Apple is widely expected to make the move to Mini LED displays which are LED-backlit LCD with Mini LED-based backlighting supporting over a thousand of Full-area Local Area Dimming (FLAD) zones. This allows deeper blacks and higher contrast ratio. Mini LED is not to be confused with MicroLED.
Prior to moving to the currently very expensive MicroLED, Apple’s plan is to transition much of the company’s Mac and iPad lineups to Mini LED display technology. Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo expects the first Apple products with Mini LED to begin appearing next year.
LCD panels used by Apple use LEDs, or light-emitting diodes inside for backlighting purposes to light up the display. Mini-LEDs, as the name suggests, are smaller diodes that are less than 0.2mm… Compared to a traditional LCD, a panel light with mini-LEDs uses many more LEDs, which means there are more total dimming zones to work with. A traditional display might use hundreds of LEDs, but a mini-LED display could have more than a thousand. Apple, in fact, is said to be exploring mini-LED displays that use 10,000 LEDs, each one below 200 microns…
Because there are more LEDs and more dimming zones, mini-LED displays can offer deeper, darker blacks, brighter brights, richer colors, and better contrast because there’s more control over what’s displayed on the screen with so many LEDs…
LED-backlit LCDs are much more power efficient than the cold cathode fluorescent lighting used for LCD panels in the past, and mini-LED LCDs will have additional power efficiency gains.
MacDailyNews Take: Back in December 2019, DigiTimes reported that Taiwan-based supply chain makers including Epistar, General Interface Solution (GIS), Taiwan Surface Mounting Technology (TSMT), Zhen Ding Technology and Flexium Interconnect were poised to receive orders for components to be used in a 12.9-inch Mini LED iPad Pro that Apple was said to launch in calendar third-quarter 2020.
Well that was written by someone absorbed by the microscopic details of the technology over actually expanding, beyond the basics anyway, regarding the advantages to and effects upon the consumer and supplier alike.
Consumer Mini LEDs were intro’d at CES for TVs.
When you go to BestBuy or Costco and see a TV mfr advertise how many contrast control or local dimming “zones” a TV has from the tens to the hundreds; a Mini-LED TV has alot more, in the thousands.
More zones is like having more pixels, but where pixels control color; more zones give you better individual control of brightness and contrast. It sounds alot like OLED, which can switch off individual pixels, but OLED seems to be at the opposite end of the brightness spectrum. While OLEDs have amazing blacks, since they can switch off individual pixels, they’re not all that great in bright ambient light. That’s where Mini-LEDs are supposedly good, where ambient light is bright.
I may be wrong, but that’s what I’ve come to conclude from buying a TV this past Winter.