Mini-LED Made Affordable

IN LATE 2019, TCL flew me to the company’s U.S. offices in California to spend an afternoon with its new flagship, the 75Q825 8-Series Roku LCD Ultra HDTV, a 75-inch 4K model.

- Thomas J. Norton

Not all of that particular set’s firmware was complete at the time, but Sound & Vision took advantage of the opportunity to give our readers a sneak preview. The 75Q825’s signature feature was TCL’s use of mini-LEDs for backlighting, and at its then price of $3,000, it was something of an outlier for a brand typically associated with budget TVs.

Fast forward one year and we have the 65R635 6-Series Roku LCD Ultra HDTV, a 65-inch model that the company shipped us for review. Like their 8-Series siblings, the latest 6-Series models feature a mini-LED backlight, but at $1,000, the 65R635 represents a considerably more affordable option. (Don’t confuse mini-LED with the MicroLED technology that’s currently available only at nosebleed prices. As with any LED/ LCD set, the TLC’s mini-LEDs are used as the backlighting for an LCD imaging panel.)

Since mini-LEDs are much smaller than conventional LEDs, thousands of them can be squeezed into a display. This creates more uniform backlighting than conventional LEDs are capable of, but due to cost considerations, current sets lack the processing power needed to let each mini- LED act as its own local dimming zone. Instead, the mini-LEDs are arranged into clusters, with each cluster acting as an independently controlled zone. TCL claims a maximum of 240 local dimming zones for the 6-Series, with “maximum” likely referring to the largest, 75-inch model. For the 65-inch 6-Series set I measured 160 zones—still an impressive number.

TCL won’t be alone in offering mini-LED for long since sets using the backlight technology were announced from other manufacturers, including Samsung and LG, at the 2021 CES. TCL itself has announced that the upcoming 6-Series for 2021 will be exclusively 8K. No word, as I write, as to how that might impact set prices.