The television market is dominated by LED screens. Within this hegemonic category you can find two very different technologies: QLED and OLED, some concepts that can make us hesitate when it comes to changing the old plasma that we already have burned from so much use. Here we will resolve the doubts and detail the strengths and weaknesses of each of them.
Despite the fact that, in televisions, the queen of OLEDs is LG, Samsung is the one with the most OLED screens on the market, thanks to its leadership as a manufacturer of mobile panels (to date, it manufactures iPhone screens). .
Pablo Requejo, Head of Product Marketing at Samsung Spain, explains how they differ: “The main difference is how each of the products works with light. Both use the same color creation technology (in the case of Samsung, Quantum Dot), but they emit light differently.”
LED technology and, by extension, QLED (Quantum LED), have a screen with two main layers: one that is responsible for producing the colored dots (the pixels) and another that is responsible for illuminating each of the pixels by tiny LED lights. Bottom line: QLED screens are backlit. It’s like putting colored filters on a white (or bluish) bulb, multiplied by several million and in microscopic size. “On the other hand, in OLED (Organic LED) technology, each colored point emits its own light independently,” explains Requejo.
The expert clarifies that the main difference between LED and OLED is the duration and power with which they emit light. “An organic material [like OLED] wears out much sooner than an inorganic one,” he says.
However, Requejo says that light-blocking technology in screen pixels is improving by leaps and bounds. “Currently, the difference in black between an OLED and a QLED is almost imperceptible to the human eye,” says the head of Product Marketing for the Korean giant.
To begin with, there are very few brands that offer 8K OLED (LG and some others). Most brands only offer OLED with a maximum resolution of 4K. In any case, the 8K content offer is still so small that the maximum resolution is far from being the most decisive factor.
In any case, artificial intelligence image scaling technologies improve the resolution and sharpness of standard size frames –HD, FullHD– to achieve an optimization that can improve the original. An attendee at Samsung’s 2023 launch event commented anecdote: “I’m sure the people who made ‘Gone with the Wind’ haven’t seen the movie with the quality and clarity with which it was seen.” I have seen”.
If we talk about image quality and properties, when choosing one or the other system we find ourselves in the dilemma of having to give up the purest blacks on the one hand, or the brightness and vividness of color on the other. Requejo clears up the doubts: the QLED is closer to the deep black of the OLED, while the OLED does not quite achieve the brightness of the QLED.
Therefore, we could conclude that the shortcomings of the QLED are less lame than the shortcomings of the OLED, and for this reason it can be considered that it is more complete (and more expensive, of course).
New technologies such as micro-LED will not take long to consolidate, which will provide a significant improvement, especially in large sizes, nor can we rule out that in the near future we will begin to see screens tailored to the furniture and walls of domestic living rooms.
