Many versions of things have historically proven to be pretty popular.
The iPod mini, mini muffins, mini me.
But a new one called mini LED could have a big time effect
on the way we watch TV or use our computers. But before we go any further,
you guys gotta know that mini LED is not the same thing as micro LED.
They are completely separate. Micro is also cool,
and you can learn more about it right up here. But mini is the one that you might actually be able
to get your hands on for an affordable price in the near future.
As for why it matters, well it first helps to understand how it relates
to other kinds of TV technology. If you've ever been to a big box store
and seen how striking OLED TVs are next to non OLED models,
the difference is due to the fact that OLEDs have a very high contrast ratio
because individual pixels can be turned completely off,
producing deep blacks without light bleed from nearby bright objects.
Non OLED TVs, on the other hand, rely on backlighting that is always turned on.
To create images then, an LCD layer in front of the backlight
selectively blocks the light in different areas of the screen.
But it can't block the light completely, meaning that blacks can end up looking closer to gray.
To improve this, LCDs use a trick to improve their contrast
called local dimming. The idea is that the backlight can selectively dim
or even switch off in certain areas of a screen
where the image is dark or black. And local dimming can definitely help,
but it is far from a perfect solution. You see TVs that have this feature
typically have their backlight split into zones
that dim or turn off as a group. But for the effect to work well,
you need lots and lots of zones, which means lots of LEDs adding cost, heat,
and power consumption. That's where many LEDs come in.
Thanks to some recent technological advances, LEDs have not only become more efficient,
but also smaller, which is exactly the idea behind a mini LED display.
Mini LEDs are often less than a 10th of a millimeter across,
meaning that you can fit many more of them in the backlight layer of a TV,
allowing much smaller zones of lighting control. To put this in context,
a traditional local dimming TV from the last couple of years
might have dozens or maybe a few hundreds of zones.
While these recently released mini LED displays from ASUS and TCL have about 1,000 individual zones.
This should help them do a much better job of preventing that blooming effect
that you sometimes see with local dimming where bright objects in a dark scene
have this aura or halo glowing around them because the zone that's lighting the bright object
is simply too large to be confined to the area where it's supposed to be.
Of course, mini LED is a newer technology right now
so you can expect to pay more for it, but it's well positioned to be more affordable than OLED,
especially after the early adopter tax wears off.
And with micro LED being quite a ways off from hitting the mass consumer market
due to high costs and manufacturing complexity, mini LED looks to be an appealing option
to tide us over until then. Now if you'll excuse me,
I've got to go to Tim Hortons because I've got a sudden hankering for some mini donuts.
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I might even do the whole thing instead of leaving out a word like I did a second ago.
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