Goodbye Full Array LEDs — why Mini-LED TVs are here to stay

edzieba

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Jul 13, 2016
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The sole difference between FALD and mini-LED is the resolution of the LED backlight. Everything beyond that is marketing: both are arrays of addressable LEDs that act as the backlight (rather than edge-lighting or LED arrays that cannot vary brightness relative to each other), but different companies will choose a different arbitrary number of LEDs for different screen sizes, below which they will slap a label on the box that says "FALD" and above which they slap a label on that says "Mini LED". Both fall under the banner of "Local Dimming" backlights. Depending on the screen size, a "mini LED" panel and a "FALD" panel can even end up with the same number of total dimming zones at the same resolution, but one get sold under one branding and the other under a different one - for example a 95" UHDTV with 32x32 zones (dimming zones do not necessarily have a 1:1 aspect ratio, with edge dimming zones being the extreme of this) sold as a "FALD" TV and a 32" UHD desktop monitor with 1024 zones sold as a "Mini LED" monitor both have the same number of zones and the same number of pixels per zone, despite the varying backlight density.