II can’t decide, everything is so colorful here,” Nina Hagen sang four decades ago. Since then, the TV confusion has increased drastically: anyone who wants to buy a new television today has to deal with a tangle of abbreviations that would have even upset the grande dame of German punk. Should it be a Nanocell? And what is mini LED? Or full array LEDs? Is QLED better than OLED? What is NeoQLED? We want to sort through this marketing lyric a little, in time for the real market launch of all those innovations that the big manufacturers are using to advertise the coming season.
Fortunately, the following still applies: Almost all screen variants can be assigned to two families. By far the largest of the two works according to the LCD principle, the smaller uses pixels of the OLED type. Especially in the LCD warehouse, technical refinements ensure quality differentiation with corresponding abbreviations – but first to the elementary differences. The pixels of LCD screens are illuminated like tiny slides by a separate light source. A layer of filigree cells filled with liquid crystals and controlled by wafer-thin electrodes defines the brightness of each individual pixel. Additional filters color the light dots in the primary colors red, green and blue. The liquid crystals give this technology its name. OLED screens compose images with tiny, self-illuminating semiconductors made from organic material, resulting in stunning picture quality – natural colors and deep blacks where the scene demands it. Most importantly, the colors of OLED screens look equally good from any viewing angle. LCD TVs, on the other hand, tend to lose luminosity and color fidelity when viewed from the side. So are these screens superior to their counterparts in LCD technology? After all, almost all major manufacturers in the upper price ranges offer OLED.