Mini-LED Made Affordable
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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. 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
