LED LCD TVs

Today, LCD TVs use efficient Light Emitting Diodes (LED backlights) with a Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) to help achieve better blacks, brighter colours and ultimately a clearer picture; so technically, an LED TV is an LCD TV, and vice-versa! Today, you’ll find these TVs referred to either as “LED” or “LCD” interchangeably but they are the exact same thing.

LED-backlit LCD TVs are the most common type of TV you’ll find. However, not all backlighting is created equal when it comes to LED LCD TVs. That’s where it’s important (particularly when you’re looking at the big screen TVs where image quality might matter most to you) to keep an eye out for their contrast capabilities they offer i.e. full array backlighting or full array dimming is often considered the superior in LED LCD.

You’ll find that all the major brands produce a great quality LED LCD TV. Most offer a range of sizes, levels of quality, and price points to accommodate buyers. The top sellers remain consistent with Samsung, LG, Sony, Sharp, TCL, and Hisense leading the way. FFalcon and Toshiba also offer a good range of LED LCD TVs. 

If you love watching sports or playing games on your Xbox or Playstation, you’ll want to consider the refresh rate or motion rate (how often your TV changes the picture on your screen). 60Hz is common for older TVs, with many newer TVs offering 120Hz (120 frames per second). You may find some images are blurry if your refresh rate is too low. The higher the Hz, the better your picture quality will be.

Put simply, a TV can either be LED LCD or OLED - that’s it! 

It’s the variations within LED LCD TVs where things get quite interesting. LED-backlit LCD TVs can also either have Quantum Dots (QLED TVs) to magnify colour and detail; or Mini LED where many tiny LEDs make up the backlight for better backlighting control to deliver deeper blacks, bolder colour, and a better, overall picture over conventional LED-backlit LCD TVs (and arguably for some - over QLED).

Further to this, many of today’s QLED TVs also have Mini LED backlights! These are considered your more higher-end LED LCD panels for big-screen entertainment from brands such as TCL (first to market with QLED Mini LED), Samsung (first to market with QLED), LG's QNED TVs and more.

So essentially, a QLED TV is an LED TV, it just has a more sophisticated backlight comprised of quantum dots (sometimes with Mini LEDs too), and often, these sort of screen types come with more sophisticated image processors, advanced smart TV capabilities (like built-in handsfree voice assistant), colour technologies and so on.

Invented by LG, OLED TVs are considered the pinnacle of TV realism. These are the best you can buy if you’re not prepared to settle for anything less than spectacular! Known for their cinematic capabilities, OLED is a completely different type of screen technology - they don’t rely on a backlight to display contrasts, but rather have self-lighting pixels that turn on or off to display the picture as intended. Think perfect blacks set against eye-popping colour for the most realistic scenes possible to replicate the director’s vision. 

This depends on a few factors, starting with your space! How far away will you be sitting from the TV? As a general guide, here’s how far away you should sit for the ultimate viewing pleasure: 55” TV = 1.7m, 65” TV = 2.0m, 75” TV = 2.3m & 85” TV = 2.6m. Once you know your ideal size, you can decide if you’ll wall mount your new TV and therefore, you’ll need to find the correct TV bracket.

Then you’ll start to look at the various specs of your LED TV. A major part of this is the picture resolution, and you will see you can choose from a range of TVs, including Full HD (TV sizes around 24" to 42"), 4K or 8K Ultra HD (some in smaller screen sizes but the majority in big screens up to 86"). There's a lot more 4K content around to stream these days and most 4K TVs will take Full HD 1080p content and render it closer to lifelike 4K. There is very limited 8K content around but again, these TVs have upscaling too to make some lower resolution content look sharper.

Next you'd look at the screen types within LED. As we've just seen, this would either be conventional LED LCD TVs (like these FFALCON 4K TVs offering a great picture on a smaller screen), Mini LED TVs from Hisense, QLED TVs from the likes of Hitachi, or QLED TVs with Mini LED backlighting from LG (to name but a few brands). 

These days, all the major brands produce high-quality TVs, with Samsung being a global best seller, closely followed by LG for their outstanding OLED TVs and high-end LED LCD TVs, and Hisense for their budget friendly TVs.

Today you’ll find that most LED TVs are smart TVs, allowing you to connect to the internet to stream movies, TV series or sports with your favourite subscription streaming apps, play online games and more. If the TV smarts are important to you, consider the televisions' smart TV platform, for example if you’re an Android user, keep an eye out for Android TVs that use Google’s Android operating system, helping you to quickly find content to watch.

When you’re buying a new smart TV (or any appliance), it’s always a good idea to pay attention to its energy efficiency rating.

TVs and appliances in Australia will have an Energy Rating Label denoted by a number of stars, so you can get an idea upfront as to its expected annual energy usage. The more stars, the less electricity your potential new TV will use and the more energy efficient your potential new TV will be.

Remember to compare TVs of the same size for a true understanding of the energy efficiency of the model you’re eyeing off.  If you’re looking at buying a new LED/LCD TV, you’ll be pleased to know that they use less energy than an OLED TV. However, both of these TVs will offer massive cost savings if you’ve been running an old-style Plasma TV, notoriously known for consuming way too much electricity.

Generally speaking, smaller TVs usually have the best energy ratings as they cost less to power and run compared to larger screen TVs, however you’ll still find some big screen TVs with a 5-6 Star Energy Rating depending on the type of LED backlighting (Mini LED for instance are considered more efficient than conventional LED and so on). Most TVs would have an Energy Saving setting which adjusts the backlight to reduce the screen brightness.

LED TVs are generally long-lasting, with most giving up to 60,000 hours of brightness. An LED TV can last you several years or more, depending on how much time you spend watching TV and the screen brightness set on your TV; also in turn impacting energy consumption!