It’s almost a new year and LG is ready to celebrate with yet another new TV tech acronym: QNED Mini LED TV, a brand new series of televisions premiering at LG’s Virtual CES Expo on January 11, 2021. QNED TVs feature quantum dots. and LG’s NanoCell technology in their displays for improved brightness and color reproduction, but more importantly, these new TVs will also be powered by up to 30,000 mini LEDs adding more dimming zones than ever to this premium line-up.
Despite the buzz around these new QNED TVs, LG made sure they are still a step below the company’s flagship OLED TVs, offering emissive display technology that allows each individual pixel to be turned on and off independently for class-leading contrast between the brightest and darkest images on the screen. Although mini LEDs are smaller than traditional backlights, they are not “emitting displays” like OLED and Samsung’s new MicroLED technology, so they cannot create the same contrast level.
Still, the new QNED TVs can be a hit with those looking for a brighter alternative to OLED screens. We can also expect QNED TVs to be cheaper than comparable LG OLED TVs. Their most direct competitors today are TCL’s 8 Series mini LED TVs and Samsung’s QLED TVs.
“Our new QNED Mini LED series is a premium home entertainment option that expands and improves the LCD TV space and gives consumers great viewing choices again,” said Nam Ho-jun, senior vice president of R&D at LG’s Home Entertainment Company.
LG says the QNED lineup will include a total of 10 new 4K and 8K models for 2021, for a wide variety of screen sizes and price points. The top QNED TV, an 86-inch 8K monster, will feature up to 2,500 dimmable zones for exceptional contrast, along with (we expect) impressive clarity and color reproduction thanks to the mix of other display technologies such as quantum dots. To put things in perspective, this equates to a whopping 10 times the number of dimming zones you see on traditional LED TVs.
At the Virtual Expo on Jan. 11, LG will have a live showcase of its new 86-inch 8K QNED TV, which the company hopes will give it an edge over rivals like Samsung and TCL. We’ll have to wait and see if QNED can be proud of the other great Mini LED TVs available today, but LG’s other OLED and LED offerings give us confidence that the new alphabetical entry in the TV acronym library will be a worthy one .
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