FEATURE
This image from Vizio illustrates the concept of local dimming LED arrays.It can get complicated,but in short,
there’sa backlight(usuallywhite),with
an LCD layer on top of it. The purpose
of the LCDs is to block a controlled
amountof light from the backlight.
On top of the LCDs are colourfilters
that turn the light red, greenor blue.
That’sthe basic structure,but modern
LCDs have other layerslike polarizers,
anti-glare coatings, and so on. A big
white light, covered by a bunch of tiny
LCDs (three for each pixel) to block or
let through various amounts of light,
and a colour filter to turn the light red,
green or blue.
What Mini LED technology does is
replace that big backlight with a grid of
lots of tiny little backlights. I’m glossing
over the finer points. There are lots of
exceptions. In TVs, for example, larger
LED backlight arrays with what is called
‘local dimming’ are common, and even
Mini LED TVs are already on the marketfrom brands like TCL. Apple’s Pro
Display XDR is very nearly a Mini LED
display, with 576 backlight LEDs that
are individually controlled (a typical
Mini LED display of that size would
have perhaps a few thousand).
So that’s Mini LED in a nutshell: kind
of like the Pro Display XDR, but with
many more, smaller, LED backlights.PRECISE LOCAL
DIMMING AND HDR
What does a backlight array of
thousands of tiny LEDs do for you,
exactly? Well, in a traditional LCD you
may have one backlight lighting up
the entire display in a uniform fashion.
It has to be as bright as the brightest
white pixels on the screen. Then the
LCDs in front of it would block some
amount of light to make darker pixels.
With an array of backlight LEDs, like
those on the Pro Display XDR, you can