What is Mini LED?
Blaze Display Technology Co., Ltd. | Updated: Nov 27, 2018
What is Mini LED?
Mini LED is a type of screen tech found mostly in TV displays. Nowadays most of the major TV makers, like Philips, TCL, LG and Samsung, all have Mini LED TVs available to buy or they’re building new ones with Mini LED’s backlight tech inside them.
Simply put, Mini LED is a more efficient, and more effective way of backlighting an LCD screen.
Officially a diode no bigger than 0.2mm can be classed as ‘mini’ – but this is the consumer electronics industry we’re dealing with here, and you can expect the word ‘mini’ to be used quite loosely. The basic principle, though, is that smaller LED diodes allow for more LED diodes.
Fitting more, and smaller, LED diodes behind the LCD pixels means images can be brighter. It means backlighting control can be more targeted and precise. It should allow for better control, which ought to mean less backlight bleed and stronger contrasts.
Why does Mini LED matter?
If it’s deployed effectively, Mini LED backlighting should allow LCD panels to get much closer to OLED levels of performance than has been possible before. These theoretical advantages are pretty compelling.
And, of course, that’s without OLED’s perceived problems: LED/LCD technology has never been the subject of screen-burn scare stories, nor does it fall prey to the eventual but inevitable drop-off in performance that’s the price of the ‘organic’ element of OLED.
Of course, the success of Mini LED will come down to the way the technology is implemented. There’s a lot of variation in the performance of similarly priced, similarly specified LED-backlit LCD screens - you only have to have a quick glance at our numerous TV reviews to see that. And if some TVs are found wanting when it comes to controlling a few dozen backlight dimming zones, can they really be expected to be any better when they have control of what could be thousands?
Apple pursuing Mini LED for its 12.9-inch iPad Pro 2021, making for 600 nits of brightness, and its latest MacBook Pro 14-inch (2021) will only raise awareness and hype for the technology too.
