Mini-LED
Mini-LED is a backlight made of thousands of very small LEDs, used behind an LCD screen to light it more precisely.
On this page 3 sections
How it works
An LCD screen does not make its own light. It needs a backlight behind it. Older backlights use a few dozen larger LEDs. A Mini-LED backlight packs thousands of much smaller LEDs behind the panel and groups them into zones. Each zone can be brightened or dimmed on its own.
What it changes
- Bright areas can get much brighter, which helps high-dynamic-range pictures.
- Dark areas can be dimmed more, so blacks look deeper.
- The more zones there are, the finer the control.
What it does not promise
Mini-LED is a backlight, not a new kind of screen. The pixels are still the LCD layer in front, and they do not light themselves as they do on OLED. Because zones are larger than pixels, a bright object on a dark background can show a faint glow around it, often called blooming. The term also does not state how many zones a screen has or how bright it gets, so those details come from the specification sheet. The backlight alone also does not decide colour accuracy. Even so, the effect depends on how well the screen's software controls the zones, not just on the backlight hardware.