Mini-LED vs MicroLED – What Is The Difference?

What's the difference between Mini-LED and MicroLED? Let's find out.

Answer:

MicroLED is the next generation of display technology. Just like OLED, it produces its own light and therefore is capable of infinite contrast ratio. However, since it doesn’t use organic materials, it won’t deteriorate or burn-in over time.

What’s more, MicroLED displays will be brighter than OLED displays, and you will be able to customize their size, aspect ratio, and resolution (modular displays).

Mini-LED, on the other hand, improves upon the existing LCDs by replacing their LED backlights with mini-LED backlights, which consist of more efficient and numerous light-emitting diodes that will increase contrast ratio, uniformity, response time, etc.

Although similar in name, microLED and mini-LED technologies are fundamentally different!

What Is MicroLED?

MicroLED Dimming

MicroLED is the leading-edge display technology that is yet to be adjusted to the consumer market; in simpler terms, it’s the display technology of the not-so-distant future.

Similar to OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) technology, MicroLED doesn’t rely on a backlight to produce light. Instead, it uses self-emissive microscopic LEDs, which allow for an infinite contrast ratio, just like on OLED displays.

However, unlike OLED, MicroLED technology has no organic materials, so it won’t degrade over time, and you won’t have to worry about image burn-in.

Further, MicroLED displays are capable of higher luminance emission in comparison to OLED displays, which will allow for better details in highlights of the picture and therefore an even better HDR (High Dynamic Range) viewing experience.

Lastly, they can have a unique modular characteristic that would allow you to customize the display’s screen size, resolution, and aspect ratio to your liking by arranging and connecting more panels.

What Is Mini-LED?

Mini LED Dimming

Mini-LED technology improves on the existing LCDs.

It replaces LED backlights with Mini-LED backlights, which consist of more LEDs that can offer a higher contrast ratio, better uniformity, faster response times, etc.

Mini-LED displays trade blows will OLED displays as they can get a lot brighter and don’t have the risk of burn-in, but they don’t have as high contrast ratio and suffer from blooming.

When one zone is fully illuminated, but the zones surrounding it are dim, a certain amount of light will bleed from the lit zone to the dim zones, which creates the halo/bloom effect.

Nowadays, there are plenty of good options when it comes to both mini LED and OLED displays, all of which you can check out in our best HDR monitors buyer’s guide.

We also have a list of all mini LED monitors.

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Rob Shafer

Rob is a software engineer with a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Denver. He now works full-time managing DisplayNinja while coding his own projects on the side.