OLED Televisions.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Notice these are being promoted. Are they a true LED TV, or just LCD with LED backlight?

[John Rumm]

The pixels are emmissive and need no back light - so yes they are "true" LED in that sens, even if you would not recognise the LED itself.

The main advantage is "perfect" black levels, wide viewing angles are ridiculously thin screens. Downside is eye watering prices at the moment, and some question over the longevity of the panels (especially the blue component)

[Chris French]

In message , "Dave Plowman (News)" writes

Yes. Organic Light Emmitting Diode.

No

[Tim Watts]

"OLED TV" generally means "every pixel is an LED" - like say a smartphone.

"LED TV" is often gratuitously misused to mean "LED backlit LCD" which have some advantages as they can modulate the LED backlighting by region to achieve better contrast, but is not true LED.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

It may mean that in practice - but there's no fundamental reason why OLED can't be used as a backlight.

It would be equally possible to make a TV using conventional LEDs - as some display screens do. Technology may allow this for domestic screens one day - who knows?

Having looked at the LG OLED spec, it's interesting it uses an extra white LED rather than just RGB, which suggests the colorimetry of the RGB might not be ideal.

[Dave Liquorice]

Or you don't have to drive the RGB ones so hard to get a given level of light. I shall have to take a closer look at the LED ad boards, I think they are only RGB clusters.

[Tim Watts]

Of course - I was making an observation about the way the term seems to be used by marketing droids.

My Samsung phone is OLED (as the last one was, Galaxy S2 then Note 3). It's got a brilliant little display - way in excess of what any LCD could achieve.

But little is the operative word. It would be great to have a 42" TV with the same display tech but I would assume right now that's going to cost a small fortune.

As "OLED" is marketed as "super premium LED display" it would be risky to pollute the term for mere backlighting.

I wonder if we are going down the route of printing and eventually we'll have several intermediate colours on the really high end displays?

[Tim Watts]

[Tangent]

Anyone remember the Tomorrow's World episode with the giant RGB panel that used GLS coloured lamps for the the pixels?

[Huge]

No, but I do remember this;

[Lee]

Clearly there is a difference, because others' say there is but my eyes can't see the difference* between the Galaxy S3, the Note 3 (other than higher res) and the lcd screen on, for example, an iPhone. Same with the otherwise identical Sony Vita OLED and LCD versions.

How this translates up to large displays I'm not sure, they don't look much different to me either, in the shop at least.

Decent LCD screens have pretty good blacks these days...

*The viewing angle advantage of OLED goes without saying of course, I'm talking about viewing front on.

When it comes to very small screen though, OLED is definitely more readable than LCD, I have one those fairly common little 1" 64*128 displays for a 'Duino project and it's amazingly easy to read despite being tiny :)

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Oh indeed. Trouble is when LED back lighting arrived, they weren't too eager to make sure it wasn't thought of as an LED TV.