements in the real world.
In an effort to put its color accuracy to the test, a Samsung rep placed a Pantone color card against the screen of the quantum dot-powered Q9F television to show how closely it matched the colors on the card (spoiler alert: the colors on each looked exactly the same). Next, the card was placed against the same image on an OLED display, revealing a completely different, darker shade entirely.
Even taking into account things like brightness and color settings, the evidence was fairly irrefutable – QLED leaves OLED for dead in terms of color accuracy.
It doesn't suffer from burn in
Unlike the organic light-emitting diode.....
(Read the full article in the link above!)
Interesting read.