Given how many options we have at our disposal, it’s never been easier to find a television that fits specific requirements and a budget — but it has also never been harder to decide which one is actually worth buying. One quick look at a retailer’s website, and you’ll find yourself scratching your head trying to pick between LCD, OLED, or Mini LED options. If you’re even a bit tech-savvy, you’ll recognize OLED as the superior display technology of the bunch — but OLED TVs aren’t exactly budget-friendly.

Mini LED technology has been on the rise recently, bridging the gap between LCD and OLED panels. How Mini LED works is pretty fascinating — it uses hundreds of tiny LEDs behind the LCD panel, giving you several local dimming zones. This lets the TV control bright and dark elements on screen more precisely, as opposed to how a traditional LCD TV would simply light up large portions of the panel. Mini LED panels, can therefore, produce inky blacks while also maintaining high brightness levels when required.

Of course, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution with Mini LED TVs. Sure, newer technologies like QD-Mini LED produce more convincing images, but there are a few downsides that the more expensive OLED TVs don’t have to deal with. I’ve recently made the jump to Mini LED myself, and while it is a noticeable upgrade over my older LCD TV, there are still a few compromises that I’ve had to accept.

It’s difficult to completely eliminate the blooming effect even on premium mini LED TV models — this is simply a technological limitation that comes with panels that use any form of backlight. Blooming refers to the weird halo effect you can sometimes spot around bright objects that are surrounded by a dark background — think of streetlights or the moon against a dark night sky. Blooming is even more noticeable with white subtitles if they are laid over a particularly dark scene, or positioned within the letterbox bars — this is quite difficult for me to miss on my TV.

Blooming happens because of the limited number of dimming zones found in Mini LED TVs. If a bright object is smaller than the dimming zone it’s positioned within, the TV still lights up the entire dimming zone, in turn bleeding the light into the surrounding pixels that should technically have remained dark. A way to make sure you don’t get stuck with a TV with horrendous amounts of blooming is to simply buy one that has more local dimming zones. This ramps up the price noticeably, but it’s still a more affordable affair than going with an OLED panel.

I noticed that reducing the overall brightness of my TV or turning on a light source in the room helped lessen the visibility of the halo effect. OLEDs don’t suffer from blooming, since every pixel is self-emissive and doesn’t rely on a backlight.

OLED’s biggest selling point is how inky the blacks can get, and since every pixel generates its own light, all the TV has to do is turn off the ones responsible for displaying pure black. While premium  Mini LED TVs can do a remarkably good job at replicating the contrast levels of OLED panels, the latter is clearly superior given how it has a loyal following among home theater enthusiasts despite the price difference.

RTINGS compared the two technologies in great detail, and another aspect where Mini LED panels fall short is response time. OLED panels have pretty much no latency compared to LCD panels, since each pixel can be updated instantaneously. While response time is mostly relevant when shopping for gaming monitors, it does also affect how fast-moving images appear on TVs. Plus, many OLED and Mini LED TVs are now being advertised as being gaming-ready, and if you’re hooking up a console or gaming PC and meaning to get competitive, this is a factor worth considering. I’ve played some fast-paced games on my TV, and its 288Hz VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) is quite fantastic. 

Colors are a huge part of what makes a movie watching experience enjoyable, and fortunately, most Mini LED TVs have excellent color reproduction. In fact, they beat WOLED panels and are on par with QD-OLED displays, thanks to the fact that many mid-range and high-end Mini LED TVs also use quantum dot technology, which produces richer colors.

In RTINGS’ roundup of the best Mini LED TVs, a common criticism was poor viewing angles, even on the Sony Bravia 9, which is a flagship television. This is because most Mini LED TVs and monitors opt for VA panels that provide deep contrast, but have noticeably poor visibility when viewed from extreme angles. For large living room setups attempting to accommodate multiple viewers, this can be a genuine drawback with Mini LED TVs. That said, traditional LCD TVs also suffer from poor viewing angles, and generally, only OLED panels get you the best viewing experience regardless of where you’re seated.

Mid-range and flagship Mini LED TVs, when adjusted for the optimal TV viewing distance, can still provide a great experience. Another characteristic of OLED TVs is how slim they are. Since Mini LED and regular LCD TVs require a backlight, the additional layer behind the panel adds both thickness and weight. If you’re looking to wall-mount your TV and care about getting the aesthetics just right, then an OLED’s paper-thin profile is difficult to beat.

Mini LED TVs are also susceptible to the Dirty Screen Effect (DSE). It usually shows up as dark patches or long streaks of lines, mostly visible on plain, gray backgrounds. Inconsistencies in backlight diffusion are often the cause of the Dirty Screen Effect, to which OLEDs are nearly immune. That said, I appreciate not having to worry about burn-in on my TV — something OLED owners always have to keep in the back of their minds.

Despite all the downsides, Mini LED is an exciting technology that borrows from the positives of both OLED and LCD panels. You get much better contrast levels than LCD TVs and noticeably higher brightness than OLED TVs. Most of the drawbacks we’ve noted are also true for traditional LCD TVs, so unless you’re willing to spend the premium that OLED TVs ask for, we’d say Mini LED TVs are still a fantastic option.

For this article, we also referred to the in-depth analysis carried out by RTINGS across different aspects of TV performance, like contrast ratios, color reproduction, gray uniformity, and response times. Upper-mid-range or premium Mini LED TVs manage to deliver excellent picture quality, even if they can’t quite match OLED in terms of black levels or response time. Some of the best TVs you can buy use either OLED panels or Mini LED technology with a thousand or more dimming zones.

In fact, after much deliberation, I picked up the TCL C7K (QM7K in other regions) for my own living room. It has 1,008 dimming zones and support for high refresh rate. While I do notice blooming around the subtitles, the contrast ratios being infinitely better than traditional LCD TVs more than make up for it. My unit fortunately doesn’t have the DSE and viewing angles are pretty solid. More importantly, the TV’s peak brightness of 2,600 nits helps with visibility even during the day with the sun at full blast.