Shopping for NEW TV | Mini LED - not just yet?

[tomini]

Hello,

my father has been enduring with old Samsung TV (PS50A457P1DXXH), that isn't even 1080p I believe, but as it was a plasma and those blacks to this day are really good, he kept it.

 

Finally Mini LED looks like the best of both worlds. HDR, true blacks and no burn-in!

Plasma suffered from burn-in, but after like 14 or whatever years nothing burned permanently. Few of my friends with OLEDs have permanent ghosts of HUD and stuff after 5 years and that is why I steered my father away from OLED to this very day.

 

I looked around and on-display (in terms of Mini LED) they had only some Samsung for 1900€, which is frankly too much. He would like to pay 800-1100€ at max. The less the better...

I've seen some TCL and Hisense that were around that price and from what I know the only places you can source panels that big is Samsung and LG.

But if only they can offer prices that low... There has to be a catch.

 

So is it too early and the tech is still expensive?

 

Besides the budget of 800-1100€, the size should be 55" or bigger, capable of gaming (I've heard some TVs had awful input lag) and great HDR. We have Nvidia Shield, so OS doesn't really matter.

Basically looking for a TV that will be replaced only if it dies. He loves movies and games a lot.

The final showdown between like two/three models would be probably decided by the remote and OS as some have aaaaawful input selection and such...

 

Thank you

[seanondemand]

When you compare something like the Hisense U8H to a Samsung or LG with a similar feature set, generally the main trade off is processing - upscaling won’t come out as well, noise reduction won’t be as effective, that kind of thing. But you won’t find a better panel for your money. 

[tomini]

12 minutes ago, seanondemand said:

When you compare something like the Hisense U8H to a Samsung or LG with a similar feature set, generally the main trade off is processing - upscaling won’t come out as well, noise reduction won’t be as effective, that kind of thing. But you won’t find a better panel for your money. 

I expect upscaling be worse or not even detecting stuff like 240p or 480i (retro consoles), but what do you mean about "noise reduction"?

And "But you won’t find a better panel for your money." you mean Mini LED in general?

 

It solely depends on my advice. I would wait, but the plasma is drawing something absurd last time I checked... I wouldn't be surprised if after year of use it would be 10-15% of the Mini LED price just in electricity bill.

 

Thanks.

[seanondemand]

17 minutes ago, tomini said:

I expect upscaling be worse or not even detecting stuff like 240p or 480i (retro consoles), but what do you mean about "noise reduction"?

And "But you won’t find a better panel for your money." you mean Mini LED in general?

 

It solely depends on my advice. I would wait, but the plasma is drawing something absurd last time I checked... I wouldn't be surprised if after year of use it would be 10-15% of the Mini LED price just in electricity bill.

 

Thanks.

Take a look at some reviewers like rtings.com that have done testing and give recommendations based on things like budget - based on their testing on the U8H, which might be the lowest priced mini-led panel you can get on a given day, in terms of picture quality it is the leader in its category (although they haven’t tested its U8K successor yet). But, it can experience some colour banding and some minor artifacting that TV dorks might notice, which is a processing thing that a bigger brand can spend big money to avoid. For your dad it would probably never be an issue. 

[tomini]

9 hours ago, seanondemand said:

Take a look at some reviewers like rtings.com that have done testing and give recommendations based on things like budget - based on their testing on the U8H, which might be the lowest priced mini-led panel you can get on a given day, in terms of picture quality it is the leader in its category (although they haven’t tested its U8K successor yet). But, it can experience some colour banding and some minor artifacting that TV dorks might notice, which is a processing thing that a bigger brand can spend big money to avoid. For your dad it would probably never be an issue. 

Hold up, I thought Mini LED (besides other benefits) takes HDR to the next level because it ditches traditional dimming zones and each pixel is a diming zone by itself...

But this user points out that his Hisense has huge boxes of lights around subtitles and states the exact number of dimming zones. The retail eshop doesn't mention dimming zones or the number of them anywhere on product page.

 

The quote from link (in case subreddit goes on strike):

Quote

This last one just kills me. It was a HUGE letdown. The dimming zones on the U8HQ are HUMONGOUS!! The subtitles lit up a huge block of white on the bottom. Any isolated object on a black background transforms into a back light bleed square, and even small peak brightness zones, for example, sun shining on some ones faces transforms the skin tone from whatever it is to a LOT colder tone.

The specs say 65U8H - 504 dimming zones, 65U8HQ - 160 dimming zones. I believe this says it all.

 

[seanondemand]

5 hours ago, tomini said:

Hold up, I thought Mini LED (besides other benefits) takes HDR to the next level because it ditches traditional dimming zones and each pixel is a diming zone by itself...

But this user points out that his Hisense has huge boxes of lights around subtitles and states the exact number of dimming zones. The retail eshop doesn't mention dimming zones or the number of them anywhere on product page.

 

The quote from link (in case subreddit goes on strike):

 

Confusingly, the U8HQ is the euro spec of the TV, with an IPS panel and 160 dimming zones, while the North American spec is VA, 500 zones, so much less blooming. 
 

Important to note that miniled is not microled a la Samsung’s The Wall, miniled is hundreds of dimming zones, not thousands or hundreds of thousands. It’s an improvement on led, but it’s not truly an OLED competitor. Still, looks great for 90% of people, just not “high-end” for tv nerds. 

[tomini]

38 minutes ago, seanondemand said:

Confusingly, the U8HQ is the euro spec of the TV, with an IPS panel and 160 dimming zones, while the North American spec is VA, 500 zones, so much less blooming. 
 

Important to note that miniled is not microled a la Samsung’s The Wall, miniled is hundreds of dimming zones, not thousands or hundreds of thousands. It’s an improvement on led, but it’s not truly an OLED competitor. Still, looks great for 90% of people, just not “high-end” for tv nerds. 

Oh, so I was mistaken. Well, then it's not very good...

Father wants deep true blacks and no blooming. He sort of is TV nerd, he just lacks the knowledge and energy to dig into what is best.

And I don't blame him, on paper all the TVs look identical! 

 

So wait for Micro LED? Or go with Mini LED? What would you do?

I don't want him to buy an OLED (or AMOLED) as from my circle of friends I've seen them in various horrific states and they didn't have them cranked in terms of brightness, had image retention prevention ON and still...

 

Like I said before, he wants an end-game TV. There is a small chance I could convince him to go above to ~1500€ or higher, but damn... I was certain Mini LED was the tech from "The Wall" from LTT. Too bad.

[seanondemand]

Yeah, without going to OLED you're not going to get perfect blacks/absolutely zero blooming. But, it looks like the TCL QM8 (sold in the UK as C935 from what I can tell at £1,399 for a 65") has 1080 dimming zones in a 65" which is seriously impressive at that price, and aside from not being great for a really wide space (not great viewing angles) it seems to have excellent picture quality according to reviews, particularly for the price. 

[tomini]

10 minutes ago, seanondemand said:

Yeah, without going to OLED you're not going to get perfect blacks/absolutely zero blooming. But, it looks like the TCL QM8 (sold in the UK as C935 from what I can tell at £1,399 for a 65") has 1080 dimming zones in a 65" which is seriously impressive at that price, and aside from not being great for a really wide space (not great viewing angles) it seems to have excellent picture quality according to reviews, particularly for the price. 

C935 is named same here, too. 65" for 1539€ and 75" for 1988€.

I feel like >2000 zones should be a minimum for good HDR...

Spoiler

Do you have an OLED? Or TV at all...?

[seanondemand]

3 minutes ago, tomini said:

Do you have an OLED? Or TV at all...?

Might be able to find an LG C2 on a sale, not a lot of changes on this year's C3 so the C2 is an OLED value pick.

[saintlouisbagels]

2 hours ago, tomini said:

C935 is named same here, too. 65" for 1539€ and 75" for 1988€.

I feel like >2000 zones should be a minimum for good HDR...

You're kind of talking about 2 different things.

 

True blacks and zero blooming is only achievable with OLED. Does your father actually care about blooming? I've been perfectly happy with 65" televisions with only 200 dimming zones because I don't notice blooming - I'm too busy being immersed in the content.

 

HDR is about having a wider colour gamut and displaying higher details and colour accuracy in very bright and dimly lit scenes.

The intensity of the HDR is definitely determined by having insane brightness. But for me, I'm happy with low brightness HDR and OLED televisions. The color improvement is marginal, and I don't care about being blinded by the intensity of the sun, but it's nice to see extra detail in dark shows like The Witcher.

 

One example I read to demonstrate the usefulness of HDR happens in Avengers: Infinity War.

Iron Men and Pepper Potts are walking outside in a park in a brightly lit day. SDR shows almost no detail in the sky, while HDR is capable of showing the clouds.

[tomini]

7 minutes ago, saintlouisbagels said:

You're kind of talking about 2 different things.

 

True blacks and zero blooming is only achievable with OLED. Does your father actually care about blooming? I've been perfectly happy with 65" televisions with only 200 dimming zones because I don't notice blooming - I'm too busy being immersed in the content.

 

HDR is about having a wider colour gamut and displaying higher details and colour accuracy in very bright and dimly lit scenes.

The intensity of the HDR is definitely determined by having insane brightness. But for me, I'm happy with SDR and OLED televisions. The color improvement is marginal, and I don't care about being blinded by the intensity of the sun.

 

One example I read to demonstrate the usefulness of HDR happens in Avengers: Infinity War.

Iron Men and Pepper Potts are walking outside in a park in a brightly lit day. SDR shows almost no detail in the sky, while HDR is capable of showing the clouds.

I want him to upgrade, not downgrade. I would feel bad for recommending something that could be distracting to him.

 

Have you experienced proper HDR? It's really pleasing to look at and not a "bonus", rather how it actually should look. When movie or game has scene in cave and there is a light on the end of the tunnel or shootout in dark... With HDR and local dimming it's spectacular.

 

Oh, sorry. My bad, you are describing just that now
I hate to look at him still watching stuff on that 200W plasma that heats the room more than the in-wall heating, but on the other hand if Micro LED or something that would fit what I described is around the corner (1-3 years), it would be shame to buy something that will die. Just like plasma did when he bought it...

 

Frankly 99% of the BluRays we have are SDR, but that's not important. The best worthwhile stuff can be re-bought in HDR version, no need to swap whole collection...

 

I guess I will have to do some more research as I see that there is A LOT of display tech and backlight combos, and as it seems I was going only for the backlight spec. Pick like 3 models and ask the shop for a preview of them is the best option I guess.

[saintlouisbagels]

3 hours ago, tomini said:

Have you experienced proper HDR? It's really pleasing to look at and not a "bonus", rather how it actually should look. When movie or game has scene in cave and there is a light on the end of the tunnel or shootout in dark... With HDR and local dimming it's spectacular.

Yeah... those very specific situations requiring super bright 1000/2000 nits don't make a television show or prestige film in any way better to me.

But seeing extra details in super dark shows like Game of Thrones, The Witcher, House of the Dragon? Yeah HDR is dope. I have an OLED television (LG C1) and I have a collection of 4K HDR blu-ray films and an Apple TV 4K (2nd gen, with Dolby Vision), so I know what HDR is and I regularly go to Dolby Cinema theaters. I just do not care about this obsession with blinding lights. Is there a correlation between gamers, RGB, and HDR1000 ?

 

[tomini]

7 hours ago, saintlouisbagels said:

Yeah... those very specific situations requiring super bright 1000/2000 nits don't make a television show or prestige film in any way better to me.

But seeing extra details in super dark shows like Game of Thrones, The Witcher, House of the Dragon? Yeah HDR is dope. I have an OLED television (LG C1) and I have a collection of 4K HDR blu-ray films and an Apple TV 4K (2nd gen, with Dolby Vision), so I know what HDR is and I regularly go to Dolby Cinema theaters. I just do not care about this obsession with blinding lights. Is there a correlation between gamers, RGB, and HDR1000 ?

 

I didn't mean blinding lights. I don't think it even should work like that... I meant that you don't have a scene that looks like you are going to heaven, because you can see the end of the cave, but still can see the walls and not just black and only black.

However the TV will be in living room, so 1000 nits should be minimum I think as sometimes it's quite bright there during the day.

[dalekphalm]

IMO if "true blacks" and no blooming are really what your father wants, OLED is pretty much his only option, since MicroLED are still absurdly expensive.

 

MiniLED is honestly just a fancy marketing term for dimmable backlight zones. That's literally it. Now, with that in mind, the most high end MiniLED backlights do have a LOT of zones (Samsung's flagship MiniLED, the QN95C reportedly has around 1344 dimming zones for reference - about double the QN95B predecessor, as compared to a low end MiniLED which might have 150-200 zones).

 

That's a lot, but a true OLED or MicroLED will have equal number of zones as pixels, so a 4K OLED TV will have roughly 7.5 million zones.

 

Personally I own a Sony A80J 4K OLED (55" Model) and I've yet to experience any ghosting, image burn or image retention. It's almost 2 years old now. If MicroLED is too expensive (Which, it probably is - last I checked, Samsung's cheapest model was something like $80,000), your only option is either OLED, or extremely high end MiniLED (which will get you into a similar cost point as OLED).

[saintlouisbagels]

2 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

MiniLED is honestly just a fancy marketing term for dimmable backlight zones. That's literally it. Now, with that in mind, the most high end MiniLED backlights do have a LOT of zones (Samsung's flagship MiniLED, the QN95C reportedly has around 1344 dimming zones for reference - about double the QN95B predecessor, as compared to a low end MiniLED which might have 150-200 zones).

Come on now, let's not simplify tech terms with misinformation.

We had Full Array Local Dimming (and therefore dimming zones) way before MiniLED was a thing.

It wasn't great; like 32-64 zones for mid-range televisions and 128 zones if you were spending over $1000. Back in 2017, my Vizio 65" with around 128 dimming zones was ~$1800. 1-2 years later, my friend bought one for $1200 with even more zones.

 

I don't get why you're using the word literally in your explanation when, literally speaking, MiniLED is... a smaller LED. Which of course, led to more dimming zones.

 

What a time to be alive that there are many MiniLED options on the market just half-a-decade later at half the price for 4x the performance

[seanondemand]

5 hours ago, saintlouisbagels said:

Come on now, let's not simplify tech terms with misinformation.

We had Full Array Local Dimming (and therefore dimming zones) way before MiniLED was a thing.

It wasn't great; like 32-64 zones for mid-range televisions and 128 zones if you were spending over $1000. Back in 2017, my Vizio 65" with around 128 dimming zones was ~$1800. 1-2 years later, my friend bought one for $1200 with even more zones.

 

I don't get why you're using the word literally in your explanation when, literally speaking, MiniLED is... a smaller LED. Which of course, led to more dimming zones.

 

What a time to be alive that there are many MiniLED options on the market just half-a-decade later at half the price for 4x the performance

I think what he might be getting at though is that "miniLED" used to be something like a MacBook Pro's ~2500 dimming zones across a 16" screen, which is truly going to make a difference with blooming and contrast, and now a high-end "miniLED" TV has 1000-1500 dimming zones across a 75" screen. It's become watered-down.

Edited July 26, 2023 by seanondemand
grammar

[tomini]

6 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

IMO if "true blacks" and no blooming are really what your father wants, OLED is pretty much his only option, since MicroLED are still absurdly expensive.

 

MiniLED is honestly just a fancy marketing term for dimmable backlight zones. That's literally it. Now, with that in mind, the most high end MiniLED backlights do have a LOT of zones (Samsung's flagship MiniLED, the QN95C reportedly has around 1344 dimming zones for reference - about double the QN95B predecessor, as compared to a low end MiniLED which might have 150-200 zones).

 

That's a lot, but a true OLED or MicroLED will have equal number of zones as pixels, so a 4K OLED TV will have roughly 7.5 million zones.

 

Personally I own a Sony A80J 4K OLED (55" Model) and I've yet to experience any ghosting, image burn or image retention. It's almost 2 years old now. If MicroLED is too expensive (Which, it probably is - last I checked, Samsung's cheapest model was something like $80,000), your only option is either OLED, or extremely high end MiniLED (which will get you into a similar cost point as OLED).

Could you share how you use your Sony TV? I am really worried about HUD and logos burning in or from time to time you have to just blast away and leave the TV sitting on menu unintentionally... Like I said, I don't have baseless prejudice against OLED. I've seen a few at buddies places and uniform color is always frightening to look at, especially the color grey. I can see the news station logo in pretty well and even faint box where the title of topic is...

2 hours ago, seanondemand said:

I think what he might be getting at though is that "miniLED" used to be something like a MacBook Pro's ~2500 dimming zones across a 16" screen, which is truly going to make a difference with blooming and contrast, and a high-end "miniLED" TV's 1000-1500 dimming zones across a 75" screen. It's become watered-down.

I thought wrong. I must have mixed up MicroLED back when Linus wanted that The Wall thingy, but you might be onto something. Maybe the marketing from one brand/product got into my subconsciousness.

                                              

Anyway... From the looks of it, >2000 zones should be minimum for an experience that won't lead to buyer's remorse just year or two down the line.

If you (@dalekphalm) say that my doubts and worries about OLED are wrong, then I will look at it. If there are some lab tests of burn-in, I'd love to take a look at them. (Rtings' long-term test pretty much encapsulates the situations I saw at friends' houses.)

Any tips would be welcome, too!

[dalekphalm]

17 hours ago, saintlouisbagels said:

Come on now, let's not simplify tech terms with misinformation.

We had Full Array Local Dimming (and therefore dimming zones) way before MiniLED was a thing.

It wasn't great; like 32-64 zones for mid-range televisions and 128 zones if you were spending over $1000. Back in 2017, my Vizio 65" with around 128 dimming zones was ~$1800. 1-2 years later, my friend bought one for $1200 with even more zones.

It's not misinformation, but it is just literally an evolution of existing technology. There's nothing inherently different about MiniLED technology other than they were able to reduce the size of the LED's to add more zones.

 

Unlike MicroLED, which is fundamentally different because each MicroLED is really 3 individual light emitting LED's that are colourized.

17 hours ago, saintlouisbagels said:

I don't get why you're using the word literally in your explanation when, literally speaking, MiniLED is... a smaller LED. Which of course, led to more dimming zones.

 

What a time to be alive that there are many MiniLED options on the market just half-a-decade later at half the price for 4x the performance

The fact that MiniLED and more expansive dimming zones is a thing on the market is a good thing, yes, absolutely. Especially as it enters the low end market - there's going to be a time very soon where basically every TV has dimmable zones - 10 years ago, that wasn't the case.

 

Granted, I think there's a minimum useful number of zones to get a good result in my own opinion - and older "non MiniLED" style dimmable zones often suffered from horrendous lighting zones where if something bright came on the screen, a square a significant portion of the screen would light up. In my personal opinion, that's worse than no dimmable zones because at least with no dimmable zones, as it's more uniform.

 

I don't have enough experience with various displays to tell you where that magic line lives though - but I'd probably guess that something in the mid-hundreds would be the useful minimum where the zone is small enough to not be overly distracting.

13 hours ago, tomini said:

Could you share how you use your Sony TV? I am really worried about HUD and logos burning in or from time to time you have to just blast away and leave the TV sitting on menu unintentionally... Like I said, I don't have baseless prejudice against OLED. I've seen a few at buddies places and uniform color is always frightening to look at, especially the color grey. I can see the news station logo in pretty well and even faint box where the title of topic is...

I use it with movies, TV, and occasional gaming. I'm not gaming on it constantly, but my primary media device is an Xbox One S, which has an overlay. I have power saving features setup on the Xbox that will turn itself off after I believe 5 minutes of being idle, so that helps to reduce the risk of burn in. I've also fully enabled all burn-in protection features on the TV itself.

 

If you're sitting on a news station all day long, that definitely could lead to burn in or some image retention. Plasma TV's suffered from the same issues though, so if your fathers old Plasma TV didn't have that issue, I wouldn't be overly worried about OLED. It really comes down to his viewing habits. If he's going to be careless and leave the TV running all night long on CNN or another 24-hour news channel, yeah - that's gonna cause burn in on an OLED.

 

If you'd like to see real world testing, check this out there:

https://www.rtings.com/tv/learn/real-life-oled-burn-in-test

 

They recently started a new test designed to test modern gen OLED's, which can be found here:

https://www.rtings.com/tv/tests/longevity-test

 

They have video updates I believe to get the latest test results. You might need to poke around on their website to find them.

13 hours ago, tomini said:

I thought wrong. I must have mixed up MicroLED back when Linus wanted that The Wall thingy, but you might be onto something. Maybe the marketing from one brand/product got into my subconsciousness.

Could be - the terms are so similar that it's very understandable to mix up MiniLED and MicroLED.

13 hours ago, tomini said:

                                              

Anyway... From the looks of it, >2000 zones should be minimum for an experience that won't lead to buyer's remorse just year or two down the line.

2000 zones is a LOT for MiniLED - but if you can find one within your budget that has that many zones, I doubt you'll regret the decision.

13 hours ago, tomini said:

If you (@dalekphalm) say that my doubts and worries about OLED are wrong, then I will look at it. If there are some lab tests of burn-in, I'd love to take a look at them. (Rtings' long-term test pretty much encapsulates the situations I saw at friends' houses.)

Any tips would be welcome, too!

Please check out the links above - I don't want you to take my word for it. Only you can decide if OLED is good enough, and burn-in is not going to be a problem. I'm not going to get offended or upset if you decide you don't want to take the risk, and decide to go with MiniLED instead. Personally I'm very happy with my OLED, and it shows no signs of burn in yet, but we'll see how happy I am in 3-5 more years!

[cmndr]

TLDR: good mini-LED and OLED will both be good, both will probably last about as long. mini-LED wins in bright rooms that are hard to light control. OLED wins otherwise. 

 

I have a QN90A, which is one of the better mini-LED based displays out there. It's mostly good, but like everything else it isn't perfect. 

If I had it to do over again, I probably would've bought a budget unit from Hisense or TCL. They're not too far off in image quality. You can then upgrade 2x as often at the same cost. 

I think solid mini-LED units are the way to go for desktop displays and OLEDs are the way to go for TVs/movies at this point. 

At this point burn in on OLEDs isn't as big of a deal as a few years ago, though I suspect we're still a few years out from it being a 99% solved problem. For what it's worth phones are MOSTLY OLED these days and no one worries about burn in the way they did 10 years back. TVs can get brighter and hotter than phones, but they're still mostly fine. 


At this point I think my biggest TV regret is size. I kind of wish I went for a 75" display. I might end up buying a bigger TV the next time I move.