Forget OLED, forget LED LCD, there's a new TV tech on the horizon: MicroLED. This display type has the potential for incredible image quality and an even more incredible range of sizes. From your smartwatch to wall-sized TVs, there's almost no limit in where you might find a MicroLED display. At least, theoretically. While you can buy MicroLED displays now, they're quite expensive.
MicroLED uses millions of tiny individually addressable LEDs, which promises to rival the picture quality of OLED, while also capable of better brightness and a lower chance of burn-in. Multiple TV manufacturers, including LG, Hisense, Samsung, Sony, and others, have all shown MicroLED TVs. Several companies, including Apple and Samsung, are also working on small sizes, but there have been issues.
Although it's expensive now, MicroLED is on the cusp of being the next great display technology. And it could end up in your home or on your wrist sometime in the future, even if you're not rich. Here's what you need to know.
What's MicroLED?
The first thing to understand is that MicroLED is a different technology from mini-LED. Although they're both new and similar-sounding, mini-LED is an evolution of current LCD TV technology. It uses more and smaller LEDs as part of the backlight, but an LCD panel is still used to create the image.
With MicroLED, on the other hand, the LEDs themselves directly create the image. The picture you watch is composed of individually-addressable LEDs, which makes it more like how OLED works. No more LCDs.
Different ways to create a MicroLED display, with the associated pros and cons. Left is just red, green and blue LEDs. In the middle, blue LEDs create blue light and excite red and green quantum dots. On the right, UV LEDs excite red, green, and blue quantum dots. The 4th subpixel is a spare to help improve yields.
You can buy mini-LED TVs now for the same price as other technologies, whereas MicroLED TVs are currently huge and expensive. On the smaller end of the scale, MicroLED displays for smartwatches are getting closer to production. Though this is skipping ahead a bit, just because a company can start production on big MicroLED displays doesn't necessarily mean it can also successfully make small MicroLED displays.
Here's how it works. As the name suggests, MicroLED is made of millions of micro, well, LEDs. Tinier versions of what's in your current LCD TV, or newer flashlights, light bulbs and what myriad other devices use to create light. This makes MicroLED seem simple. So why did it take so long just to make smaller LEDs and stick them in a TV?
An illustration of the size difference between traditional LEDs and MicroLEDs.
Turns out that process is a lot harder than it sounds. One problem is that when you shrink LEDs, the total amount of light they produce goes down. So you either need to drive them harder, increase their efficiency, or both. Just driving them harder introduces new issues. The TV will need a lot more electricity and have to dissipate a lot more heat. The dozens of LEDs in your current TV don't emit that much heat, certainly not compared to older technologies like plasma and CRT, but put millions of them right next to each other and things can get toasty.
Getting manufacturing tolerances to the point where the yield, as in how much of what a company makes is good enough to sell, has been a challenge. One method being researched is to use ultraviolet LEDs to excite red, green and blue quantum dots. This has the potential to increase yields and, by extension, drive prices down.
This diagram shows the various stages used to build MicroLED displays using UV LEDs. Once the UV LEDs are mounted, each has its own "bucket" that will hold quantum dot material. An ink-jet printer deposits said material into the bucket. As precise as this is, some "ink" spills out of the correct bucket (a). By turning on that sub-pixel, the UV light created cures the ink into place (also a). The surface is washed, removing the spilled ink (b). The process is repeated for green and blue (c-f). If, during this process, a computer detects one of the sub-pixels isn't activating, the 4th spare sub-pixel gets the dead sub-pixel's color (g). The final stage (h) sees the entire unit covered and secured for further manufacturing and assembly.
And then there's the cost. Instead of a few dozen, yellow-blue "white" LEDs like you get on a normal TV, or even the few thousand in mini-LED TVs, you have 8.3 million LEDs, one for each pixel on a 4K 3,840x2,160- pixel display. Actually, it's way worse than that. Since you need red, green and blue LEDs for each pixel, that means there could be upwards of 25 million total LEDs. Thousands of these are then grouped into modules, and multiple modules make up a TV, wall or movie screen. There are ways arrange the LEDs so you might only need the 8.3 million, but that's still a lot.
An illustration of LCD versus OLED versus MicroLED. Compare the complexity and multiple layers of an average LCD versus OLED and especially MicroLED. Also note the thickness, which while not exact, is indicative of the thinner display possibilities of the newer technologies.
Big, big picture
OK, so those are the challenges. Engineers like challenges. And in the history of consumer electronics, the trend is for "smaller and more efficient." The potential positives to MicroLED are numerous: Brighter images than OLED, but with the same ability to turn off each pixel, for a similarly perfect black. This would mean an even punchier, more realistic image than OLED and better HDR reproduction.
One aspect that's appealing to manufactures is the relative ease they can make different screen sizes. Once they've got the LEDs all figured out, they can just add more to scale up the size. For instance, the MicroLEDs on the market, such as the Awall at CES 2025, have modular blocks. To generalize, say a 4K 50-inch MicroLED TV has 10 modules with around 830,000 pixels on each module. The company could put more of those same modules together, now they have an 8K, 100-inch TV for essentially no difference in production costs. Or they could sell a 21:9 version with half the blocks. The difference in resolution is irrelevant thanks to modern video processing.
TCL's 163-inch MicroLED prototype.
This oversimplifies the whole thing a bit, but that's the general idea. With the right processing, it wouldn't matter if your TV is exactly 4K resolution, or if it's 5,327x2,997 or 8,000x4,500 pixels. If your dream is a wall-size display with 10K resolution, this could be the way to get it.
To put it another way, current LCD and OLED TVs have different size pixels for different screen sizes. So a 4K 75-inch LCD has larger pixels, but the same number, as a 4K 50-inch LCD. MicroLED could, possibly, just add more pixels of the same size to make a larger, and higher resolution, TV. This could turn out easier than changing the tiny LED pixel sizes, from a manufacturing standpoint. The only issue is viewing distance, since wider pixel spacing while cheaper (fewer LEDs) could be noticeable from close distances.
Displays big and small
Samsung's transparent MicroLED display.
MicroLED isn't all about massive screens, however. Apple was working on MicroLED for the Apple Watch, though that transition seems to have been delayed. Samsung showed a MicroLED smartwatch demo at CES 2025 and Garmin is rumored to be working on one as well. Another area that would benefit from small, high-resolution MicroLED displays is with AR/VR headsets.
It's also possible to make transparent displays with MicroLED.
The micro future
At the turn of the 21st Century, OLED was a far-off future tech that never seemed to leave the prototype stage. Now there are multiple sizes and resolutions that would have seemed impossible in the tech's early days. It's possible we're similarly in the early days of microLED. It's a technology that holds a lot of promise, in both picture quality, screen sizes and myriad other uses -- but it's not without its issues. Price is a big stumbling block, but engineers love a challenge. The fact that you can, if you've got $50,000 to $100,000 or so to burn, buy one now says a lot. Could this replace LCD TVs in many homes? Maybe. Could it give OLED a run for its money? Possibly. Will it replace projectors? Probably. As I said, it's an interesting technology.
As well as covering audio and display tech, Geoff does photo tours of cool museums and locations around the world, including nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, medieval castles, epic 10,000-mile road trips and more.
Also check out Budget Travel for Dummies, his travel book and his bestselling sci-fi novel about city-size submarines. You can follow him on Instagram and YouTube.