Mini LED technology advantages are significant and will coexist with OLED for a long time. Currently, the application of Mini LED is mainly divided into two parts: one is used as the backlight for LCD products, and the other is as large-sized display panels, which can also be applied in medium-sized high-end products such as monitors, laptops, and automotive displays. As a core component providing display and backlight sources, Mini LED can achieve curved displays and ultra-thin applications, and it has obvious advantages in wide color gamut, HDR display, and dynamic area adjustment.
For panel manufacturers, pairing Mini LED backlighting with high-end LCD panels meets the demands of higher-end products, thus providing an alternative solution to issues such as low yield rates of AMOLED and defects in component properties. Qin Feng believes: “LCDs equipped with Mini LED backlighting can display better quality than traditional LCDs, approaching the display performance of OLED, with both having their own strengths.”
Senior Director of Tianma Specialized Display R&D Center, Qin Feng
According to a research report by LEDinside, the next generation of Mini LED backlight technology will be a development focus for various manufacturers, with an estimated market size reaching $1 billion by 2023. Data from Yole Research shows that global Mini LED display devices will grow from 3.24 million units in 2019 to 80.7 million units by 2023, with a compound annual growth rate of 90%.
Seeing the development prospects of Mini LED, Liu Chuanbiao stated: “The company has developed Mini LED backlight and Mini RGB display product solutions, and is currently shipping small batches to multiple clients. In terms of upstream LED chips, the company has invested in the construction of blue and green light LED epitaxy and chip production projects in Nanchang, making it the largest, most automated, and highest-efficiency enterprise in the LED industry. Given that RGB displays are increasingly replacing traditional LED displays and the spacing is getting smaller, red and yellow light LED chips will have a huge market development space. Therefore, the company will invest 1 billion RMB in Nanchang to build red and yellow light LED epitaxy and chip projects, further strengthening its layout in the LED chip field.”
From a technical perspective, Mini LED technology is superior to OLED in terms of color contrast, energy efficiency, and lifespan, while also solving the burn-in problem of OLED. More importantly, the emergence of Mini LED can break OLED‘s monopoly on high-end panels, giving manufacturers another option.
“The performance of Mini LED backlight + LCD is close to, and even in some aspects may exceed OLED, but it will depend on the subsequent process development and cost reduction, as well as the degree of production capacity investment,” Qin Feng believes: “Both OLED and Mini LED are evolving technologically, with the latter having a considerable trade-off space between performance and cost, allowing flexible market adjustments. The product mix will also be more diverse, with more mature technology, larger production capacity, and higher yield rates. For a period of time, there will be a coexistence state; in the future, Mini LED backlighting will be more widely used in mid-to-high-end TVs, laptops, tablets, and high-end professional display applications; independent display parts will dominate in outdoor ultra-high-resolution displays.”
Compared to traditional displays, Mini LED offers better display effects, higher contrast, and longer lifespans. At the same time, compared to OLED, Mini LED is more diverse in product composition and has higher yield rates. However, OLED and Mini LED backlit LCD will be in a complementary and coexistence state for a long time. Source: Touch Screen OLED Network
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