wildant26

[wildant26]

QLED vs. OLED vs. Mini LED: Understanding TV backlight tech

So many choices when it comes to television. It starts with the size and resolution, but there are competing backlight technologies to consider as well. So before you plunk down serious cash, make sure you’re getting the lighting style you want by understanding the differences in QLED vs. OLED vs. Mini LED.

What is LED?

LED is an acronym for light-emitting diode. You likely interact with LED tech in some form multiple times per day, including the screen in your phone, light bulbs, and many other sources of illumination. LEDs are the small elements of a television screen that light up in order to produce an entire image on the screen.

Basically, these cells release light when an electrical signal passes through them, and the television manages the electrical impulses to produce the image it wants to show. QLED, OLED, and Mini LED are all versions of this basic technology, which has been utilized in electrical products since the 1960s and gained popularity in television technology thanks to Samsung's improvement and acceptance in 2007.

CCFL (cold-cathode fluorescent lighting) was replaced by LED, which illuminated the screen from the edges. Some LED TVs use this edge-lit configuration, but others have progressed to more complex configurations. Manufacturers can now have more precise control over how each portion of the screen is lighted thanks to LED arrays with several points of light behind the panel. In some circumstances, such as with OLED, the screen's black portions might go fully dark to increase contrast and dynamic range.

What is QLED TV?

QLED is a Samsung technology that builds on the typical LCD (liquid crystal display) television with LED backlighting. This is the same tech, many iterations over, which Samsung introduced in 2015. The Q in QLED stands for “Quantum Dot.” They are embedded directly into the stack of materials that make up the LCD display. When light hits them from the LED backlight, these dots emit their own light to enhance the image on-screen. The goal is to lessen one of the main weaknesses of LED technology, which is the “blooming” effect of brighter parts of an image slightly lighting the areas around the image, and color bleeding.

While QLED offers some improvement over traditional LED, it doesn’t always mitigate this blooming, and the contrasts between light and dark are not as stark as with some other technologies.

What about color?

QLED is fantastic in terms of color. QLED screens have a wide range of color options and outstanding color contrasts. QLED is also less expensive at greater sizes than other backlighting technologies, making it the ideal budget-conscious option for a new higher-end TV. In addition, QLED tends to produce panels with a higher overall brightness, which may be beneficial depending on your screen requirements.

Samsung's 43-inch TU-8000 series from 2020 is a fantastic cheap 4K UHD alternative if you want to experience this type of screen. This Samsung QLED TV is a budget-friendly 4K option that's ideal for a dorm room, a child's room, or as a second or third display. It's about as inexpensive as you can get, with an MSRP of $379.99. This is not the television for you if you want to build a home theater system or if you want the finest picture quality and options. QLED TVs have the potential to rise to the top of the market, but they are up against OLED and now Mini LED.

What is OLED TV?

OLED stands for "organic LED." Organic materials make up OLEDs, which produce similar effects when current is sent through them. OLED displays, on the other hand, are fundamentally different from traditional LED-lit LCDs.

A backlight shines through a stack of display materials to form an image on LCD TVs. As a result, they fall within the category of transmissive screens. OLEDs, on the other hand, are unique. OLED panels are made up of many tiny diodes that emit their own light, putting them in the emissive display category. When an OLED display wishes to portray black on a specific section of the screen, it simply switches off the pixels in that area, resulting in considerably darker tones with no light flowing through from brighter surrounding areas.

When it comes to color, OLED has some challenges with longevity. While red and green OLED pixels have a high lifespan (over 45,000 hours), blue OLED pixels only last about a third as long. This means that as the blues fade, an OLED display may have color accuracy concerns in the long run. This occurs more frequently in corporate displays than in household displays. Of course, for the ordinary home user, a blue OLED pixel's 15,000-hour lifespan may never be an issue.

[wildant26]

The Rivian R1T breaks the electric-pickup game wide open

When an EV startup is founded by sports car fans who can also read a financial sheet, you get the all-electric, all-wheel-drive Rivian R1T pickup truck. Rivian was founded in 2008 with the intention of producing a performance coupe, as it is what CEO RJ Scaringe and director of vehicle dynamics Max Koff desired.

But consumers like pickup trucks. The Ford F-Series, Chevrolet Silverado, and Ram pickup were the number one, two, and three-selling vehicles in the US last year. The GMC Sierra and Toyota Tacoma were numbers nine and 10.

According to IHS Markit, electric vehicles accounted for only 1.8 percent of US vehicle sales last year. Rather than putting itself at a disadvantage by focusing on a narrow vehicle category using EV technology, Rivian decided to construct an electric pickup truck.

But the car enthusiasts in control didn't want to give up on the notion of creating a fun-to-drive vehicle, so they enlisted the help of McLaren Automotive's chief engineer Charles Sanderson. He was well-versed in McLaren's Tenneco-supplied connected hydraulic damper system, a technology that is as transformational for the R1capabilities T's as the R1electric T's all-wheel-drive system.

Years ago, the company began discreetly working on this project while another EV company's CEO made bombastic statements on social media and presented an odd-looking pickup prototype while making equally outrageous claims about the vehicle's capabilities and delivery date. (Yes, we're referencing Elon Musk's Cybertruck.)

Rivian is now set for its major public debut, with the R1T electric pickup truck going into production on Sept. 13. The deliveries have already begun. The truck was first shown to the press in Breckenridge, Colorado, at an altitude (12,600 feet maximum!) that would make a combustion-powered vehicle pant for air. A normally aspirated combustion engine would lose 37.5 percent of its rated power due to the thin air at that altitude.

Electric vehicles, on the other hand, do not require air to function, hence altitude has no effect on them. The R1T, on the other hand, could possibly bear this disadvantage because its four electric motors have a combined peak output of more than 800 horsepower. That's true, the R1T not only features supercar suspension technology, but it also has supercar power output. With a 0-60 time, it fulfills the promise of these specs.

[wildant26]

Inside The World’s Most Ambitious Eco-City

Masdar City appears to be a mirage at first view. From afar, it appears to be a single multicolored structure standing alone on the horizon. Part of the illusion is due to the city's peculiar location: next to Abu Dhabi airport, right across the highway from the Arabian Gulf, in a desolate desert stretch. Between there and downtown Abu Dhabi, there are 20 miles of the most wasteful urban construction I've ever seen—a featureless plain crisscrossed by vacant six-lane boulevards and peppered with pompous walled residences the size of the Supreme Court. However, density plays a role in the illusion. Masdar City, a $18 billion experiment, will house 40,000 people in a two-square-mile area.

As the world’s most ambitious eco-city, Masdar does not allow cars. Visitors must instead leave their vehicles in a giant garage at the city’s northern edge. As I pulled in, a trim Westerner wearing a dark suit despite the heat stepped from the shade to introduce himself. Stephen Severance, a 45-year-old American, is the city’s program manager. He came to Masdar four years ago, after working at the consulting firm Booz Allen.

Severance took me past rows of parked automobiles to a set of smoky glass doors that slammed open onto a marble lobby with a whoosh. Masdar's Personal Rapid Transit pods, or PRTs, waited waiting beyond a second glass wall. The small white self-driving cars serve as an environmentally friendly update for passengers who have replaced their out-of-date internal-combustion engines. Severance and I sat into chairs facing each other, the automated door slid shut, and the little pod sped through what appeared to be a massive basement at 15 mph. It moved almost silently on rubber tires, following magnets buried on the floor and avoiding collisions with proximity sensors.

According to Severance, the PRTs were designed to offer transit throughout Masdar City in the original blueprints. Engineers would have had to build the entire city on 20-foot-tall pedestals to create room for them beneath the structures. This is how they erected Masdar City's present center—roughly a third of a square mile—but elevating the entire metropolis was unaffordable. The rest of Masdar will be built on the ground, and its transportation system is still being decided: electric buses or solar-powered carts, for example.

Severance made a motion toward the pod. "This reminds me a touch of the Jetsons," he said. "It was a great concept, and we've demonstrated that it works." We're currently running on solar power. These automobiles arrive at their destination without colliding." However, he told me that the PRT line that Severance and I boarded was the only one that was operational, and that the PRTs only take one route: about half a mile from the garage to Masdar Institute.