There are technologies that are born with enormous promise. He MicroLED is one of them. Since Samsung introduced “The Wall” at CES 2018the sector has been telling us for years that this technology is going to revolutionize the way we watch television. And he is right. The problem is that this revolution has not reached anyone’s living room. who is not a billionaire.
The technology has become the Holy Grail of the television industry, but the enormous cost of its manufacture means that only the most exclusive models and, let’s say it without frills, extremely expensive, can integrate this technology. Unlike what has happened with OLED or MiniLED, manufacturers have not managed to reduce production costs of these panels to make them competitive in mass manufacturing.
What is MicroLED and why is it so special?
To understand MicroLED you have to know how current screens work. Traditional LED TVs have a layer of pixels that filters light coming from an array of LED lights installed on the back. It is, therefore, a backlighting technology that offers very good brightness power. The problem is that when those screens need to display pure black, the screen can’t turn off pixel by pixel, so it turns off areas of those rear LEDs.
The more dimming zones you have, the better the light control and the more control over the blacks you have. Even so, it is inevitable that some light will sneak in. It’s not really black. The result is very dark grays at best.
The technology OLED solved that problem years ago, making each pixel on the screen emit its own light that can be turned off individually. Here, the result is a perfect contrast, but it has its own limits.
The LED diodes that make up each pixel are organic, so they degrade over time and are susceptible to burn-in, leaving a permanent mark on the screen after many hours with a static image on the screen.
In this sense, the promise of MicroLED technology is to provide the perfect balance between OLED and LED, but without any of their drawbacks. Like OLED, it uses microscopic LEDs as a pixel, but made with inorganic materials that are much more stable and resistant to burning. In this way, the screens MicroLEDs are capable of reaching OLED contrast levelsbut with a much higher shine and with a useful life that is measured in decades. It is literally the best of all worlds. And there is also its trap.
The problem: manufacturing the MicroLED is a nightmare
A 4K display has about 8.3 million pixels. In the latest MicroLED panels, each of those pixels needs three individual LEDs, leaving us with almost 25 million microscopic chips that must be manufactured, placed and connected with nanometric precision on a panel the size of a television screen.
This level of miniaturization required by MicroLED has limited its production to large-inch formats before the challenge it poses fit so many millions of diodes into a 55″ or 65″ panel.
The process of mass transfer of these chips, what the industry calls mass transferis extraordinarily complex, and today, also extraordinarily expensive.
How much expensive? To put it in context, one of the few MicroLED models that can be purchased in stores is a 89 inch Samsung and has a sale price of 109,000 euros.
He LG Magnitaimed at the extreme luxury market, was around 230,000 euros in sizes of 118 and 136 inches. That price range makes them unviable as home televisions (at least for most mortals’ homes). Hence its market figures are very small at present.
In all of 2024, they were manufactured less than 1,000 units of MicroLED televisions in the entire world. Samsung sells that many conventional televisions in a matter of minutes.
However, although these panels do not reach the living rooms, it does not mean that the MicroLED is stagnant. In fact, it is in development. This technology is growing strongly in those niches where price matters less than performance.
In large format signage it has been the standard for years. film and television studio fundslobbies of luxury buildings or private movie theaters. In automotive, the dashboards of the future want bright, durable and efficient screens. And in the wearables segment and augmented reality, both Apple and Samsung have been investing for some time in bringing MicroLED to smart watches and AR glasses, where extreme pixel density is critical and having smaller production volumes makes the cost more manageable.
As indicated in an analysis According to Yole Group, the global MicroLED market could grow to nearly $5 billion in revenue by 2032, although most of that will come from those niche segments, not the living room TV.
There are MicroLED and “MicroLED”
The high production cost made manufacturers explore other ways to make this technology profitable and evolve. One of the solutions was to use as backlight system behind an LCD panel, rather than as self-emissive pixels.
Strictly speaking, although the latter have MicroLED technology, they should not be considered as such. However, some brands use it interchangeably in their trade names for advertising purposes.
By having a smaller scale, MicroLEDs allow much better control of light and enhancing the colors, but they still require an LCD panel that separates the colors of each subpixel. That is, it would act more like a MiniLED or a conventional LED than an OLED.
The good news is that, as brands showed like Hisense and Samsung have already evolved MicroLED technology with white diodes, towards the RGB MicroLEDwhich already has a self-emissive RGB diode for each pixel that, now, would be closer to the operation of an OLED. This evolution, as before MicroLEDs they made other technologiesrepresents the first sign that these panels are beginning a path of optimization to reduce production costs.
In fact, the models launched by Samsung during the last CES 2026 It would be around $30,000.. It seems like an exorbitant figure for a television, but it must be taken into account that we have prices that exceeded $100,000 in previous generations, which makes it a much more “affordable” option, but far from the 2,000 euros that an OLED television costs on average in Spain.
However, and here comes the least exciting but most honest part, is that there are still a few years before we can see televisions with these MicroLED RGB panels capable of competing in price with OLED or MiniLED models.
The MicroLED has already proven to be everything it claims to be. The technology works, its performance is spectacular, its advantages over the durability of OLEDs and the brightness of Mini-LEDs are real and measurable. But, as the proverb said: there is a distance from saying to doing. That stretch is an abyss called price and it will still take a long time to close.
Image | Samsung
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