Backlighting: What is it and why does it matter?

When shopping around for TV’s, the term “backlighting” comes up quite often. What does this mean?

Most TVs produced and sold today are LCDs or Liquid Crystal Displays. This technology has been around for a while now; chances are, most if not all of your TVs are LCD. LCDs have two main layers: the screen and the backlights. The screen arranges whatever image is needed and the backlights light it up so you can see it. Early versions of LCD screens used florescent bulbs as backlights. Nowadays, all TVs uses LEDs or Light Emitting Diodes.

There are three main forms of backlighting: direct lighting, edge lighting and full-array lighting. Direct lighting is the simplest: backlights reflecting onto a diffuser layer. It's very cheap to produce and will be found on basic TVs. Edge lighting is just what it sounds like, where the backlights are placed around the edge of the image TV: this allows for a much thinner overall TV. The best of the bunch, full-array backlighting, is where LEDs are evenly placed across the whole screen and are controlled by the TV's processor. This produces much better overall brightness and allows the TV to dim parts of the image as needed, resulting in much better black levels and reduced “bloom” (an effect where the light bleeds over into parts of the image that are supposed to be dark).

The best LCD screens will use full-array backlighting with MiniLEDs. This is very similar to traditional full-array backlighting but it uses much denser arrays of small LEDs called MiniLEDs. These smaller LEDs can be stacked much closer together, producing a significantly brighter picture, a  more pronounced the local dimming effect, much reduced bloom and better black levels.

The other type of screen in today's market are the OLEDs. They simple don't have backlights, since the screen creates its own light. For a deeper dive on what makes OLED different from traditional screens, check out our FAQ titled “OLED vs QLED: What’s the difference?”

Both LG and Samsung offer LCD TVs with all of these backlighting systems. The differences are best seen in person, on our showroom floor.