Samsung is currently selling souped-up LCDs as “QLED TVs” but the term originates with an entirely new type of a self-emitting display, similar to OLED. China’s BOE has showcased the first two prototypes of true QLED displays, according to a report by OLEDnet.com.

True QLED is still years away
UBI Research’s Chief Analyst, Choong Hoon Yi, once said: “If you can’t do OLED, don’t even dream about QLED”. What he meant was that a true QLED display actually builds on OLED technology more than any single manufacturer will admit. It is a combination of some technical principles developed for OLED and quantum dot technology.

”If you can’t do OLED, don’t even dream about QLED”
During many years of research, the term “QLED” referred to an electroluminescence – or self-emitting – display technology. In other words, a display that applies electricity to individual pixels to make them emit light and consequently colors. That was until Samsung chose to rebrand its LCD TVs to “QLED” this year. An LCD display relies, as you know, on a backlight unit, an LCD panel, and other layers sandwiched in-between. 

That is why China’s BOE’s latest prototype displays are exciting. These are the first true QLED displays; a new self-emitting display technology that could one day challenge OLED.


The two displays are apparently a 5” QLED prototype with 320x240 (80ppi) resolution and a 14” QLED prototype with 960x540 (80ppi) resolution. 

- “QLED display improves its reliability by using inorganic matters for existing OLED structure instead of organic matters, featuring better color gamut than OLED. 100% inkjet printing-based QLED is better in terms of manufacturing cost saving and large scale, compared to deposition-based OLED,” BOE told OLEDnet.com.

Manufacturers such as LG.Display are currently using deposition-based production techniques to produce OLED TV panels. LG, Samsung and others have experimented with using inkjet production techniques for OLED, and LG will reportedly start inkjet pilot production this year.

The industry expects that it will take more than 5 years to mass-produce QLED displays.

- Source: OLEDnet.com