“Some products marketed as ‘QLED’ use traditional backlight architectures (standard phosphor, optical film, diffuser plate) and rely on picture modes or software tuning to create a more saturated ‘vivid’ look,” reads a January whitepaper from TUV Rhineland and QD supplier Nanosys. The whitepaper, “Redefining a ‘true’ quantum dot display”, also points to devices that contain “QD materials at trace levels, or in packaging and integration designs that limit excitation and light extraction to certain wavelengths.”
The white paper states, “In these cases, the display can still achieve competitive headline gamut coverage, yet the measurable optical signature of an effective QD system is absent or minimal.” “At high brightness the spectrum, color, volume behavior, chromaticity stability and temporal response can remain similar to non-QD LCD solutions.”
For now, the German ruling mandates scrutiny of “QLED” and other potentially misleading display terms.
A clear understanding of what constitutes a QD display is also essential for QD-OLED displays and will only become more important if true quantum dot electroluminescent displays ever take off. (These displays using backlight-free technology are also known as QDEL or QD-LED.)
“Quantum dot displays should be defined by a combination of measurable material concentration and TV performance results in terms of color purity, color gamut and so on. Ideally, in a way that can be understood by consumers,” Vire said.
The whitepaper from TUV Rhineland and Nanosys argues that QD displays must meet certain performance requirements that go beyond color gamut: “Displays must provide the optical benefits associated with quantum dots, including spectral precision, tunability and stability, improved color accuracy behavior in luminance (not just a 2D gamut number), and, where applicable, temporal performance under backlight modulation.”
With TV marketing remaining vague and often misleading, digging into detailed display reviews is the most reliable way to find out how a display might perform in the real world.
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