OLED vs Mini-LED vs QLED: what each one costs in Australia

Walk into any Australian electronics retailer and the TV wall is sorted by three words: OLED, Mini-LED, QLED. Two of them describe how the screen makes light. The third mostly describes a filter sitting in front of an ordinary LED backlight. They are not three rungs of one ladder, and the prices don't line up as though they were.

The table below is built from the TV listings in our catalogue, grouped by the technology the retailer's own product page claims. It is generated when this page is requested, so the counts move as stock moves.

Live figures, read from our catalogue on 11 Aug 2026.

89 listings across one store. A technology with fewer than three live listings is left out rather than shown thin.

What actually separates them

An OLED panel has no backlight. Every pixel makes its own light and switches off completely, so black on an OLED is the same black as the bezel around it. That is the whole pitch: contrast, and the shadow detail that comes with it. You pay for it in peak brightness, and in a small long-term risk of image retention if you leave the same scoreboard or news ticker on screen for thousands of hours.

Mini-LED is still an LCD. What changed is the backlight: thousands of tiny LEDs in hundreds of independently dimmed zones, instead of a few dozen. It gets much brighter than OLED, which matters more here than most reviews allow for, because plenty of Australian living rooms are watching sport at 4pm through north-facing glass. Where it loses is edges. A bright object on a dark background sits inside a lit zone, so you see a faint halo around it.

QLED is a quantum-dot layer over an LCD panel. It widens the colour range and it is cheap to produce, which is why the QLED shelf runs from small no-name sets up to Samsung's flagship line. The badge on its own tells you nothing about local dimming, brightness or contrast, because the same badge sits on a 32-inch bedroom set and on a top-of-range 85-inch. Read the backlight spec, not the sticker.

How to read the table

Two caveats matter more than the numbers. The cheapest live price is one listing at one store at one moment, not a market floor; the same set may be cheaper at a retailer we don't crawl. And the median is a median of what is listed, not of what people pay.

Screen size drives price harder than panel technology does. If one technology's list is mostly 75-inch sets and another's is mostly 43-inch sets, comparing the two medians compares the mix, not the technology. Use the medians to see where a technology's volume sits, and compare like sizes on the category pages before you decide anything.

Which one to buy

Bright room, daytime sport, free-to-air with the curtains open: Mini-LED. Dark room, movies at night, or a screen you sit close to: OLED. A second set for a bedroom or a rental, or anything under 55 inches where OLED barely exists at all: QLED, chosen on size and inputs rather than on the badge.

Whichever you land on, settle the size first. Moving up one size class is usually a bigger real-world upgrade than moving up a technology tier at the same money.

Live listings by technology: OLED TVs, Mini-LED TVs and QLED TVs. Our picks are in the best OLED TVs guide, and we track individual sets across stores, including the LG C-Series OLED, the Samsung S90 series, the Hisense U8 Mini-LED and the TCL C8 series.