There are tons of variables to consider when shopping for a TV or monitor. From resolution to refresh rate, you might feel like you’re drowning in math while trying to pick a new display or device.

Before you even consider specific variables like those, it’s important to understand the basic technology behind those numbers.

While OLED displays and LED displays are often marketed side by side, they feature very different methods of providing video and backlighting.

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This variance plays a huge role in not just the quality of your picture, but also how big or heavy your display is. Read on to find out which of these technologies is best for which purpose, and to discover whether OLED or LED is better for your needs.

The main difference

The biggest difference between these two technologies is the job or jobs they do and how they do them. LED (Light Emitting Diodes) don’t create the display image. That’s actually handled by a transparent LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) panel. But, since LCDs don’t emit their own light, the panel would look nearly black without the backlighting provided by the LEDs positioned behind or around them.

On older, basic displays, backlights could consist of as few as 10 or less “lighting zones” of LEDs. This often made dark sections of the image look overly lit, or gray, due to the imprecise placement of light. More modern displays offer far, far more lighting zones, sometimes into the thousands. Now, each tiny section of the display can receive precisely light it needs for ideal image brightness and black levels.

OLEDs (Organic Light Emitting Diodes) solve this backlighting conundrum entirely by both creating the picture and emitting their own light. You can think of each individual pixel of an OLED display as a tiny, color-changing light bulb. This makes it able to turn off entirely to provide perfect black levels, or illuminate in any color, or pure white. We’ll cover more about the benefits and drawbacks of this capability in the next section.