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Comment by muska3 | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting. One thing I don't fully understand is the difference between mLED and uLED. As I understand, mLED have a an array of separately controllable backlights, but what exactly is uLED?

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miniLED means that they place small LED's that are basically equivalent to the present level of LED technology behind an LCD array. So instead of the normal LCD backlight design where you shoot LED light sideways from the LCD module edge into a series of films that direct the light from the sideways direction to the normal viewing axis direction, the LED's are placed in a regular grid behind the LCD array itself, but you need a large number of these mini LED's to cover the entire surface of the display panel, as well as some diffusers to reduce hotspots. The main advantage is that the peak brightness you could get using this technique could be quite high. And in a sense you can get high contrast ratios by selectively dimming certain zones. So comparing two zones the contrast can be quite high, but comparing within a zone the contrast ratio is still the same as a normal LCD. uLED means that you are attempting to place one LED chip for every pixel. Equivalent to how they build those large LED signs at sports arenas. In the smart phone situation, the LED chips would need to be crazy small -- on the order of say 10-50 microns -- so the name uLED (microLED) makes sense.

FALD has been a thing long since before mled was spun up. As far as I can tell, mled is just a marketing term for slightly higher number of dimming zones.

Mini led is supposed to be quite a lot higher number of zones, but it looks like the controllers / algorithms aren't ready yet. Regular FALD tvs generally have 16-800 zones.

The tcl 8 series tv is the only miniled one i know of, and has 25000 minileds.

Unfortunately they are grouped such that there are only about 900 zones, which is very disappointing. Hopefully the next generation of miniled will deliver the hype.

If the number of dimming zones approaches the number of pixels, that could make a pretty big difference.

Approaches, but very slowly. Jumping from 1000 zones to 10000 zones might seem impressive, but it is still pretty far cry from 8+ million pixels of a typical 4k screen.

The pixels are self-emitting (similar to OLED).

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