Long live the LCD TV

While OLED technology has become more mainstream in the past few years, recent sales trends and forecasts for the next few years show that LCD TVs will be around for a long time yet.

Liquid crystal display (LCD) TVs have existed since 1982 but only gained real traction in the early 2000s due to rapidly declining prices.

The technology beat out plasma — the first mainstream flat display technology — thanks to its larger size possibilities, better resolution, lower weight, and improved energy efficiency.

Modern LCD TVs consist of two primary components — the LCD panel — and a light-emitting diode (LED) backlight.

The LCD component consists of three polarised glass panels — one red, one green, and one blue.

Liquid crystal molecules flow between the panels and rotate as electric current passes through them, enabling different amounts of light to filter through to the viewer’s end from the backlight.

The other major display technology currently in widespread use is organic light-emitting diode (OLED), which first became popular in TVs around 2010.

OLED was first used in digital cameras developed by Kodak in 1987.

OLED TVs do not have a backlight and come with millions of small, thin, and flexible diodes that can produce their own colours.

The big upside to this technology is that it allows for switching individual pixels on and off, enabling deep blacks in dark scenes for excellent contrast.

By comparison, LCD TVs will often show dark grey patches in scenes when the room has low ambient lighting.

While OLED TVs generally offer superior colour reproduction and contrast, they are still much more expensive to manufacture than LCD TVs and have lower peak brightness.

OLED has become highly popular in smaller screens, like those used in smartphones.

Over much of the past decade, the world’s two biggest TV panel manufacturers — Samsung and LG — have taken contrasting approaches.

LG has focused heavily on OLED in its premium segment, while Samsung and many other TV set manufacturers have prioritised refining and upgrading to deliver advanced LCD TVs with performance closer to OLED.

LCD closing the quality gap

One of the first major innovations for LCDs was the addition of quantum dots, tiny particles that emit a particular colour when energised to improve the supported colour spectrum of LCDs.

Samsung was one of the early adopters of this technology and used it in its flagship QLED line-up.

A more recent advancement is MiniLEDs, first popularised by TCL in 2019.

The first LED-based TVs typically used edge-backlighting, which limited contrast and resulted in washed-out images.

MiniLED TVs have a backlight with lights as small as 200 microns across, allowing manufacturers to pack hundreds or even thousands of them together.

These lights allow for more precise lighting control to bring contrast performance closer to OLED.

Many LCD manufacturers use a combination of MiniLED and QLED to build TVs that combine high brightness and greater colour accuracy.

This includes TVs like Samsung’s Neo QLED series, Hisense’s MiniLED ULEDs or TCL’s MiniLED range.

In recent years, OLED technology has also been improved with the addition of quantum dots in Samsung’s QD-OLED TVs and monitors.

A miniaturised version of OLED called MicroLED  — used in the Apple Vision headset and Samsung’s massive Wall TVs — have improved image resolution and colour production even further.

However, both these technologies are still trumped by advanced LCD TVs in terms of price.

Samsung The Wall TV at the company’s research headquarters in South Korea.

Counterpoint Research company Display Supply Chain Consultants (DSCC) expects both advanced LCDs and OLED shipments to keep growing until at least 2027.

It anticipates that OLED TV units will see a 14% compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2023 to 2027, while advanced LCDs will record a CAGR of 8%.

The contribution of advanced LCD TVs to overall revenue is expected to decline to 57% by 2027.

However, DSCC also expects revenues from MiniLED TVs, the newest advanced LCD, will exceed OLED TV revenues by 2027 due to the former’s cost-effectiveness.

In terms of sales volumes, market research agency Luotu Technology has predicted that MiniLED sales would surpass OLED TVs for the first time in 2024.

The firm estimated that 6.8 million MiniLED TVs would be shipped by the end of 2024 compared to 6.4 million OLED units.

By 2028, it anticipates that more than three MiniLED TVs will be sold for every OLED TV.

The table below summarises MiniLED and OLED TV sales from 2021 to 2023 and a forecast for sales from 2024 to 2028.