QLED vs. RGB vs. OLED and QD-OLED: Which TV Tech Is Best?
TV brands like LG, Samsung, and Sony use lots of jargon to market their sets. Understanding the terms can help you find a model you'll love at a great price.
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If you’re in the market for a new TV, you may find the process confusing because of all the technical jargon you need to wade through. TV brands use a veritable alphabet soup of acronyms, including LED, QLED, QNED, ULED, OLED, and QD-OLED.
All those terms describe how TV screens are built, and the technology has implications for how the picture will look.
Most TVs fall into one of two categories. OLED and QD-OLED displays can be grouped together in one camp, while the other group includes LED, QLED, QNED, and ULED screens—and, starting this year, RGB TVs, which are LCD/LED displays with a fresh way of displaying colors.
What Are LED and QLED TVs?
There are only two basic types of televisions: LCDs and OLEDs. We’ll start with LCDs, as they account for the majority of TVs on the market.
All LCD (liquid crystal display) TVs have a backlight that shines through a filter to produce colors. The backlight is always on, and the liquid crystals act like shutters, opening to allow light through for brighter parts of a scene and closing to block light in dark areas. Some light always escapes, though, which is why black tones on many LCD sets look grayish rather than truly black.
You’ll see references to LED TVs, but those are really LCD TVs; they just use LEDs in their backlights.
The term LED TV surfaced more than a decade ago when companies switched from using fluorescent (CCFL) lamps to LEDs (light-emitting diodes) in LCD TV backlights, mainly because LEDs could get brighter and last longer than fluorescent lamps. They also allowed TVs to be much thinner.
Initially, LED backlights were more expensive, so some companies seized the opportunity to market the sets to consumers as a new, improved type of TV. But they were still LCD sets.
Nowadays, any LCD TV you buy will rely on LEDs. At Consumer Reports, we sometimes refer to LCD/LED TVs to help consumers who have heard both terms, but in our labs, we call them LCD TVs.
Source: Samsung Display Source: Samsung Display
That brings us to QLED TVs. Those sets are LCD TVs, with one defining difference: They use quantum dots to produce colors.
QLED TVs from companies such as Amazon, Hisense, LG, Panasonic, Roku, Samsung, Sony, and TCL use a blue LED light source combined with a film embedded with tiny, nano-sized crystals called quantum dots. The quantum-dot film is sandwiched between the other layers of the LCD panel, replacing the color filter that was previously placed in front of the LED backlight.
When those tiny crystals are hit with the blue light from the backlight, they glow, emitting highly saturated primary colors that vary based on the size and composition of the quantum dot material. The system renders very accurate colors, even at higher brightness levels where colors can start to look a bit washed out.
You should also be aware of two LCD technology enhancements: local dimming and Mini LEDs, which often work together.
Local dimming divides a TV’s LED backlights into zones that can be dimmed or illuminated separately. That can help improve contrast and black levels. It works best with TVs that have full-array backlights, meaning that there are LEDs across the entire back of the set. In contrast, many less expensive LCD TVs on the market are edge-lit sets, with LED backlights along the edges of the display. Those sets may still use local dimming, but it tends to be less effective and can sometimes cause blooming, where halos of light appear around bright images shown against dark backgrounds.
Local dimming can work especially well in TVs that use Mini LEDs, an advancement in backlight technology. These sets use very small LEDs, and that lets companies cram more of them into the backlight. Because the LEDs are so small, you can have many dimmable zones—say, 1,000 or more instead of the dozens typically found in even the best LCD sets until recent years. And those zones can be precisely controlled to improve contrast and black levels and reduce halos.
This year, we’ll see another backlight improvement that uses Mini LEDs to enhance brightness and colors: RGB TVs. We’ll explain more about RGB sets below.
All this has created a new set of TV acronyms as companies give proprietary names to sets with quantum-dot and Mini LED backlights. LG, for example, markets its models with those features as QNED TVs. (However, not all QNED sets have Mini LEDs.) Samsung is calling them Neo QLED sets. Hisense uses the term ULED TVs for all its sets with quantum dots and Mini LED backlights. Both Amazon (Omni series) and Roku (Pro and Plus series) now offer Mini LED TVs, and all of TCL’s top 2025 and 2026 TV series feature Mini LED backlights.
OLED TVs, described below, have some inherent advantages over LCD sets. However, the best LCD/LED TVs now rival OLEDs in picture quality and high dynamic range (HDR) performance, helping TVs present brighter, more vivid images with greater contrast and a wider array of colors, much closer to what we see in real life.
What Are RGB TVs?
One of the biggest TV stories to come out of the CES tech show earlier this year was the arrival of so-called RGB Mini LED TVs from Hisense, LG, and Samsung.
These LCD-based sets, often referred to simply as RGB TVs, use thousands of tiny red, green, and blue LEDs in the backlight to create color directly, rather than relying on a white or blue backlight with color filters. As with other Mini LED TVs, they use local dimming, which allows each zone to be adjusted for both brightness and color. Samsung calls its version Micro RGB, LG uses the term Micro RGB evo, and Hisense brands them as RGB MiniLED TVs.
All RGB Mini LED TVs promise extremely high brightness—up to 10,000 nits in some cases—and a wider color range than current standards. By comparison, most 4K content is mastered at 1,000 nits, with some Dolby Vision titles hitting 4,000 nits, levels very few TVs can reach today. Once limited to massive, ultra-expensive displays, RGB TVs are now coming in more practical sizes, starting at 55 inches. Pricing will be announced later this spring.
LG plans Micro RGB evo models in 75-, 86-, and 100-inch sizes, while Hisense showed a 116-inch flagship 116UXS and says its more mainstream UR8 and UR9 series will span 55 to 100 inches. (The 116UXS is unusual in that it adds a fourth primary color—cyan.) Samsung, meanwhile, unveiled what it calls the world’s first 130-inch Micro RGB TV, the R95H, featuring a gallery-style design and floor-standing “Timeless Frame” stand, alongside smaller models starting at 55 inches.
TCL is taking a different tack this year. The company is offering one RGB TV in its RM9L Series. However, the company is mainly focusing on a different technology that it’s planning to pitch as direct competitor to RGB.
These new TCL sets appear in a flagship line called X11 SQD-Mini LED TV. They skip RGB’s colored LEDs in favor of a reformulated quantum dot layer—SQD, short for Super Quantum Dot—and a new color filter paired with a Mini LED backlight featuring thousands of local dimming zones—up to 20,000, according to TCL. The company claims peak brightness of up to 10,000 nits, along with a wider color range and better accuracy.
Across the board, these TCL sets will probably cost more than conventional Mini LED sets. We have details on just one so far: The 75-inch SQD-Mini LED TV will be priced around $6,000.
Meanwhile, the rise of RGB Mini LED TVs has pushed another promising technology, MicroLED, into the background. MicroLED sets don’t use a backlight at all; each pixel is made up of self-emissive red, green, and blue LEDs, allowing for pixel-level control similar to what OLED provide. They have the potential for excellent contrast and color. At CES, Hisense showed a 163-inch MicroLED TV that adds a yellow subpixel to the usual RGB mix.
What Are OLED TVs?
At Consumer Reports, we’ve been evaluating OLED TVs for almost a decade, and those sets have consistently ranked at the very top of our ratings.
OLED stands for “organic light-emitting diode.” In an OLED TV, each individual pixel emits its own light, eliminating the need for a separate backlight. Because each individual pixel can transition from bright to fully off, OLED TVs can generate high-contrast images with truly deep black tones.
Source: Samsung Display Source: Samsung Display
Until a few years ago, all OLED TVs from companies such as LG, Sony, and Vizio utilized a variant of the technology known as WOLED. (This is the rare TV acronym that hasn’t been used in advertising.) Those sets feature a white OLED light source and color filters that produce the red, green, and blue colors of the spectrum. You can see the panel structure of that type of TV in the image above.
Because color filters absorb some light, those sets add a white subpixel that bypasses the color filter to increase brightness. The downside is that at the very high brightness levels required for some HDR content, that extra white subpixel can sometimes make colors look a bit washed out.
In the past, OLED TVs lacked the kind of peak brightness we see in the best LCD sets. However, they’ve been getting brighter, and over the last few years, we’ve seen some OLED TVs that can approach the peak brightness levels of the best LCD TVs. Last year’s LG G5-series sets and Panasonic’s flagship Z95B sets used a new "four-stack" OLED panel, making them among the brightest OLED TVs we’ve tested. This year, LG will offer that technology—now called Primary Tandem RGB—in its largest C6H models as well as its flagship G6-series models.
Not to be confused with RGB Mini LED TVs, in this new OLED panel technology, the red and green layers are sandwiched between two blue layers. The companies say that separating the red, green, and blue elements enables TVs to produce brighter images with greater color purity. TVs using that new technology have done very well in our tests.
What Are QD-OLED TVs?
These TVs came on the market a few years ago. QD-OLED TVs excel at producing extra brightness, especially when they are displaying highly saturated colors.
The first two letters stand for quantum dots. Years ago, quantum dots were used only in LCD-based sets. However, both Samsung and Sony introduced QD-OLED TVs in 2022, and Sharp followed shortly after. These sets represent a hybrid approach that marries the advantages of traditional OLED TVs—high contrast, deep blacks, and unlimited viewing angles—with the higher peak brightness and more vibrant colors typically found in QLED TVs.
Source: Samsung Display Source: Samsung Display
Just like QLED TVs, QD-OLED sets start with a blue light source and use quantum-dot material to produce red and green light. But since they are OLEDs, the light source is actually each individual pixel.
Because QD-OLED TVs don’t use color filters in front of the light source, they have the potential to reach higher peak brightness levels without losing any contrast.
In 2025, we saw continued improvements that are allowing both WOLED sets and QD-OLED TVs to hit higher brightness levels and help boost HDR performance.
Several TVs introduced last year, including higher-end models from LG, Samsung, and Sony, offer higher peak brightness levels than earlier sets, enabling them to deliver a very satisfying HDR experience.
More broadly, the best TVs in any category these days can combine high peak brightness with impressive black levels, plus vibrant, accurate colors and bright screens. That’s true for both LCDs and OLEDs. If you’re shopping for a television, you have more top-flight choices than ever before.
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