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Micro LED TVs are something of a white whale for the biggest TV manufacturers. The display technology has a lot of potential, promising emissive pixels and infinite contrast without sacrificing brightness levels and deep blacks. It also doesn’t suffer from the performance penalty associated with organic display types like the best OLED TVs.
Thanks to the way Micro LED TVs are manufactured – using clusters of “micrometre-scale LEDs,” or “almost microscopic lights,” that are superimposed onto larger LED modules – you get an incredible amount of brightness control at the pixel level, as well as the ability to rearrange LEDs in different modular combinations.
Yet micro LED has been touted as the “next big thing” in television since 2018, when Samsung launched its first micro LED TV, The Wall. Since then, however, little progress has been made in reducing the gargantuan production costs.
We’re seeing new micro LED TVs hit the market: In 2024, Samsung unveiled 76-inch, 89-inch, 101-inch, and 114-inch models. But even that smallest 76-inch version will cost $90,000, which is obviously prohibitively expensive when it comes to mass adoption. The LG Magnit micro LED TV, meanwhile, is explicitly aimed at “luxury customers,” according to the company press releaseThe retail price is $237,000 and the models are only available in 118-inch and 136-inch sizes.
Price seems to be the bottleneck for wider micro LED implementation. In June 2024, ETNews reported that Samsung had told its manufacturing partners to drastically reduce production costs. 90% to make micro-LED competitive in today’s TV market. And it seems that both LG and Samsung, the main drivers of micro-LED development, are pulling back on their investments in the technology for the time being (via FlatPanelsHD).
So why all the fuss about micro-LED? Well, cost aside, it solves a lot of the problems plaguing leading TV panel technologies – or, it did when investment in micro-LED development was still flowing. To understand what’s changed, we need to talk about OLED.
Solution to a missing problem
OLED has become the premium TV technology of the decade. While OLED displays are still more expensive than traditional LCD-LED displays, you can now get an excellent OLED TV for under $1,000, and in a variety of sizes (the LG C4 OLED ranges from 42 to 83 inches). And even mid-priced OLED TVs tend to have excellent viewing and gaming specs, from 4K resolution and 120Hz frame rates up to Dolby Vision HDR.
OLED offers infinite contrast with truly deep blacks, thanks to its ability to completely turn off pixels, as well as excellent color reproduction. The biggest problem plaguing OLED is its historically weak brightness output – making it great for late-night movie nights, but mediocre for daytime viewing.
The gains in OLED brightness over the years have remedied this, though, with both traditional OLED displays (this year’s LG C4 hit over 1,000 nits peak brightness in our review) and OLED-QLED hybrids like the Samsung S95D, which hit nearly 1,900 nits in our tests. Concerns about burn in have also been largely crushed.
This makes the promise of micro LED – the benefits of emissive display technologies, without the drawbacks of organic displays – a little less certain, especially when you consider that a micro LED TV costs 10 to 20 times as much as a similarly sized OLED.
The Future of Micro LED TVs
While attending CES Event 2024 Earlier this year, a TCL representative told us that it would likely be another 5 to 10 years before micro LED TVs would be commercially viable – and who knows how long after that it will be before they actually hit the market. affordable for most people. Depending on how OLED and mini LED technologies will continue to develop in the coming years, and depending on the investment decisions of the major TV manufacturers, we may never reach that point.
As long as a micro LED TV costs as much as a small house, they will remain the domain of billionaires, supervillains, or Hollywood production sets that use micro LED technology. to replace the green screen – rather than the average TV enthusiast looking for a good home cinema system. So we wouldn’t wait for micro LED instead of grabbing one of the best TVs out there today.
The biggest problem with micro LEDs right now is that the competition is so damn good. That’s a big problem for most TV buyers.
