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Samsung Claims Its New QLED TVs Are Better Than OLED TVs (theverge.com)
Samsung recently unveiled its latest flagship televisions at CES 2017, the QLED series. The company is challenging the notion that OLED TVs represent the pinnacle of picture quality in the living room. According to Samsung, the QLED TV represents its best achievement in image quality and viewing experience yet. The Verge reports: Of course Samsung would say that at an event meant to showcase said product. But the company insists it's made very real improvements compared to the flagship TVs it unveiled only a year ago. One of those upgrades pertains to brightness. The QLED TVs reach a peak brightness between 1,500 and 2,000 nits -- up from the 1,000 peak from 2016's lineup. Color reproduction has also been improved. The QLED sets handle DCI-P3 "accurately" and are capable of reproducing "100 percent color volume" -- something Samsung claims to be a world first. "This means they can express all colors at any level of brightness -- with even the subtlest differences visible at the QLED's peak luminance -- between 1,500 and 2,000 nits." Samsung says all of this is possible because it's using a new metal material along with the quantum dot nanocrystals. On the software end, Samsung's 2017 TVs are still powered by Tizen and feature basically the same user interface as last year. But there are some new additions like a sports mode that aggregates scores and other content from your favorite teams and an expanded Music section that lets you Shazam music as it's playing in a TV show and immediately launch that track in Spotify another streaming services. Samsung is also looking to clean up how its TVs look in your living room. New this year is a clear-colored "Invisible Connection cable" that runs from the TV to an external breakout box where you'll find all the HDMI ports and other critical connections (besides power, which is a separate input).
QLED = LCD screen using an LED backlight and quantum dot phosphors
Organic LEDs (OLEDs) are electroluminescent. Quantum dots are fluorescencent. They require a backlight of some sort to produce light.
Ordinary quantum dots, as used by Samsung in their previous TVs, are indeed photo-luminescent, requiring a backlight and an LCD filter.
However, these new displays use QLEDs (aka QD-LEDs), which are actually electro-luminescent very much like OLEDs - they're stimulated by electrons instead of photons, so they don't need a backlight. It also means they can be directly turned on and off like OLEDs, so they don't need an LCD filter and you also get those wonderful perfect blacks. QLED TVs are a lot like OLEDs, only brighter.
Unsurprisingly there's some confusion about the terminology, even among reporters, and Samsung isn't helping much. But if you look up earlier articles on QLEDs, and look at the comparisons vs OLED that Samsung has been doing, you'll see how much of a jump QLEDs are.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
The claim is "they can express all colors at any level of brightness".
Currently every shipping consumer television (inorganic LED or OLED) can only display the DCI-P3 color primaries, making the entire color gamut a triangle substantially smaller than "all colors".
Newer sets are able to receive color information in a container based on ITU-R Rec. 2020 color primaries, however no sets can actually display the colors outside of DCI-P3 but inside ITU-R Rec. 2020. Moreover, even the gamut of Rec. 2020 is not "all colors."
To have a container for all colors with three primaries, you have to have color primaries that are not realizable, such as the CIE 1931 XYZ space or the ACES color space.
However no one has yet invented a display system that can display colors that are not realizable, because they are not realizable.
No system can display "all colors" additively, unless you use a system with color primaries based on all of the monochromatic colors (i.e. much more than three primaries - thousands). Four or five color primaries added together can get close. Allowing subtraction as well as addition of color primaries can help, but that is difficult to realize.