QLED vs. OLED: Quick summary of the TV technologies
Let's start with a quick breakdown.
OLED stands for "organic light-emitting diode."
QLED (according to Samsung) stands for "quantum dot LED TV."
OLED is a fundamentally different technology from LCD, the major type of TV.
QLED is a variation of LED LCD, adding a quantum dot film to the LCD "sandwich."
OLED is "emissive," meaning the pixels emit their own light.
QLED, like LCD, is "transmissive" in its current form and relies on an LED backlight.
A QLED TV is just an LCD TV with quantum dots
The main takeaway is that QLED is closer to regular old LCD than it is to OLED, which I (and most other experts) consider a distinctly different class of television, much like plasma before it.
Quantum dots are microscopic molecules that, when hit by light, emit their own differently colored light. In QLED TVs, the dots are contained in a film, and the light that hits them is provided by an LED backlight. That light then travels through a few other layers inside the TV, including a liquid crystal, or LCD, layer, to create the picture. The light from the LED source is transmitted through the layers to the screen's surface, which is why we say it's "transmissive."