From The Verge: LG’s new range of Mini LED TVs, which it’s branding “QNED,” are releasing worldwide starting next month, the company has announced. The lineup consists of three sets, the 8K QNED99 and QNED95, and the 4K QNED90, ranging in size from 65- to 86-inches. LG says the TVs will launch first in North America, with additional regions following “in the weeks ahead.”
Mini LED is a relatively new kind of display technology which uses an array of thousands of tiny LEDs as a screen’s backlight. Because there are so many (up to 30,000 in the case of the 86-inch QNED99), they can create a sharper contrast between light and dark areas of an image. LG says the technology, which has previously been used on some TVs from TCL as well as Apple’s latest 12.9-inch iPad Pro, allows for “10 times better contrast ratio” than normal LCD TVs.
LG is marketing Mini LED as a “giant leap forward in LCD TV picture quality,” but it’s not quite at the level of an OLED TV, where its the individual pixels themselves that are illuminating to create an image (with Mini LED, the LEDs are still shining through an LCD layer). Mini LED should not be confused with Samsung’s outrageously expensive MicroLED technology, which also uses an array of tiny LEDs but without the need for an LCD layer at all.
We’ve reached out to LG to clarify pricing for its full lineup of QNED TVs (LG’s US site still lists them as “coming soon”) but based on a previous report from FlatPanelsHD they’re unlikely to come cheap. The 8K QNED99 will reportedly start at $5,000 for the 75-inch model, rising to $8,000 for the 86-inch version, while the 4K QNED90 will reportedly cost up to $4,000 for the 86-inch model.
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