TCL Unveils Next-Gen Super-Thin, High-Contrast Displays Using MiniLED For CES

January 11, 2021 by Dave Haynes

The Chinese electronics firm TCL is very much a consumer-driven company, but what happens with TVs often finds its way to commercial display design.

It is CES this week and the firm announced a range of new products, including new miniLED-based TVs that show where that technology best fits on the commercial side of displays.

The new screens are almost as skinny as OLED “wallpaper” displays, and also emulate OLEDs by having roughly a bazillion local dimming zones to make for better, high-contrast viewing.

Says TCL in its CES PR today:

A pioneer in delivering sharp contrast and brilliant brightness with mini-LEDs, TCL continues to take the lead in display innovation with its 3rd generation of mini-LED backlight launching later this year – OD Zero mini-LED technology.

OD Zero combines TCL’s latest mini-LED backlight technology, driven by its skilled in-house development and vast expertise in display engineering, to deliver an ultra-slim display with tens of thousands of mini-LEDs and thousands of Contrast Control Zones for striking brightness, precision contrast, and smooth uniformity.

The zero represents the measurement of distance between TCL’s mini-LED backlight layer and the LCD display layer, which has now been reduced to a remarkable 0mm to create an ultra-thin high-performance panel.

TVs and commercial displays already tend to have super-skinny profiles, but for jobs where depth and form are important for the install, technology that closes the gap between the light source and display layer would be attractive.

The bigger, broader story is how this is a good example of where mini fits in the increasingly crowded and confused ecosystem of LED displays. MiniLED is being marketed as a direct view LED display type, but is an interim step to the more compelling microLED tech. Where miniLED is much more likely to catch on is as a better lighting source for LCD – with tens of 1,000s of locally addressable, individually dimmed lights that can make the critical viewing difference from on-screen scenes that are grey and muddy, to deep black.