Mini-LED TVs have become commonplace in the television market in recent years. All major smart TV manufacturers offer mini-LED TVs in their product portfolio, and the technology has trickled down to some of the most affordable TVs. If we zoom out and look at the major screen types such as LCD, OLED and QLED, mini-LED TVs are very similar to modern LCD screens. However, instead of relying on conventional LEDs for backlighting, they use even smaller LEDs, giving them better control over localized dimming and increasing their overall brightness. Some of the best mini LEDs offer serious competition to their OLED counterparts, known for their impressive picture quality.
Despite the many benefits offered by mini-LED technology, mini-LED TVs are not without notable drawbacks, such as narrower viewing angles and blurring, which can impact your overall viewing experience. It’s important to understand these drawbacks if you’re shopping for a new smart TV and don’t want any nasty surprises once you unbox your brand new TV.
Black people can appear gray
An inherent disadvantage of mini-LED TVs (or any TV with an LED backlight system) is that they rely on LED backlighting to illuminate the images you see on the screen. The lack of self-emitting pixels, such as those found in OLED TVs, forces them to take advantage of local dimming to turn off the backlight in certain parts of the screen to try to get closer to true black. However, because even the most expensive mini-LED TVs have far fewer dimming zones than available pixels, they aren’t able to offer perfect light control to produce the inky blacks you get with OLED panels. As a result, parts of a scene that should be dark or black can often have a grayish tint.
More importantly, the quality of this black performance may vary depending on the number of dimming zones and the manufacturer’s dimming algorithm. While the most expensive mini-LED TVs typically have thousands of dimming zones managed by superior algorithms, budget models only have a few dozen or a few hundred. As a result, blacks will appear much deeper on more expensive mini-LED TVs than on their affordable counterparts. Since black performance is one of the main factors determining a TV’s contrast ratio, the visual “pop” and color depth you experience will depend heavily on the local dimming zones of the TV you choose.
Blooming and black crushing are notable concerns
Another disadvantage of mini-LEDs that arises from the presence of a backlight is blooming. This is essentially a display artifact in which the backlight shining behind isolated bright objects “bleeds” into surrounding darker areas. The reason for this is simple: because mini-LED TVs have a finite number of local dimming zones, they are not able to precisely target light to an individual pixel without it spreading to darker surrounding areas. This is most noticeable with small, bright highlights in a scene and also appears around subtitles, as these are often stark white against a black background.
The severity of blooming can vary depending on the number of dimming zones, with a higher number of zones resulting in tighter light control and less light loss. Although excessive blooming can be distracting, you generally won’t notice light blooming when you’re absorbed in a piece of content. In contrast, there is no glare on OLED TVs because they can precisely target lighting at the pixel level.
Additionally, some manufacturers, in an effort to curb glare, sometimes aggressively turn off the backlight in certain darker areas of a scene. While this reduces glare and results in deeper blacks, some shadow details may become less visible because they don’t get enough backlight. This is called black crushing and results in a loss of subtle textures in dark environments.
Bad viewing angles
Most mini-LED TVs feature VA (vertical alignment) type LCD panels, which are favored for their relatively high native contrast ratio, but are notorious for poor off-axis viewing. Essentially, if you’re not looking at them head-on while sitting directly in front of the screen, colors can appear washed out and contrast degrades. This makes mini-LED TVs with a VA panel less ideal for a group environment, as some group or family members sitting at the ends of the sofa won’t get the best viewing experience. While some mini-LED televisions are equipped with an IPS (in-planeswitching) panel, which offers superior viewing angles, these are relatively rare, because IPS panels have a lower native contrast ratio than their VA counterparts.
To alleviate this problem, some manufacturers, like Samsung, include a specialized wide-angle layer in their mini-LED TVs to improve the viewing angles of VA panels. However, even with this layer of enhancement, they still can’t match the impressive off-axis visualization of an OLED. If you are concerned about viewing angles because you often watch TV with friends or family and want the best experience, it is best to invest in a TV with a wide viewing angle layer or, better yet, an OLED panel. Keep in mind, however, that OLED TVs have their own drawbacks.
Slower response time while gaming
Although mini-LED TVs are generally a good choice for gaming due to their high peak brightness and low input lag, they can suffer from slower response times than OLED TVs. Because the liquid crystals in an LCD panel take time to physically move and the backlight must synchronize with the action on the screen, transitions are not always instantaneous. This can cause ghosting or smearing in extremely fast-paced games, such as first-person shooters, racing titles, and multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games.
However, for most content this is not a problem. In fact, it can be useful and a hidden benefit when consuming certain types of content. Although the faster response time contributes to the overall clarity of a scene, it can cause stuttering in low frame rate content, such as movies, because each frame is so sharp and instantaneous that the jump between them becomes noticeable and can be jarring to the viewer. In these cases, the blur caused by a mini-LED TV’s slower response time can actually make the action in 24fps content smoother and more natural.