Samsung Electronics has been getting nervous that Chinese brands could soon break its 19-year stranglehold on global TV sales. The likes of Hisense and TCL are slowly eating away at its lead, but it has a secret weapon that it hopes will allow it to maintain its dominance of the market for years to come – the first true QLED televisions.
BusinessKorea reports that Samsung is now ramping up the development of its new QD-LED TVs in order to fend off the Chinese upstarts and increase its dominance once again.
According to that report, the initiative is a collaboration between multiple business units, including Samsung’s Visual Display division, which sells its TVs, and Samsung Display, which develops the displays that go inside them. Also involved is an organization called SAIT, which used to be known as the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology.
"Samsung has set an internal target to commercialize EL-QD within a few years and is fully committed to its technological development," the report said, referring to QD-LED by one of its alternative names.
QD-LED is a new kind of display technology that has many names. It’s also called EL-QD, QDEL, QD-EL and NanoLED, and it’s often referred to as “true QLED” because of the way it supplies electricity directly to the quantum dots to produce coloured light, eliminating the need for separate light-emitting diodes.
Those are the same quantum dots that are found in today’s advanced QLED and Mini-LED displays, but they’re notably much smaller, being microscopic in size, possessing subpixels in the three major colours – red, blue and green.
The technology is thought to be able to produce the same kind of colour accuracy as today’s OLED televisions, along with the high contrast and deep blacks that enable such lifelike images to be displayed on screen. However, QD-LED has some advantages. While OLED is known to degrade over time due to its organic nature, QD-LED does not have this problem. It’s also believed that QD-LED is more energy-efficient than traditional OLED.
This is not an entirely new technology, as we’ve seen a fair few prototypes exhibited in recent years by Samsung, and also rivals such as TCL, Nanosys and Sharp. Last year, Samsung showed off an 18-inch NanoLED display for monitors (pictured), and according to those present, it looked absolutely stunning with deep blacks and saturated colour.
BusinessKorea says Samsung is now getting deadly serious in the race to become the first company to commercialise QD-LED, in the hope that it could extend its lead in the global TV market for another 10-to-20 years.
The company still has some difficulties to overcome if it’s going to be able to mass produce NanoLED TVs and monitors, with the biggest issue being how to stabilise the quantum dots that go into the displays. And despite the claims that QD-LED might be more energy-efficient than OLED, BusinessKorea noted that efficiency remains a challenge.
Samsung will need to work fast to solve these problems if it wants to obtain a first-mover advantage. In fact, it's not even clear if Samsung is currently out in front.
For instance, Nanosys, the company that designs and manufactures the quantum dots for Samsung et al, is also working on its own variation of QD-LED. It was acquired in 2023 by a Japanese conglomerate called Shoei Chemical, which promptly announced similar plans to accelerate development.
