RATING
WE’VE BECOME so accustomed to what an OLED TV can do that we risk reciting its benefits in our sleep. Great black levels, check. Viewable with little picture change from as far off center as you might want to sit, double check. Bright enough for modestly lit to very dark rooms (but not a sun porch!), check. High prices? That too. But in the past few years, nothing dramatic has muscled its way into the OLED world, though prices have slowly become less intimidating—until now. Samsung, which for years resisted joining the OLED TV parade, has developed a relatively radical way to build an OLED display with Quantum Dot Technology.
QD WHAT?
Until now, the most common and commercially successful way to design an OLED TV involved using white OLEDs together with filters to separate the white light into the red, green, and blue colors needed to create color images. All of today’s pre-QD OLED designs use this technique. But it does have a downside. In order to achieve high peak brightness, white-light-enhanced OLED displays—which insiders sometimes call WRGBs—add a white pixel to the RGB pixels. This can result in reduced color saturation in very bright scenes, or on picture highlights. This is rarely obvious in normal viewing, but it’s still a technical issue that pops up from time to time with the higher peak brightness levels and wide color gamut associated with HDR source material.
Samsung’s new way to build
