Different types of TV technologies
TV technology has evolved significantly over the years, with new innovations continuously reshaping the way we experience visual content. Below, we'll explain different types of TV technologies, detailing how they work and their advantages and disadvantages.
TELEVISION
11/18/202410 min read
1. CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) TVs
Description: CRT TVs were the standard in television technology for decades. They work by using electron guns to fire electrons onto a phosphor-coated screen, where the impact of the electrons makes the phosphors emit light, producing the image.
How It Works: ACathode Ray Tube (CRT) TV works by firing electrons from an electron gun at the inside of the screen, which is coated with phosphor. The electron beam scans the screen in lines from top to bottom, and when the electrons hit the phosphor, they emit light. The phosphor is arranged in tiny red, green, and blue areas (pixels), which combine to create a full-color image. The deflection system controls the movement of the electron beam, allowing it to cover the entire screen. The screen refreshes many times per second to maintain a steady image.
Advantages:
Good color reproduction, particularly for darker scenes.
High refresh rates, which are beneficial for fast-moving content.
Disadvantages:
Bulky and heavy.
Limited resolution, usually only 480p or 720p.
Small to medium screen sizes.
2. LCD (Liquid Crystal Display)
Description: LCD TVs use liquid crystals that align when an electric current is applied. The liquid crystals don't emit light; instead, a backlight illuminates them, and the liquid crystals control the light passing through to form the image.
How It Works: A Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) TV works by using liquid crystals that change their alignment when an electric current is applied, allowing light to pass through or be blocked. Here's how it works in brief:
Backlight: The TV has a light source (usually LEDs) behind the screen to illuminate it.
Liquid Crystals: The screen is made up of liquid crystals that are sandwiched between two layers of polarizing filters. These crystals can twist to control the amount of light passing through.
Color Filters: Each pixel on the screen is divided into three subpixels—red, green, and blue—each with its own liquid crystal layer. The liquid crystals adjust to allow specific amounts of light through these filters, creating different colors.
Control: Electrical impulses regulate the liquid crystals' alignment to allow light to pass through, creating images by altering the color and brightness of each pixel.
Advantages:
Thin and lightweight compared to CRTs.
Energy-efficient.
Available in various screen sizes.
Lower cost compared to newer technologies.
Disadvantages:
Limited contrast ratio (blacks may appear grayish).
Poorer viewing angles than OLED and QLED.
3. LED (light-emitting diode) TVs
Description: LED TVs are essentially LCDs with LED backlighting. Unlike traditional LCDs, which use CCFLs (Cold Cathode Fluorescent Lamps) for backlighting, LED TVs use light-emitting diodes to provide the backlight.
How It Works:
LED Backlight: Unlike traditional LCDs that use fluorescent lights, an LED TV uses LEDs (light-emitting diodes) as the backlight source. The LEDs can be arranged either around the edges of the screen (edge-lit) or directly behind it (full-array).
LCD Panel: The TV still uses a liquid crystal display (LCD) panel, which controls the amount of light passing through to create images. The liquid crystals twist to either block or allow light to pass through, adjusting the brightness and color of each pixel.
Color Filters: The LCD panel has color filters (red, green, and blue) for each pixel, creating the full range of colors when light passes through them.
Enhanced Picture Quality: LED backlighting provides better brightness, contrast, and energy efficiency compared to traditional fluorescent backlighting, and some advanced LED TVs offer local dimming, where specific areas of the screen can be dimmed or brightened for improved contrast.
Advantages:
Thinner and more energy-efficient than traditional LCDs.
Better brightness and contrast than regular LCDs.
More affordable than OLED and QLED.
Disadvantages:
Still relies on backlighting, meaning black levels aren’t as deep as OLED.
Limited color accuracy compared to OLED and QLED.
4. OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode)
Description: OLED TVs represent a major advancement in display technology. Unlike LCD and LED, OLED pixels emit their own light when electricity is applied, which means no backlight is required.
How It Works: An OLED TV (Organic Light Emitting Diode) works by using organic materials that emit light when an electric current is applied. Here's how it works in brief:
Self-Emitting Pixels: Each pixel in an OLED display is made up of organic compounds that glow when electricity passes through them. This eliminates the need for a backlight, as each pixel produces its own light.
Color Creation: OLED pixels can emit red, green, and blue light independently. By adjusting the brightness of each pixel, the TV can create a full spectrum of colors and deep blacks.
Perfect Black Levels: Since each pixel is individually controlled, it can be turned off completely, allowing OLED TVs to achieve perfect black levels with no light leakage.
Thin and Flexible: OLED panels are much thinner and more flexible than traditional LCD or LED TVs because they don’t require a backlight, allowing for sleeker designs.
Advantages:
Perfect black levels and infinite contrast ratio.
Excellent color accuracy and vibrancy.
Wide viewing angles.
Thin, flexible panels.
Disadvantages:
Expensive compared to LED and LCD.
Risk of burn-in if static images are displayed for too long.
Lower peak brightness than QLED.
5. QLED (Quantum Dot LED)
Description: Quantum dots are semiconductor nanocrystals that emit light when exposed to a backlight; Samsung coined the name QLED to refer to LCD TVs that use these nanocrystals to enhance the color and brightness of the backlight.
How It Works:
LED Backlight: Like an LED TV, a Quantum Dot TV uses an LED backlight. This backlight can either be edgelit or full-array.
Quantum Dots: A layer of quantum dots (tiny semiconductor particles) is placed between the backlight and the LCD panel. When the LED light hits these quantum dots, they emit highly precise colors—red, green, or blue—based on their size.
Color Enhancement: The quantum dots help to improve color accuracy, brightness, and overall picture quality. They allow the TV to display a wider color gamut and more vibrant, true-to-life colors.
LCD Panel: The LCD layer still controls the light passing through, using liquid crystals to adjust brightness and color, but the quantum dots improve the quality of the light that reaches the pixels.
Advantages:
Brighter than OLED, especially in bright rooms.
Enhanced color accuracy and vibrancy.
No burn-in issues like OLED.
Disadvantages:
Black levels still can’t match OLED because of the reliance on backlighting.
Viewing angles are more limited compared to OLED.
6. Mini Led
Description: A Mini LED TV is an advanced version of traditional LED-backlit LCD TVs. The key difference lies in the use of smaller LEDs for the backlight. While a regular LED TV uses large LEDs for backlighting the LCD panel, a Mini LED TV uses much smaller LEDs, allowing for more precise control over the brightness and local dimming of the screen. This improves the overall contrast, black levels, and brightness, making it a more advanced display technology that sits between standard LED and OLED in terms of picture quality.
How It Works:
Mini LEDs: The TV uses smaller LED chips (typically about 1/40th the size of regular LEDs). These smaller LEDs can be packed into smaller areas, allowing for a higher density of LEDs behind the screen.
Local Dimming: Mini LED TVs utilize local dimming, meaning the backlight can be divided into many zones. Each zone can be dimmed or brightened independently, improving contrast. Dark areas can be dimmed without affecting bright areas, resulting in better black levels.
LCD Panel: The LCD panel (which controls the image) still uses liquid crystals to adjust light passing through it. However, with more precise control over the backlight thanks to Mini LEDs, the overall image quality improves.
Color & Brightness: The use of smaller LEDs allows for brighter, more uniform backlighting, which helps the TV display a wider color range and higher peak brightness.
Advantages:
Improved Contrast: Mini LEDs enable more precise local dimming, which leads to deeper blacks and brighter whites, improving contrast over traditional LED TVs.
Higher Brightness: The smaller size of the LEDs allows for more LEDs to be packed into the same space, meaning Mini LED TVs can achieve higher peak brightness, which is great for viewing in bright rooms or for HDR content.
Better Picture Quality: With more control over the backlight and better local dimming, Mini LED TVs can display a wider range of colors and deliver more vibrant, accurate images compared to regular LED TVs.
Thinner Design: Mini LEDs are smaller than traditional LEDs, which allows the TV to be thinner and lighter, improving the overall design.
Affordable Alternative to OLED: Mini LED TVs provide many of the benefits of OLED (such as improved contrast and black levels) but at a lower price point.
Disadvantages:
Still Not Perfect Black Levels: While Mini LED offers much improved contrast, it still can't achieve the absolute perfect blacks that OLED can, since the backlight is still behind the LCD panel (OLED pixels can turn off completely).
Blooming Effect: With many small backlight zones, some models may still suffer from blooming (light spill from bright areas into dark areas), though it’s much less noticeable than in regular LED TVs.
Cost: While Mini LED TVs are less expensive than OLED TVs, they can still be more expensive than traditional LED TVs due to the advanced technology and manufacturing costs.
Thickness: Although thinner than traditional LED TVs, Mini LED TVs are still thicker than OLED displays, which are incredibly slim due to their self-emitting pixels.
Not as Good as OLED for Motion: OLED has superior motion handling due to its fast response times and perfect black levels. While Mini LED TVs have good performance, they can't match OLED in terms of smooth motion and no-motion blur.
7. Plasma TVs
Description: Plasma TVs were once a popular alternative to LCDs and LEDs. They use ionized gas (plasma) cells that emit ultraviolet light when excited by an electric current, which then excites phosphor cells to emit visible light.
How It Works:
Plasma Cells: A plasma TV screen is made up of millions of tiny cells, each containing a mixture of gases like neon and xenon. These cells are arranged in a grid pattern and are placed between two layers of glass.
Electrical Discharge: When the TV receives a signal, an electrical current is sent through the gas-filled cells. This excites the gas, causing it to ionize and produce ultraviolet (UV) light.
Phosphor Coatings: Each plasma cell has phosphor coatings that correspond to the three primary colors: red, green, and blue. The UV light emitted by the excited gas strikes the phosphor coating, causing it to glow and emit visible light in red, green, or blue.
Pixel Control: Each pixel on the screen consists of three sub-pixels (red, green, and blue), each made up of individual plasma cells. By controlling the intensity of the electrical discharge in each cell, the brightness of each sub-pixel can be varied, allowing the screen to display a full range of colors.
Color Mixing: The combination of varying the intensity of the red, green, and blue sub-pixels at each location on the screen creates the full spectrum of colors you see on the TV.
Continuous Light Emission: Plasma TVs are self-emitting, meaning each pixel emits its own light rather than relying on a backlight (like LCD or LED TVs). This gives plasma TVs the ability to display deeper blacks and higher contrast ratios because they can turn off individual pixels completely.
Advantages:
Excellent black levels and contrast.
Superior color accuracy and vibrancy.
Wide viewing angles.
Fast response time, great for sports and gaming.
Disadvantages:
Heavy and bulky.
High power consumption.
Susceptible to burn-in.
Discontinued, so no new models are available.
8. 8K and 4K Technology
Description: 4K TVs offer a resolution of 3840 x 2160 pixels, while 8K offers a resolution of 7680 x 4320 pixels. These higher resolutions provide much more detail than standard Full HD (1080p) displays.
How It Works: 4K and 8K TVs pack more pixels into the display, offering sharper and more detailed images, especially noticeable on larger screens.
Advantages:
Ultra-sharp images, especially on larger displays.
Better HDR performance with higher resolutions.
Immersive experience on large screen sizes (55 inches or more).
Disadvantages:
8K content is still scarce, with most content being upscaled from lower resolutions.
8K TVs are extremely expensive and not necessary for most consumers.
Limited content and streaming options in native 8K.
9. Smart TVs
Description: Smart TVs are internet-connected TVs that allow you to stream content from platforms like Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, and more. They come with built-in operating systems such as Google TV, Tizen (Samsung), WebOS (LG), and Roku.
How It Works: Smart TVs have built-in processors, memory, and software to run apps, browse the web, and connect to the internet via Wi-Fi or Ethernet. They often support voice control and integration with smart home devices like Alexa and Google Assistant.
Advantages:
Access to streaming services without needing additional devices (like Roku or Chromecast).
Easy to use, with app stores and voice control.
Can integrate with other smart home devices.
Disadvantages:
Security risks with internet connectivity.
Potential for slower performance due to software limitations on lower-end models.
Some apps may require additional subscriptions or external devices.
10. Laser and UST (Ultra Short Throw) Projectors
Description: Laser projectors use lasers as a light source instead of traditional lamps, offering brighter images with deeper colors and a longer lifespan. UST projectors are a subset of projectors that can be placed very close to the screen (typically within a few inches).
How It Works:
Laser Light Source:
Instead of using conventional bulbs or lamps, laser projectors use laser diodes (usually RGB—red, green, and blue) to produce light. Lasers are more energy-efficient, and they offer brighter, more vibrant colors with a wider color gamut.
Color Wheel or Light Modulation:
Some laser projectors use a color wheel to combine the different primary color lasers into a white light, while others (like pure laser projectors) mix the colors directly within the light engine to achieve the desired color output.
Image Formation:
The light from the laser is directed through digital light processing (DLP) chips or liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS) panels to form an image.
In DLP projectors, micromirrors reflect light toward the screen or away from it, depending on the image being projected.
In LCoS projectors, light is reflected off liquid crystal panels to form the image, with each pixel being modulated to control how much light passes through.
Projection:
The final image is projected through a lens onto a screen or wall. The laser provides bright, consistent light, allowing for higher-quality images, more vivid colors, and deeper contrast.
Advantages:
Large image sizes (100 inches or more).
No need for a large viewing distance.
Bright and sharp images, with a long lifespan.
Disadvantages:
Expensive compared to traditional LED/LCD/OLED TVs.
It requires a special screen for the best image quality.
Conclusion
The price of a TV often depends on the technology, brand, screen size, and additional features. Basic LED and LCD models are generally more affordable, while OLED, QLED, and 8K TVs offer premium features that come at a higher price point. The choice of technology depends on what you're looking for—whether it’s image quality, screen size, or features like smart functionality.
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