QD-OLED TVs were announced by Samsung during CES 2022, thus marking the company’s entry into the market for smart TVs based on OLED technology. However, due to the acronym “QD” for Quantum Dots (Quantum Dots), many are confusing it with QLED displays, technology used by the vast majority of Samsung TVs.
As the sale of Samsung S95B TVs, which use a QD-OLED display, began to be sold in several countries around the world, it has not yet arrived in Brazil, we only have TVs with QLED technology in the country. As LG invested heavily in advertising its OLED TVs and Samsung likewise with QLED TVs, the Brazilian public was confused with the nomenclatures and functioning of these technologies.
Samsung doesn’t have QLED TVs with Quantum Dot
The technology classified as Quantum Dot (QD or Quantum Dot) is based on extremely small semiconductors that do not exceed nanometers in diameter. The displays that use QDs are theoretically able to emit pure monochromatic light in red, green and blue colors individually. However, Samsung’s QLED TVs are not able to emit light of their own, instead they use LCD technology, which uses a blue light panel (on conventional LCDs it is white).
The emission of self-light is only present in OLED, QD-OLED and microLED technology. The flatpanelshd website says that MicroLED is “a self-emitting display technology that uses very small LEDs” and utilizes “a TFT (thin film transistor) circuit to control the individual pixels”. To give you an idea, a miniLED display has a light-emitting diode (LED or light-emitting diode) with a diameter of 0.2mm, while a microLED is 0.05mm.
The difference between OLED and microLED is the use of organic material in light emitting diodes. The microLED uses GaN (Gallium Nitride or Gallium Nitride), an inorganic material.
So what is the advantage of QLED TVs compared to LED TVs?
Although both QLED and LED TVs use a backlight panel (blue for QLEDs and white for LEDs), QLED panels have an additional filter with red and blue dots, which brings more accuracy to colors and brightness, as well as allow for a higher level of brightness without losing the color saturation of the content. This makes QLED displays superior to traditional LED displays, yet both use the basic principle of LCD (panel backlight) technology.
Only OLED, QD-OLED and microLED technologies are capable of delivering deep black
Due to the fact that QLED, LED and miniLED TV displays use a light panel behind the light emitting diodes, it is impossible to have as good a black level result as OLED, QD-OLED and microLED screens. . These three technologies have pixels capable of emitting their own light and turning it off completely to produce black in images.
What is the difference between QD-OLED and OLED?
QD-OLED is a new type of OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) technology that uses a quantum dot filter to generate colors. Basically there is an organic blue light emitting diode that uses an extra layer (filter) of quantum dots (quantum dots or QDs) to convert the color to red and green. Check out an image below showing how light passes through the OLED and QD-OLED panels.
