TV Backlighting Tech Is Confusing Buyers, Here’s What You Need To Know

I’ve become increasingly confused by TV backlight technology. So let me explain it, because if I’m confused, you almost certainly are too.

Over recent months I’ve talked a lot about RGB TVs, and it’s a brilliant new technology, the latest and greatest, using what’s called direct backlit tech. But TVs haven’t always worked that way. Over the years we’ve had edge lit, backlit, full array backlit, and a pile of other terms thrown around. Every single one of them plays a part in the picture you see, because every TV on the market today, apart from OLED, uses an LCD panel. That panel opens and shuts to form the picture, but it can’t show you anything unless there’s light shining through it.

So manufacturers have spent years projecting light, blue or white, through different layers to make that picture brighter, punchier and more vibrant. But there’s a catch, and it’s easiest to explain with a couple of simple examples.

Edge Lit vs Direct Lit, What’s The Difference

Picture an old school edge lit TV. The lights sit around the outside of the screen, along the top, bottom or sides. Now imagine a black screen with a white soccer ball sitting in the middle of it. To show that ball, the edge lights nearest to it fire up bright or dim to push light across the panel and up to where the ball needs to appear.

The problem is that light doesn’t stay where you want it. You get blooming around the edges of that soccer ball, a faint glow bleeding out into the black, because the light is being thrown in from the side rather than sitting directly behind the image.

Direct backlit TVs fix a lot of that. Instead of lights around the frame, you’ve got lights spread across the whole back of the screen in a clear, deliberate pattern. Now, for that same white soccer ball on a black background, only the lights directly behind the ball switch on. Everything else stays off. It’s a much better result, though with fewer lights than today’s sets, you could still get some blooming.

Every RGB And OLED TV Is Direct Lit, But Not Every MiniLED Is

Here’s my actual gripe. It’s not that any of these technologies are bad. It’s that it’s genuinely difficult to work out which one is sitting inside the TV you’re about to buy. I’ve spent time in retail stores, on retailer websites and on manufacturer websites, and it is not made clear anywhere near often enough which lighting style a given TV uses.

There’s no argument that direct lit is the better technology. If you’re buying an OLED or an RGB TV, you’re getting direct lit light in some form, every RGB panel we’ve tested uses direct lit mini or microLEDs shining straight through the picture.

MiniLED is where it gets murky. Some TVs marketed as miniLED genuinely have those miniLEDs arranged directly behind the panel, direct lit. Others use miniLEDs positioned around the edge instead, which technically makes them a miniLED TV, but functionally it’s still edge lit tech with the blooming and softness that comes with it. Same buzzword, two very different pictures.

What A TV Brand Insider Told Me

I put this to Chris Mayer from Hisense on my podcast, and his answer stuck with me. Asked what a shopper should do when they can’t tell which backlight tech they’re getting, he said if you can’t know the answer, you should only buy at a price point where you do know the answer.

He took it a step further too, saying that if he personally can’t confirm whether a TV is running inferior backlight tech, and the brand won’t tell him either, the right move is to walk away and buy something else in that price range instead.

This isn’t really about ,000 flagship TVs, where the tech is usually obvious and well documented. It’s the affordable end of the market where I think buyers are most exposed. Plenty of TVs marketed as miniLED at that price point could be edge lit rather than direct lit, and that difference genuinely changes what you see on screen.

Chris could only speak to his own brand, and what he told me is that every Hisense TV except their Canvas range is direct backlit. The Canvas TV is edge lit on purpose, because it needs to run at a much lower brightness for its art mode when it’s not being used as a normal telly. That’s a deliberate design choice, not a shortcut.

My Advice Before You Buy

I don’t know how many other brands can say as plainly as Hisense did that their whole range, bar one deliberate exception, is direct lit. That’s the question every buyer needs to be asking, and pushing retailers and websites to actually answer.

If you can’t get a straight answer on whether a TV is edge lit or direct lit, be cautious. That doesn’t automatically mean it’s a bad TV, an edge lit set from ten years ago was a genuinely great television in its day. But by today’s standards, direct lit is where you want to be, and you deserve to know what you’re paying for.

If you’re shopping for a TV in Australia, check out our Which TV To Buy guide. Every 2026 TV that’s been announced is listed, and you can filter by price, TV type and size to narrow down your choice. There are no affiliate links and no commissions in it for me, I just want you better informed before you buy your next TV.