If you have followed my recent flurry of old TV reviewer rants at sky features, you’ll know one of my big tasks this year has been reviewing a sea of Mini LED TVs.
Which is why this week I was delighted to get a slight change of pace and help our senior staff writer, Lewis Empson, test the swanky new LG C5.
Routine is great, but we all need a little variety every now and then.
In the course of our investigations, Lewis and I ran through our usual portfolio of comparative checks, running the new set head to head with rival products.
And as we went through our standard suite of test discs, I came to one conclusion as to why OLED still dominates the upper echelons of our best TV buying guide despite heavyweight companies, including Hisense and new “top dog” TCL’s efforts to push Mini LED.
It’s all to do with light control
Comparing any Mini LED with an OLED, you will find the latter will offer deeper blacks. This is because OLEDs have pixel-level light control, where the set charges individual pixels to create images.
Blacks are made by doing nothing at all – which is why all OLEDs offer perfect black levels.
Mini LED TVs by comparison, have a backlight. They use tiny LEDs arranged into zones that can light independently of one another; Mini LED TVs tend to have more zones than ‘standard’ LED TVs – we’re talking about a four-figure number on most models.
A 4K OLED TV, by comparison, essentially has over eight million ‘zones’ thanks to its ability to light each pixel independently.
Ultimately, while a Mini LED TV can create perfect black, it is rarely able to manage the feat, as there is usually some amount of light bleeding in from the part of the picture that is lit.
But it isn’t black level in itself that makes top end OLEDs perform better in these conditions. It’s the overall light control.
It’s all to do with consistency. Jump over to our reviews of the TCL C855K, Amazon Fire Mini LED, Hisense U8N and Hisense U7N and you’ll see one common complaint: they struggle to deal with intense scenes with a mix of very bright and very dark elements.
On the TCL C855K this results in distracting leaps where the backlight can’t control sections with enough finesse, leading to the entire screen either going too bright and looking flat, or awkwardly flipping its brightness, causing noticeable shifts to the picture.
On the others, including the Amazon Omni Fire TV Mini LED and Hisense U8N / U7N, light blooming crept in.
This is a phenomenon where there is a noticeable halo around light parts of the picture set over a dark background.
In each instance this led me to focus more on what the TV was doing, than what was happening in the movie on the Mini LED set I was reviewing – a cardinal sin for any home cinema product.
In comparison, the LG C5’s precision in managing every part of the picture creates an immersive, consistent experience that never made Lewis or me focus on the set’s background processing.
It’s this consistency with how the picture and contrast is handled by OLEDs that continues to differentiate them from Mini LEDs, which are still struggling to match that pixel-perfect precision in the top end of the market.
Will that change?
It’s hard to envision a backlit TV ever being able to match the consistent contrast control of a self-emissive pixel technology such as OLED; but that doesn’t mean Mini LED TVs don’t have their place. For starters, the cheaper manufacturing costs mean cheaper TVs for consumers, and that definitely strikes a chord with many buyers.
This is easily shown by TCL’s recent lead for sales in the premium TV market, despite the sea of (decent, but not perfect) four-star reviews we have given its sets.
I also am happy to report that, from a performance-per-pound / dollar perspective, Mini LED is the dominant player in the mid-range TV space. OLED is an inherently expensive technology to manufacture, so TVs with the impressive tech cost a premium.
But for buyers where performance is king, who want the best home cinema experience possible, and don’t mind paying for it, OLED remains the top option – and I can’t see that changing until Micro LED becomes affordable.
MORE:
These are the best 65-inch TVs we have reviewed
Our picks of the best OLED TVs
We rate the best Mini LED TVs money can buy
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