Why Your Next TV May Have Mini LEDs

This backlight technology can help boost brightness and contrast in LCD TVs from Hisense, LG, Panasonic, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, and TCL

By James K. Willcox
Senior Home & Tech Editor

Updated March 12, 2025

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Samsung TV seen in a living room. — Samsung TVs with Mini LEDs are called Neo QLED sets.

Keeping up with new TV tech isn’t easy. Every few years, shoppers see new marketing jargon for features that promise impressive improvements but often don’t live up to the hype.

But we’re actually excited about one emerging technology, Mini LEDs in TV backlights. These really make a difference in how some higher-end LCD/LED TVs perform.

Televisions with backlights made up of Mini LEDs have the potential to deliver improved brightness, contrast, and black levels. The technology started appearing four years ago in TCL sets, but you can now find it in TVs from other brands as well, including Hisense, LG, Samsung, Sharp, and Sony.

Mini LEDs Improve Local Dimming

Mini LEDs in the backlight take the idea of local dimming much further. By shrinking the size of the LEDs, companies can use more of them packed together—thousands of them in each TV. Because the LEDs are so small, there can be a lot of dimming zones—say, a thousand zones, instead of the dozens typically found in even the best LCD sets without Mini LEDs. These zones can be controlled precisely to help improve contrast and black levels and reduce halos.

By increasing the dynamic range of the TV—the difference between the brightest whites and deepest blacks—Mini LEDs can also help boost a TV’s HDR (high dynamic range) performance. That means you’ll be able to see all the detail in a darkly shadowed scene.

Combine these factors, and Mini LED sets can perform more like OLEDs, while retaining some traditional benefits of LCDs, such as better brightness and a wider choice of brands and screen sizes. One big trend we’re seeing in 2025 is that companies are focusing on improving Mini LED performance by exerting more precise light control and increasing the efficiency of the LEDs. This can produce even brighter images and further reduce halos around brighter objects on dark backgrounds.

The technology has been gaining momentum. Mini LED backlights not only are in many brands now but also are no longer being relegated to the most expensive LCD sets. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January, several brands, including Hisense and TCL, announced that their more mainstream sets will include them, though the pricier models will have higher peak brightness, more dimmable zones, and more powerful processors for controlling them.

Consumer Reports has been impressed with the Mini LED models we’ve tested. “We’ve seen Mini LEDs can make an improvement in the local dimming feature, with better control of black levels and dark scenes, and significantly reduced haloing effects,” says Matt Ferretti, who heads TV testing at CR. These sets have done well in our ratings, and delivered top-notch HDR performance.

Here are a few of the models we’ve tested that include Mini LED backlights.

James K. Willcox

James K. Willcox leads Consumer Reports’ coverage of TVs, streaming media services and devices, broadband internet service, and the digital divide. He's also a homeowner covering several home improvement categories, including power washers and decking. A veteran journalist, Willcox has written for Business Week, Cargo, Maxim, Men’s Journal, Popular Science, Rolling Stone, Sound & Vision, and others. At home, he’s often bent over his workbench building guitars or cranking out music on his 7.2-channel home theater sound system.