If you’re making plans and shopping with installing a new home theater system in mind, it is almost impossible not to encounter the mention of QLED TVs. Not to be confused with an OLED TV, brands across the industry pitch this standard as the ideal solution in the budget and mid-range TV market, and in fairness, they have a lot going for them. The technology relies on a layer of quantum dots that light up with intense, vibrant colors when hit by a backlight. This design allows QLED displays to provide punchy colors that look appealing when consuming media, generally at a more affordable price than comparable OLED screens.

That said, how different is it from a traditional LED screen? You may have questions before you pull the trigger on buying a brand-new TV, whether it’s a cheap QLED TV for your bedroom or a premium one for your living room. After all, buying a TV can be a big financial investment, and falling for marketing hype without understanding the tradeoffs can lead to buyer’s remorse. To help you make an informed decision, let’s go over some of the core disadvantages of QLED TVs, before you swipe your credit card.

While a lot of people judge a TV by how bright it can get, it’s also important to measure how dark it can get. The contrast ratio of a TV is a measure of the difference between the brightest whites and the darkest blacks a screen can display simultaneously, and it’s an area QLED technology faces its most significant hurdle, compared to something like OLED. Because a QLED panel relies on a powerful backlight system forcing light through a grid of liquid crystals, it can never completely shut off the light on a pixel-by-pixel basis. So, even when a scene calls for pitch-black darkness, some amount of light will bleed through the liquid crystal shutters.

As a result, what should be a deep, black night sky can look more like a hazy, dark-gray fog. If you enjoy watching atmospheric movies, horror films, or dramas in dimly lit or dark rooms, this limitation may impact your viewing experience. 

While high-end QLED models try to fix the issue with local dimming zones, which turn down the backlight in dark areas of the screen, that’s more of a workaround. A standard 4K display has millions of pixels, and even the most expensive QLED TVs only have a few hundred or a few thousand dimming zones to manage them. That means a single dimming zone has to control the light for thousands of pixels (or more) at the same time, and the contrast ratio is going to take a hit.

Because QLED televisions have a limited number of dimming zones to manage a dense grid of millions of pixels, they can fall victim to a distracting visual effect known as the halo effect, or blooming. When a small, intensely bright object is displayed directly against a dark or pitch-black background, the TV’s processor will tell the specific local dimming zone behind that bright object to crank up its brightness to maximum. However, when dimming zones are physically much larger than the tiny object that needs lighting up, the intense light spills over into the surrounding dark pixels.

On your screen, the effect looks like a distinct, ghostly white smudge or a glowing halo radiating outward from the bright object. It can be distracting for folks who care about small details, and for avid movie watchers who prefer using subtitles, or sci-fi fans who love space epics, blooming can become an absolute dealbreaker. 

The issue gets even worse when you view the television from an angle, as the blooming effect becomes significantly more visible. The effect is even more emphasized when watching HDR content, since whites are generally displayed at peak brightness levels in such instances, while the blacks are supposed to be at their darkest. OLED TVs are immune to blooming, since they adjust brightness levels on a per-pixel basis.

Another design limitation that QLED TVs inherit from their traditional LCD roots is narrow viewing angles, at least when compared to OLED displays. For a QLED television to look its absolute best, you need to be sitting directly in front of the screen. If you are sitting on the edge of a wide couch because you have lots of friends and family over for a watch party, the picture may start looking dull or faded.

Notably, viewing angles also depend on the type of panel used by the QLED TV in question. It could be using a Vertical Alignment (VA) or In-Plane Switching (IPS) panel. IPS displays have better viewing angles, but brands often opt for VA panels due to superior contrast ratio (at least, when viewed straight on).

When sufficiently off-angle, colors that look vibrant and rich from the center can start looking dull, inaccurate, or completely washed out. The black levels can also degrade into a milky gray, with the halo effects we discussed earlier becoming more apparent. 

If you are shopping for a main living room television where the whole family gathers for movie nights, or if you frequently host large crowds for football games, a QLED could make the experience frustrating for anyone who isn’t lucky enough to claim the central seat in the room. If not an OLED, we would recommend specifically picking a QLED TV with an IPS panel for this purpose. This is also something you need to check before buying a new monitor.

For gamers, sports fans, and action movie enthusiasts, response time is one of the most critical features on a TV’s spec sheet. Response time refers to how long it takes an individual pixel to change from one color to another, usually measured in milliseconds. Because QLED TVs rely on physical liquid crystals that mechanically rotate to allow or block light, there is an inherent delay in how fast they can react to rapid changes while playing media.

When a fast-moving object flashes across a QLED screen, such as a hockey puck flying across the ice, a football being thrown downfield, or a camera panning rapidly during a high-octane car chase, the pixels may not shift colors fast enough to keep pace with the action. This can lead to the trailing edge of the moving object leaving behind a faint ghostly trail, commonly known as motion blur. It may not be much to the untrained eye, but those who take their media consumption seriously will note the loss of clarity, even if it’s only for a split second.

If you plan on hooking your console to your TV to play fast-paced competitive games where split-second tracking is life or death, a sluggish response time can lead to a poor visual experience that feels less responsive. While QLED TVs try to fix this by using software tricks or aggressive motion smoothing, these solutions are not foolproof. The most common side effect of these workarounds is the soap opera effect, which makes movies look unnatural. So if you’re a serious gamer, we would highly recommend splurging on an OLED TV.

As home utility bills steadily climb, lots of brands are focusing on environmental impact, and the power efficiency of your TV shouldn’t be overlooked. QLED TVs are known to be more power-hungry, especially when compared to Mini-LED and OLED TVs. The root cause of this high energy consumption comes down to that bright backlight.

Because a QLED TV cannot illuminate its pixels individually, it has to rely on a massive, powerful LED backlight array to illuminates the entire surface area of the screen. To combat daytime room reflections and achieve bright highlights, the background lighting system draws an comparatively immense amount of electrical current. The brighter you want your HDR content to look, the harder that backlight array has to work, and the more electricity it consumes.

Furthermore, because the light is always running at full blast behind the scenes, a massive portion of that generated energy is wasted. When the liquid crystal layer closes up to display a dark shadow or a black scene, it is essentially trying to block a bright wall of light right behind it. That blocked light is absorbed by the panel and dissipated as physical heat. This means a QLED TV, along with drawing more power, also runs hotter than other modern displays. Over hours of continuous use, that extra power draw can add up on your monthly electricity bill, while also impacting your TV’s average lifespan.