Quantum dot TVs beat RGB LED TVs, says the company that makes QDs for TVs

At the Los Angeles Convention Center, two 85-inch televisions sat side by side in the Nanosys meeting room during Display Week, an annual business-to-business convention focused on technology used in displays of all types. One of the TVs was a mini LED panel with super quantum dots, and the other was an RGB LED – this year’s hottest TV trend. Both TVs displayed the same content at the same time to highlight the differences between the two technologies – or more precisely, to show the potential failures of RGB LED backlighting compared to super quantum dot (SQD), which uses blue LEDs for backlighting.

I should probably mention that Nanosys created the quantum dots in the first television.

The TV on the right, with the Nanosys super quantum dots, was labeled as the TCL X11L – the striped lower grille confirming this – and the other was most likely the TCL RM9L. Nanosys hasn’t confirmed this, but I’ve seen RGB LED TVs from Hisense, Samsung, LG, and Sony in person, and it wasn’t any of those. Jeff Yurek, vice president of marketing at Nanosys, informed me that both TVs were in Filmmaker mode and the color was set natively to allow both to achieve the widest possible gamut.

As a reminder, RGB LED televisions use red, green and blue LEDs grouped into zones to create colored backlighting based on the image displayed on the screen. Theoretically, this gives the TV brighter, more saturated colors than mini-LED TVs like the X11L with blue backlighting, without needing to rely solely on quantum dots. The main potential problem is that the colored light provided by the backlight spreads into adjacent pixels or areas of a different color, resulting in what is called color crosstalk. In practice, this could cause the red in a brightly colored shirt or hat to appear reddish on the wearer’s skin. And that’s exactly what this demo showed.

Throughout the demonstration, the same video stream was broadcast on both televisions. One slide showed three rows: two rows of boxes with the primary and secondary colors – blue, green, red, cyan, magenta and yellow – and the third with a thin white cross on a black background below each colored box. The top row of boxes would then alternate between a full box and one with a white cross inside. On the RGB LED TV, when the white cross appeared in the top row, it was easy to see the color of the area around the cross become a little lighter and less saturated. The color crosstalk did not only occur in the top row of boxes; the color of the middle row box also bled visibly into the bottom row of crosses. This is also seen in TVs’ BT.2020 color gamut measurements, with the introduction of the white cross decreasing overall BT.2020 coverage, most dramatically with the blue and green color dots.

But unless you’re a measurement enthusiast like me, you’re not looking at solid blocks of color on your TV for fun. The effect is also present with skin tones – something that, as humans, is easily noticed. Just as the color of the blocks is reflected in the white cross, a colored background is also reflected in the skin tone; still images of a woman’s face with a colored background caused her skin tone to shift toward the background color. To make sure my eye wasn’t causing the color to bleed like it would on television, I used a scope to focus only part of the woman’s face, blocking the rest of my view. I could still tell what background color was being displayed by the change in the hue of his skin.

The SQD TV exhibited no color crosstalk. Contrast was also better, thanks to the number of dimming zones. The The RGB LED TV used in this comparison has, I’m told, around 8,000 dimming zones. One reason the number is lower is that each dimming zone on an RGB TV must have a minimum of three LEDs – one red, one green and one blue – and these take up space. But when the backlight is all blue LEDs, a single LED can make up a dimming zone, providing much finer control.

All of this is noticeable in the actual content. During an action scene with fast movement and cuts, I could still notice differences as the bright colors affected those around them, especially skin tones. And in night scenes, the difference in contrast was noticeable. If the RGB LED TV was alone in the room, without the SQD TV for comparison, I don’t think the color crosstalk would be as obvious. Our eyes can quickly adapt to visual problems and we stop noticing them. But removing the comparison doesn’t remove the problem.

This is not brand new information. Industry experts have been concerned about the potential for color crosstalk in RGB LED TVs since the technology debuted at CES 2025. Those concerns have grown as more RGB LED TVs hit the market this year. LG Display, notably a maker of OLED panels that compete directly with RGB LEDs, made videos a few weeks before this year’s CES highlighting the problems.

Of course, both Nanosys and LG Display have an interest in downplaying RGB TV technology. The performance of an RGB LED TV also doesn’t tell the story for all RGB LED TVs. I didn’t notice any crosstalk issues when I reviewed the Hisense UR9, although the more I see of other RGB LED TVs, the more I think the Hisense may be getting around the problem and reverting to white, not RGB, backlighting whenever there was a lot of color on the screen. Additionally, the processing capabilities of Sony’s upcoming RGB LED TVs could make color crosstalk an issue on these TVs. And we’re only at the beginning of the RGB LED TV story. As technology continues to develop and refine, these issues should be alleviated. But for 2026, the SQD at least seems to have the upper hand.