The tech that makes your computer display or TV work can seem incomprehensibly arcane, millions of tiny dots compressed into a thin sheet, somehow supplied with power and light and colour. Trends come and go, as once we were enthralled with the intense picture quality of plasma screens, only for them to fall away, replaced by lighter and less power-hungry methods of making a moving picture. Legends even tell of huge, boxy things that used magnets to steer a beam of electrons that made the inside of the screen glow, but it was so long ago we’re not sure they were even real.
Still, today’s best screens are better and thinner than ever, and that’s down to their underlying technology. Two of the leading lights are OLED and Mini-LED, and you’ll find many of the best screens – computer and laptop displays, and even TVs – using these methods of getting pixels to light up in the right order. To do this you need light, and Mini-LED and OLED use slightly different methods to achieve pixels that light up, and – importantly – don’t light up.
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What is Mini LED?
For years, flat displays have relied on a backlight to make them work. This has taken many forms, from light that comes from the edge of the screen, to a folded up fluorescent tube behind the panel itself. Next came LED backlights, a grid of lights behind the screen that could be turned on and off individually to reflect the lighter and darker parts of the scene being displayed, a technique known as local dimming.
Mini LED takes local dimming to its logical conclusion, by having many more, much smaller LEDs providing the light. The problem with a lot of backlit screen tech, such as IPS or VA, is that blacks are never really black. They use a liquid crystal layer that twists when a voltage is applied, blocking out the light coming from below and creating darker colours, but the blocking isn’t absolute, and areas that are meant to be black are often more like dark grey. This leads to an overall picture that is lower in contrast than it might otherwise be, and a less satisfying viewing experience. There can be less detail in darker parts too, as the darkest parts aren’t sufficiently different from one another.
Mini LED attempts to solve this problem by having more backlights – numbering in the thousands – that can be switched off completely, producing something akin to a true black, and much better than mere dark grey. There’s another technology coming through right now, called Micro LED, which takes this even further, with a tiny LED lighting each pixel from behind, but it’s still pretty expensive. Otherwise, the pixels are the same as any other LCD TV, though some use Quantum Dots to provide extra colour saturation. There’s a three-colour sub-pixel assembly over each pixel, and different combinations of these produce different hues and brightnesses, over eight million of them for a 4K TV, changing 60 times a second (or even faster).
What Mini-LED accomplishes is enhanced contrast in its pictures, with darker areas that are more convincing to look at and show more detail. Mini-LED TVs often come with more complex local dimming algorithms than standard LED-backlit screens, so you get a more realistic picture without areas that appear less vibrant,and the best examples can outdo any other display tech in terms of brightness. Examples of Mini-LED screens include the iPad Pro with an M1 processor (known as a Liquid Retina XDR display), MSI’s Raider 18 HX AI A2XW gaming laptop, and the LG QNED93 TV, but Mini-LED screens are rarer than those built using other backlighting methods.
What is OLED?
The acronym OLED stands for organic light-emitting diode, and it refers to the ability of each pixel in an OLED display to light itself thanks to an organic layer that glows when you put electricity across it. This means each pixel lights itself, and there’s no need for a backlight. This means panels can be thinner and lighter, as there’s less to squeeze between the layers of plastic and glass that make up their frames.
OLED is currently taking the worlds of computer displays and living-room TVs by storm, because it results in large screens that have excellent colour and contrast. As the pixels are individually lit, OLED screens can turn them off completely, which leads to excellent black levels, the complete removal of light ‘blooming’ from bright areas into darker ones, and huge detail within the shadows of an image. Newer screens that combine OLED with Quantum Dots are taking this even further, with high refresh rates and enhanced colour saturation over plain OLED screens, which were already pretty good in this area.
The downsides of OLED are that they’re more expensive than LED-backlit displays, and they can be prone to screen burn, just like older plasma displays. This means that, if a static image is displayed for a long time, it can become permanently etched on the panel. It’s easy enough to avoid, by watching moving images and allowing the screen to go into a screensaver mode when your movie or TV show is paused, but things like the Windows taskbar can be an issue if you’re using an OLED computer monitor, and channel ID logos may stay on the screen as foggy after-images if you’re watching TV news. However, as OLED versions of the Nintendo Switch and Valve’s Steam Deck have shown, along with myriad living room TVs, this is rarely an issue.
Which is for me?
OLED is more common than Mini-LED, and the latter isn’t getting the same sort of market share as its thinner, lighter competitor. As Micro-LED screens become more frequently seen and cheaper, they may become popular, but right now many of the best screens – be they computer monitors or huge living room TVs – are OLEDs. They provide excellent brightness, contrast and colour reproduction, are coming down in price, and make your movies, TV shows and games look fantastic.
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