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?

The most common screen technology today is still LCD or Liquid Crystal Display. 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 but modern screens all use 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: a few 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 evenly placed around the edge of the TV: this allows for a much thinner overall TV and better brightness compared to direct.

The best of the bunch is full-array backlighting, where LEDs are evenly placed behind the whole screen. 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).

Modern TVs are steadily moving towards the use of MiniLEDs for edge and full-array backlightnig. While regular LEDs are about the size of a shirt button, MiniLEDs are grains of sand. Their small size allows for much denser lighting arrays, in turn providing better brightness and dimming control.

The other type of screen in today's market are OLEDs, which don't actually have backlights of any kind. For a deeper dive on what makes OLED different from traditional screens, check out our FAQ titled “OLED vs QLED: What’s the difference?"