This year’s announcement of new TVs was dominated by sets using next-gen RGB LED tech or new brighter OLED screens – but TCL also slipped in a new kind of tech that it calls ‘SQD Mini LED’, used on its flagship TV this year, called the X11L.
The idea with SQD Mini LED is to deliver the super-rich color advantages that RGB TV tech promises, but that also takes advantage of all of the advances made in existing mini-LED tech over the last few years.
Here’s a quick run-down on the differences between regular mini-LED, SQD Mini LED, and RGB Mini LED (which TCL is also using in some TVs this year – just not the X11L):
Regular mini-LED and SQD Mini LED both use a single-color backlight (blue in the case of SQD Mini LED, white or blue in general for mini-LED TVs). All mini-LED TVs also include a quantum dot layer over the pixels, which is an additional color filter designed to help increase color range. The difference with SQD Mini LED is that it uses a more advanced version of quantum dots, which should be both more efficient and capable of an even broader range of colors.
RGB Mini LED uses a multi-colored backlight instead of a single-color light. Each light element is capable of showing a huge range of colors thanks to being made up of individual red, green and blue sub-LEDs. This means the light doesn’t need to be filtered as strongly when it passes through the pixel layer, which means there’s no need for a quantum dot layer. As a result, it offers a very wide range of colors and should be very efficient.
As I mentioned above, TCL is making TVs with all three of the above technologies this…