TCL SQD-Mini LED combines refined quantum dot colour, advanced light control and filtering to tackle blooming, colour inconsistency and picture flaws on large televisions.
DUBAI: The most impressive television in a showroom is not always the one with the brightest demonstration. TCL SQD-Mini LED aims to make a different case: that richer colour, deeper contrast and better control of bright objects should work together. In an exclusive interview with The Brew News, Managing Editor- Shaneer N Siddiqui, General Manager of TCL Middle East- Vic Shen, described how its latest display architecture tackles three common complaints: exaggerated colours, glowing halos around highlights, and picture inconsistencies on bigger screens.
The Brew News: SQD-Mini LED TVs have now been in the market for some time, and consumers are starting to see the technology across TCL’s premium TV lineup. For someone walking into a showroom today, what makes SQD-Mini LED meaningfully different from previous generations of display technology, and why should they care?
Vic Shen: SQD-Mini LED is the result of TCL’s latest generation of display innovation and combines three breakthroughs within a single display architecture: Super QLED, Precise Dimming Series and Ultra Color Filter.
What makes SQD-Mini LED significant is that it addresses brightness, colour and contrast simultaneously at the panel level rather than treating them as separate improvements. The technology was developed to solve persistent display challenges such as colour imprecision, blooming around bright objects, and limitations in large-screen picture consistency.
For TCL, SQD-Mini LED represents the progression of a development journey that began with our early QD-Mini LED products and has evolved through multiple generations of research in panel manufacturing, quantum dot materials and backlight engineering.
The Brew News: When consumers compare premium TVs, they often see long lists of specifications that are hard to interpret. Looking specifically at SQD-Mini LED, what key innovations have the biggest impact on the everyday viewing experience, and how do they work together behind the scenes?
Vic Shen: Each technology addresses a different part of the image creation process. Super QLED improves the purity and precision of quantum dot colour conversion by refining particle size and core-shell structure. This produces more accurate colour before the image even reaches the panel layer.
Precise Dimming Series focuses on light control. It improves dimming precision and enables more accurate management of bright and dark areas within the same scene.
Ultra Color Filter works at the colour filter layer, preserving colour purity and reducing colour impurities before the image reaches the viewer.
Together, these technologies create a complete system that simultaneously improves colour accuracy, contrast performance and brightness rather than optimising only one aspect of display quality.
The Brew News: Many consumers associate picture quality with more vivid colours, but accuracy is often just as important as intensity. How does SQD-Mini LED help deliver more precise and consistent colour reproduction across different types of content and viewing conditions?
Vic Shen: SQD-Mini LED begins improving colour at the source. Super QLED uses enhanced quantum dot materials that create more precise red, green, and blue light. This improves colour purity before light reaches the display panel.
The Ultra Color Filter then helps preserve those colour improvements throughout the final image creation process, reducing impurities that can affect colour accuracy on large screens.
Together, these technologies support an ultra-wide colour gamut of up to 100% BT.2020 and help maintain accurate colour reproduction across different content types, whether viewers are watching films, sports or gaming content.
The Brew News: Bright highlights against dark backgrounds remain one of the most demanding tests for any display. How does SQD-Mini LED handle challenging scenes such as night cityscapes, subtitles on dark backgrounds or stadium floodlights, and what improvements might viewers notice compared to previous generations of displays?
Vic Shen: One of the most visible challenges in modern televisions is managing bright and dark elements within the same scene without compromising either. Precise Dimming Series was developed to improve light control and minimise unwanted light spill between bright and dark areas.
The system enables a single dimming zone to perform with greater precision, effectively allowing light to be sculpted more accurately across the screen. This helps reduce blooming and halo effects while preserving detail in both highlights and dark areas.
In practical terms, it allows scenes such as a bright street lamp against a night sky to appear more realistic, with each element retaining its intended visual impact.
The Brew News: Television marketing often focuses heavily on brightness figures, but consumers are also becoming more aware of factors such as contrast, colour quality and shadow detail. When evaluating an TV, what picture quality characteristics should people pay the most attention to, beyond headline specifications?
Vic Shen: Brightness is important, but it is only one component of picture quality. A premium display must balance brightness, colour accuracy and contrast. If one is prioritised at the expense of the others, the viewing experience can suffer.
SQD-Mini LED was designed as a system where these elements work together. Super QLED addresses colour precision, Precise Dimming Series addresses contrast and light control, while Ultra Color Filter helps maintain colour purity throughout the display process.
The goal is not simply to make the image brighter, but to ensure that bright highlights, accurate colours and detailed shadows can coexist within the same scene.
The Brew News: We’re seeing growing demand for larger screens across the Middle East, with many consumers now considering 75-inch, 85-inch and even larger televisions. What challenges emerge as displays scale up in size, and how was SQD-Mini LED designed to maintain picture quality across these larger screen formats?
Vic Shen: As screen sizes increase, display imperfections become much more visible. On large screens, issues such as uneven brightness, colour inconsistency, and blooming become significantly easier to notice compared to smaller displays.
SQD-Mini LED was engineered with large-screen performance in mind. Super QLED helps maintain colour accuracy across the panel, while Precise Dimming Series improves the control of light across large viewing areas. Ultra Color Filter further supports colour consistency and image integrity across the entire screen.
This panel-level approach helps ensure that picture quality remains consistent even as screen sizes continue to grow.
The Brew News: Today’s viewers use the same television for everything from streaming and live sport to gaming and user-generated content. How does the processing behind SQD-Mini LED help optimise different types of content, particularly when the source material isn’t always produced in the highest quality?
Vic Shen: Image processing plays an important supporting role by helping optimise how the display responds to different types of content.
For example, TCL’s TSR AI Picture Quality technology can analyse lower-resolution or compressed content and enhance its presentation in real time. This can be particularly important on larger screens where image imperfections become easier to notice.
At the same time, processing works alongside technologies such as Precise Dimming Series to help manage brightness, contrast and overall picture consistency.
The objective is always to support the capabilities of the panel and display system rather than artificially altering the viewing experience.
The Brew News: Looking ahead, where do you see the next chapter of SQD-Mini LED innovation? What aspects of picture quality are TCL’s engineers continuing to refine, and what can consumers expect from the evolution of the technology over the coming years?
Vic Shen: The future of SQD-Mini LED lies in continuing to advance the fundamentals that shape image quality: colour precision, light control and panel performance.
We see significant opportunities to further refine quantum dot materials, improve dimming precision and expand large-screen viewing experiences while maintaining colour accuracy and contrast consistency.
At TCL, innovation is supported by an integrated manufacturing ecosystem that spans panel production, material science and display engineering. This allows us to continue evolving SQD-Mini LED as part of a long-term technology roadmap rather than as a single product generation.
Our objective is to continue improving how light, colour and contrast work together so that viewers can experience content as accurately and immersively as possible.
