TCL has accused Samsung of falsely advertising budget LCD-LED televisions as Mini LED sets, in a lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the Central District of California in late August.
The complaint says Samsung's M70H, M80H and M90H models are “merely recycled… pre-existing, low-end, standard LED televisions” from Samsung's entry-level Crystal UHD line, “re-labelled… as ‘Mini LED’”. It alleges the M models “contain none of the technological advancements associated with Mini LED technology, including [full array local dimming]”.
Samsung did not answer questions about specific claims in the suit. A spokesperson said the company intends to vigorously defend against it.
Full array local dimming, or FALD, is the most advanced backlighting used in LCD-LED displays. It uses dozens to thousands of small LEDs grouped into zones, each with individually controllable brightness, which raises contrast and matters a great deal for high dynamic range.
The M-series product pages carry a specification line for “Micro Dimming” that reads “Supreme Mini LED Dimming”. The downloadable spec sheets add a footnote: “Supreme Mini LED Dimming is Software-based (not full-array hardware-based) technology.” Samsung uses the same term on its Neo QLED pages, which TCL accepts as genuine Mini LED sets; those spec sheets carry no such footnote.
Software dimming works differently. The television analyses each frame, divides it into zones, decides an ideal brightness for each and adjusts the frame accordingly. The panel's own brightness stays uniform across its surface.
TCL says it took an M70H and an M80H apart and found they cannot perform local dimming at all, lacking the control chip and circuitry and using the same processor as the Crystal line. The filing says the sets have a few dozen LEDs arranged “on two aluminum strips”, where some Mini LED displays have thousands.
Then there is the question of whether the LEDs are small. Here the dispute runs out of ground, because there is no industry-wide rule for what makes an LED “mini”. Published ranges include 50 to 300 micrometres, 100 to 200, 100 to 300, and “typically below 200”. TCL's suit says Mini LEDs “are generally .1 mm to .3 mm” and puts the M-series LEDs at 0.5 mm.
Analysts side with the substance of the complaint. “I think that is broadly agreed across the industry that FALD is a key and mandatory feature in Mini LED backlights,” said Eric Virey, principal displays analyst at Yole Intelligence. Bob O'Brien of Counterpoint Research said: “Mini LED was originally introduced as an improved FALD technology, with more dimming zones. So among those in the industry, it has always been assumed that a Mini LED TV has FALD capability.”
They also agree on why the argument is possible. “There are no organizations with authority to make and enforce such standards,” O'Brien said. “TV brands have historically exploited the lack of clear standards to be more creative in their marketing.” Virey thinks writing standards would start “an endless race”, because “each time there are new technologies, new marketing terms are invented and can easily be abused”.
So the case is not really about whether Samsung's televisions work. It is about whether a word nobody owns has been used incorrectly.
The industry has settled on four incompatible size ranges, which is three more than are needed. No published range includes 0.5 mm. No published range has any authority either.
A court in California will now be asked to establish what “mini” means for the television business. It is the first body ever asked to do so, and it is not a standards organisation. If it rules, the definition of a Mini LED will be whatever the Central District of California says it is, which is a sharper answer than the industry has managed in a decade of selling them.
The Department of Unnecessary Research has identified the structural difficulty. “Mini” is a comparative, and the thing it is being compared with is an ordinary LED, which is also undefined. The industry has built a premium category on a relative term measured against a term that nobody has fixed either.
A Mini LED is an LED that is small. An LED is small. Proceedings are expected to take some time.