Television display technology has advanced significantly over the years, progressing from bulky cathode-ray tubes (CRTs) to the ultra-slim and energy-efficient screens we have today. The best TVs of today and their respective display technologies — from OLED and QLED to QD-OLED, mini-LED, and more — offer varying image quality, energy efficiency, sizes, and price points, catering to the diverse preferences and needs of consumers.
Each type of TV display technology comes with its advantages and drawbacks, including factors like the depth of blacks, color accuracy, energy consumption, and lifespan. As manufacturers continue to innovate, consumers can look forward to even more options that offer a compromise between performance, size, and cost. But in the meantime, we’re going to take you through a rundown every major type of TV you can buy today, with a little look at some more iconic TV technologies from years past.
There are two main TV types you can buy in 2025: LCD and OLED. There are a few different subtypes of each which we’ll dig into down below, but if you’re looking to buy a new TV, it’s going to be based on one of these two technologies.
LCD TVs
The first generations of LCD TVs had a compact fluorescent light bulb in the back shining light through all these different layers so that you got a nice image on the screen. Today they still use backlighting to make the picture visible, but typically it’s LEDs in various configurations.
LCD TVs tend to have brighter overall pictures than their OLED counterparts, making them often a better fit for brighter rooms like living rooms. They do tend to lose a little image quality at extreme angles, though, and as fast and responsive as the latest LCD TVs are, they just can’t react as fast as the latest OLED models.
Still, not all LCD TVs are made equally. Often, the backlighting technique will play a major factor in how the TVs look and operate. Let’s take a look at the different ways modern LCD TVs are put together.
Direct lit
The most entry-level option for LCD TVs is direct lit LED backlighting. This is where instead of the LEDs being placed on the edge of the display, they sit right behind the LCD panel. This can allow for strong brightness, but with no ability to turn the LEDs on or off (a practice called local dimming), direct lit TVs tend to have poor contrast and can’t offer any kind of nuance for HDR highlights and lowlights.
This makes direct lit LCD TVs more affordable, but the overall image quality is weaker than other LCD standards.
Edge Lit
Edge lit LCD TVs have a bank of LEDs placed around the edge of the TV, often at the bottom, and facing towards the center of the screen. Diffusers behind the LCD panel spread that light around the picture to give it a uniform brightness. This allows modern edge lit TVs to be super thin, and they can offer the same 4K resolutions and high refresh rates of other LCD and OLED TV designs. They can also leverage local dimming to turn some of the LEDs off and on at will, making it easier to deliver greater contrast and more capable HDR.
However, because the LEDs aren’t close to the pixels themselves, it makes it much harder for edge-lit TVs to provide nuanced HDR highlights and higher contrast as while there is dimming, there are no dedicated dimming zones. Most of the more affordable LCD TV options available today use edge lit LED backlighting.
Full array with local dimming
Full array local dimming is the best of both worlds from edge and direct lit TVs. The LEDs are arranged in banks behind the LCD display, but they can be turned on and off in local dimming “zones.” This allows for much greater control over the backlighting for the TV, delivering greater contrast, with deeper blacks and brighter highlights.
However, since the local dimming zones aren’t pixel-perfect, if there is a high contrast scene, such as a white object on a black background, local dimming can result in a blooming or ghosting effect around the brighter object, as the backlight bleeds into the darker zones nearby.
Mini-LED
The gold standard for LCD TVs in 2025 use Mini-LEDs. These TVs use the same full array design as traditional LCD LED TVs, but they use Mini-LEDs instead. These are much smaller than standard LEDs, so where you might have 10 local dimming zones on an edge lit TV, or 60 local dimming zones on a full array LCD TV, a Mini-LED LCD TV can have hundreds, or even thousands of local dimming zones.
With such in-depth control over how much light is shining through the LCD panel and in such precise locations, it’s possible to deliver much darker blacks for greater contrast, and more vibrant colors. It makes it possible to display darker shadows for a more immersive viewing experience.
Mini LED TVs are much more expensive, though, so expect to spend a lot more if you’re buying one of the latest designs.
Micro-LED
Although not readily available in consumer TVs just yet, the next-generation technology just over the horizon is micro-LED. Now, you might think this is another backlit display, where the backlights are even tinier than mere mini-LED — but that’s not the case. Micro-LED uses LEDs as the pixels themselves, so they can be turned on and off at will, with no dedicated backlight, and no need for dimming zones. That gives it perfect blacks and amazing contrast, but that contrast is cranked up to 11 because micro-LED can get so incredibly bright.
The downside to micro-LED for now — and the reason you are not likely to see it for sale on the floor of your preferred electronics store — is that it is super expensive, and it’s really hard to get 4K resolution at normal screen sizes because the pixels aren’t as tiny as they are on the other types of TVs we’ve talked about.
The other interesting thing about micro-LED displays, at least for now, is that they are modular, which has its upsides and downsides. For now, micro-LED panels are smaller squares, and you can stitch them together to make a display of varying sizes and shapes. That flexibility is a good thing, but there are seams, and while you can’t see the seams between these panels when the TVs are bright — at least not from a normal viewing distance — you can see them when they are dimmer if you look closely enough.
Look out for this technology in the next few years. We might start to see some premium designs using it in the not-too-distant future.
QLED
The final technology that you might find in your next LCD TV, is quantum dots. This is a color enhancing layer of nanocrystals that enhance the color reproduction of an LCD TV, helping TVs equipped with this layer to produce brighter, more vibrant colors.
QLED TVs are as they sound: LED LCD TVs with quantum dots. More often they use Mini LEDs, but you can find direct lit and edge-lit QLED TVs, too. You don’t need an LCD TV with quantum dots to get great color or a bright picture, but it certainly helps, and most of the best QLED TVs are some of the best LCD TVs you’ll find.
OLED TVs
The other mainstream technology you’ll want to consider when buying a new TV is OLED. These are different to LCD as they utilize organic LEDs which produce their own color and luminance, so don’t require any kind of backlighting. Traditionally this meant they were duller than LCD LED TVs, but their per-pixel control means that contrast is near infinite, and better even than Mini LEDs.
They’re also very responsive, making OLED TVs great for gaming.
Until recently, LG was the only OLED panel producer, so it owned OLED entirely until about 2022. You could get a Panasonic OLED, a Sony OLED, or even a Vizio OLED — but LG Display made the panels. However, in early 2024 Samsung and LG signed a deal that would see Samsung using LG Display’s standard WOLED tech in some of its TVs while continuing to use its own QD-OLED flagship tech (more on this below) in others, such as this year’s Samsung S95F.
Even OLED can be split off into several subcategories, though. Here are some of the most common options you’ll find when buying a TV in 2025.
WOLED
WOLED are very similar to the traditional OLED design, and only really differentiated today because of the introduction of QD-OLED. WOLED TVs use a white OLED design which has red, green, blue, and white subpixels. These then pass through a color filter layer before sending that color through to a polarizing layer, before displaying the image on the front panel. It results in a bright, vibrant image, that enjoys infinite contrast thanks to the ability to turn the individual OLEDs on and off at will.
This design helps thwart the problem of “burn-in” which has been present in past OLED designs. Because the single white emitter doesn’t have different emitters that wear out at different rates, screen retention and “burn-in” is much less likely to materialize. That filter does lower overall brightness, though.
Various technologies have been used to try to get around this, such as the multi-lens-array technology in some LG and Sony TVs. These lenses refocused the light and prevented its diffusion, but that technology has already been supplanted, with most main manufacturers moving to newer techniques for brightening their OLED TVs.
QD-OLED
QD-OLED is exactly what it sounds like: quantum dots combined with OLEDs. It uses a blue emitter with red and green subpixels, which allows for richer colors than standard WOLED, as well as a brighter overall picture, as quantum dots don’t filter the light as much WOLED’s color filter system. However, QD-OLED does lose out on some of the contrast of WOLED, making its extreme blacks look slightly more grey than WOLEDs, but there’s not a lot in it.
Some of our favorite TVs of recent years, like the Sony A95L, use QD-OLED technology to incredible effect.
Older technologies
Just because you can’t really buy CRT or Plasma TVs anymore, doesn’t mean these technologies aren’t interesting. If you’re more interested in learning about TV technologies than informing yourself for a TV upgrade, here’s some of our older content that looks at these iconic TV designs.
Cathode Ray Tube (CRT)
CRT stands for cathode-ray tube. This is what started it all, and we were all pretty happy with it for, oh, a little over 65 years. The first CRT TV was made in 1934 by Telefunken in Germany. These TVs evolved from black-and-white to color, from tiny to relatively large, and eventually were phased out around the year 2000. They used a cathode-ray tube to beam photos at a screen that was coated with phosphors to make a picture. Light hits the phosphors, and the phosphors make the picture. They were very heavy relative to their size and, as we later learned, not particularly great for the environment.
Along with the CRT TV we also got rear-projection TVs, which were simply known as “big-screen TVs.” These huge boxes used three color light cannons to project an image on a screen from behind — hence rear projection. And while they provided a very big picture, they were generally a huge headache because you had to keep the three light cannons in perfect alignment — or convergence — or you got a blurry rainbow-looking image. Also, they weren’t especially bright — the contrast was terrible. But we loved them because they were huge and made it feel like being at the movies at home.
Plasma
Then came the plasma TV, and along with it the term “flat-screen TV.” This is when TVs basically divorced the 4:3 aspect ratio and moved into the 16:9 rectangular screen shape.
Plasma TVs had tiny little pixel pockets of gas in the screen. Put electricity to them and the gas turned to plasma and lit up phosphors. Plasma TVs were about as futuristic as it got at the time. This whole flat-screen TV thing was a big deal. And even though all TVs today are flat screens, that term has held on.
The flat-screen part of the plasma became kind of a distraction from what was really cool about the technology — it was an emissive display. This gave it great brightness and contrast, though plasma TVs would ultimately be replaced by the lighter, leaner, and cheaper LCD technology when it eventually caught up on image quality.
