QLED vs OLED: Which type of TV is better?

QLED and OLED are among the most popular tech­no­lo­gies when it comes to choosing high-per­form­ance TVs and monitors. These two screen tech­no­lo­gies differ in the way they work. OLED screens use self-il­lu­min­at­ing diodes, while QLED uses LED back­light­ing to il­lu­min­ate the pixels. Which tech­no­logy meets your needs the best?

What is QLED?

QLED tech­no­logy is based on pixels. Each pixel has a colour value, which forms the basic structure for every image we see on TVs, smart­phones, or monitors. They also provide the res­ol­u­tion, contrasts, and colours on screens. QLED tech­no­logy turns pixels into images using a blue LED backlight that il­lu­min­ates liquid crystals and a layer of nan­o­particles called quantum dots. QLED is con­sidered an optimised version of LED or LCD screen tech­no­lo­gies, which also use a backlight and a ‘liquid crystal display’, but they lack the quantum dots.

QLED’S advantage is the ad­di­tion­al quantum dots layer, which is in the liquid crystal layer. Quantum dots combined with the backlight and the LCD layer guarantee brighter and more intense colour values. QLED boasts very high contrast and detail richness, intensive colour re­pro­duc­tion and very high bright­ness values.

What is OLED?

OLED screens are in the segments of tele­vi­sions, monitors for PCs and laptops, as well as in smart­phones and game consoles. OLED stands for ‘organic light emitting diode’. OLED tech­no­logy is special as it does not use back­light­ing for the pixels, unlike QLED and other image tech­no­lo­gies such as LED. The pixels light up in­de­pend­ently using organic, carbon-based light-emitting diodes.

Another special feature is that the self-luminous diodes can switch on and off. This enables deep black tone imaging and better contrasts. The adjacent diodes in OLED provide precise colour control, which ensures sharp res­ol­u­tion, very high contrasts, sharp colour edges and brilliant, intense colours, even at lateral viewing angles. No back­light­ing also allows for a thinner screen design. However, this is as­so­ci­ated with lower bright­ness.

Many OLED monitors offer a higher refresh rate compared to QLED. This is par­tic­u­larly be­ne­fi­cial in gaming for main­tain­ing a razor-sharp res­ol­u­tion during fast frame changes.

Sim­il­ar­it­ies between QLED and OLED

QLED and OLED are in the upper class of screen tech­no­lo­gies. They both surpass Full HD screens with res­ol­u­tions in 4K and 8K. If you’re setting up your own home cinema or looking for a top monitor for your home office, you should consider QLED or OLED.

Dif­fer­ences between QLED and OLED

The dif­fer­ences are clear from a technical point of view. QLED has more advanced LCD tech­no­logy that uses LED back­light­ing, a liquid crystal layer and an in­nov­at­ive quantum dots layer. OLED elim­in­ates the backlight thanks to self-luminous diodes that also switch on and off in­de­pend­ently.

QLED screens offer very high screen bright­ness, sharp res­ol­u­tion, and high colour bril­liance, while OLED screens offer deeper blacks, sharper contrasts, and better colours. Therefore, OLED has better colour accuracy than QLED. This is important if you depend on high colour accuracy in the colour spaces CMYK and RGB for design jobs.

In addition, OLED models usually have a very high refresh rate, a lighter con­struc­tion and a higher viewing angle thanks to the absence of a backlight. OLED’s dis­ad­vant­age is its sens­it­iv­ity to external in­flu­ences such as oxygen and UV radiation. LED organic diodes have a natural ex­pir­a­tion date. OLED screens last around 20,000 hours, while QLED with non-organic diodes have a service life of up to 100,000 hours.

If you want to connect two monitors or have different re­quire­ments for home cinema and home office, you could use QLED as a second screen and OLED as the main screen.

QLED vs OLED direct com­par­is­on

Our overview table sum­mar­ises the important dif­fer­ences between QLED and OLED:

Which screen tech­no­logy consumes more power?

The power con­sump­tion on PC or TV also is also worth con­sid­er­ing when choosing between QLED and OLED, as energy con­sump­tion varies for re­spect­ive screen tech­no­lo­gies. QLED screens generally consume more power as they use a backlight that must con­tinu­ously il­lu­min­ate liquid crystals and quantum dots to display images. OLED tech­no­logy tends to consume less energy as there is no con­tinu­ous backlight.

OLED’s in­di­vidu­al light points can turn them­selves on and off depending on the picture, which also has a positive effect on power con­sump­tion. In general, QLED TVs consume about 15 percent more power than OLEDs when used regularly.

What other screen tech­no­lo­gies are available besides QLED and OLED?

QLED and OLED are among the most sought-after screen tech­no­lo­gies when buying TVs, monitors, laptops, and smart­phones. This is due to very high res­ol­u­tion, optimal colours, and bright images. Although there are some specific technical dif­fer­ences between QLED and OLED, both tech­no­lo­gies offer ex­cep­tion­al picture quality.

There are other screen tech­no­lo­gies currently available on the market and there are others that are expected to emerge in the future. These include:

• LED/LCD: The terms LED and LCD are used in­ter­change­ably to refer to the classic LCD screens that use liquid crystal displays in con­junc­tion with LED back­light­ing. The liquid crystal ori­ent­a­tions and the amount of light they allow to pass through is con­trolled by elec­tric­al pulses. LCD screens offer a long service life as they do not use organic materials.
• Micro/Mini-LED: Similar to OLED, screens with micro-LED tech­no­logy use pixels and subpixels that can light up and switch off in­de­pend­ently. However, unlike OLEDs, they are made of synthetic material rather than organic material and therefore, offer a longer shelf life. Micro-LED is also con­sidered a com­pet­it­or tech­no­logy to OLED.
• NanoCell: This is a tech­no­logy that is ex­clus­ively offered by the man­u­fac­turer LG. NanoCell screens match QLED screens in terms of their per­form­ance and technical features. They also use a backlight, in com­bin­a­tion with an ad­di­tion­al NanoCell layer.
• QD-OLED: QD-OLED tech­no­logy in­teg­rates the QLED quantum dots into OLED tech­no­logy. QD-OLED uses blue light-emitting diodes, rather than white, in com­bin­a­tion with a quantum dots layer of red and green QDs. This means there is no need for ad­di­tion­al colour filters. QD-OLED covers an even wider colour spectrum than con­ven­tion­al OLED screens and enables even higher viewing angle stability.

What role does OLED and QLED play for smart­phones?

The display quality is one of the deciding factors when choosing a smart­phone. High bright­ness, intense colours, good contrasts, and an ultra-sharp res­ol­u­tion are important. You will notice im­me­di­ately when comparing smart­phones for OLED and QLED that smart­phones do not usually offer QLED tech­no­logy. The choices will be LCD or OLED. The high-end flagships from leading mobile phone man­u­fac­tur­ers like Apple, Samsung and Google usually have displays with OLED tech­no­logy. OLED tech­no­logy exceeds LCDs featuring self-luminous pixels with high colour intensity and deep black tones.

You may notice when choosing a mobile phone that OLEDs are usually called AMOLED in the smart­phone sector. AMOLED stands for ‘Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode’. While OLED and AMOLED are not identical, they are very similar display tech­no­lo­gies, however, AMOLED is more developed. ‘Active Matrix’ makes it possible to control in­di­vidu­al pixels on the screen using a tran­sist­or. ‘Super AMOLED’ and ‘Super AMOLED Plus’ refer to further de­vel­op­ments of AMOLED with more light trans­mis­sion, better colour values and higher res­ol­u­tion.