Samsung Has Reportedly Restarted Work On OLED-Busting ‘QNED’ TV Tech
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared on TechRadar.
As if TV tech weren’t confusing enough, Samsung Display has reportedly restarted development of QNED televisions – and Samsung’s QNED is not the same QNED that we’ve previously seen from LG.
Samsung’s QNED is short for Quantum-dot Nanorod Emitting Diode, and like OLED it’s a self-emissive technology, meaning each pixel generates its own light rather than using a backlight behind a grid of pixels.
For those who know TV tech, the simplest way of thinking of the version being proposed here is that it’s like a micro-LED version of QD-OLED. QD-OLED works by having OLED pixels shine blue light through a layer of quantum dots, which convert the blue to other colors as needed. But where QD-OLED uses organic LEDs (OLED), QNED uses inorganic nanorod LEDs that could be cheaper to manufacture, longer lasting, and hopefully more efficient.
You’d still have an individual light for every pixel, like you do with micro-LED, but unlike micro-LED you don’t need three sub-pixels of red, green and blue to create your colors – you just have the blue, and you let the quantum dots handle the rest, which could mean it doesn’t have the cost issues that micro-LED is struggling to beat.
(LG’s QNED technology is basically its version of a QLED TV — using advanced color filtering tech such as quantum dots with an LED backlight and LCD screen.)
Samsung had previously said that QNED would deliver better contrast, brightness and response times than the most advanced current display technologies, but as FlatpanelsHD notes, it paused the project in 2022 to concentrate on QD-OLED and micro-LED, which it was having more success with.
According to reports in the Korean trade press, Samsung restarted QNED in late 2025 after making a breakthrough in the way it positions the nanorods.
Why has Samsung returned to QNED?
Speaking to ETNews, an insider said: “The team that previously worked on QNED has regrouped. Internally, there is a recognition that nanorod LED technology should be pursued as a long-term strategy, which prompted the restart of QNED.”
That means Samsung Display has (at least!) three TV panel technologies in active development: QD-OLED, which is the current flagship and is being improved every year; EL-QD (aka nano-LED, ELQD, QD-LED, EL-QLED and AMQLED); and now QNED.
That’s on top of the continuing development in the industry around micro-LED, which has been in TVs for several years but is having trouble reaching a realistic price; constant improvements in mini-LED; and the launch of RGB-backlit TVs. Oh, and IJP-OLED is lurking somewhere over the horizon as well. It’s an interesting time for TV technology…
About the Authors
Writer, broadcaster, musician, and kitchen gadget obsessive Carrie Marshall has been writing about tech since 1998, contributing sage advice and odd opinions to all kinds of magazines and websites as well as writing more than twenty books. Her latest, a love letter to music titled Small Town Joy, is on sale now. She is the singer in the spectacularly obscure Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind.
With contributions from
Matt Bolton – Managing Editor, Entertainment