Home > Tech Explained

What Is a Quantum Dot Monitor?

By Miguel Leiva-Gomez

Many news articles have been appearing since mid-2015 talking about this radical type of display that uses something called “quantum dot technology.” At first sight, it might sound like another one of those over-hyped and unaffordable technologies, but once you look closer, it appears to be promising. Whenever new technologies appear, it’s natural for people to have a flurry of questions about them. The media generally does everything it can to make sure people are aware of the concept itself, but sometimes it does a lousy job of actually explaining how it works. That’s a void that probably should be filled before you decide to go out and open your wallet to a store clerk. Without further ado, it’s time to discuss what a quantum dot monitor actually is!

What’s Behind the Display?

quantumdot-dot

Underneath the surface there are several tiny semiconductor nanocrystals that can influence some of the smallest particles known to mankind. The sizes of these particles are so small you probably have trillions of them under your fingernail. Each of these nanocrystals is known as a quantum dot. What this does is effectively minimize the space that a pixel (or, more appropriately, a dot) will occupy on your screen. There are many reasons why this is much more applicable for television sets and desktop monitors than your current LED set up, but we’ll get to that in a minute. What you need to know right now is that we’re talking about some very tiny crystals that form the picture on your screen.

Why Not Stick with LED?

quantumdot-led

Have you ever used an OLED screen on a high-end smartphone? The black color is very deep, lacking the typical “noise” you’d encounter with any other “normal” screen. You might have also observed that the colors on display are more vivid. This is also how quantum dot (QD) technology works, except it doesn’t use organic molecules to create its light.

What makes it so much more special than anything else is its propensity to minimize power use while remaining a potentially more affordable technology than the OLED screens we are used to. Since quantum dots can be both photo-active (i.e. light triggers it) and electro-active (i.e. electricity triggers it), it means that we can trigger certain pixels to light up in color while selectively shutting down anything we want to display as black. Your typical LED screen will always have backlighting to kill the mood while you’re watching a dark scene in a movie. This backlighting requires a certain amount of power (my 27-inch monitor takes up about 45 to 48 watts in nominal power). You can technically halve that using a QD monitor because it doesn’t use any power to display black as a color.

QD’s usefulness doesn’t stop here, though. Artists and web designers are able to see a very accurate reproduction of colors due to the sharpness of the image. In addition to this, larger displays may not “fuzz out” as much with the resolution as their LED counterparts would. The fact that it’s potentially rather cheap to manufacture these displays (along with the fact that they actually shine brighter without losing their brilliance as quickly as other displays) makes the technology very promising.

Here’s a fun fact. QD technology isn’t necessarily new. The idea came around the 1980s before personal computers with separate monitors went mainstream. Now that monitors are almost all over the place, and there’s nary a home without a computer, it’s worth another look.

What do you think? Can QD tech hold up to its promise? Tell us more in the comments!

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Miguel Leiva-Gomez Avatar
Miguel Leiva-Gomez
Miguel has been a business growth and technology expert for more than a decade and has written software for even longer. From his little castle in Romania, he presents cold and analytical perspectives to things that affect the tech world.

Read next

Russia still custom-builds the Soyuz return seats for ISS crew members using plaster casts taken weeks before launch, because astronauts grow as much as five centimetres taller during a long-duration stay and a seat moulded to their Earth-shaped spine would no longer fit the body that comes home
Close-up of a young adult using a smartphone outdoors, highlighting modern technology and connectivity.
The “CrackBerry” nickname stuck for a reason — and the variable-reward psychology that hooked early-2000s executives on their BlackBerrys is the exact same machinery now running every push notification on every smartphone in your pocket
In 1843, Ada Lovelace described a brass-and-punched-card engine that could act on symbols as well as numbers, even composing music if harmony could be reduced to rules, inside seven translator’s notes three times longer than the paper itself
Bright modern laboratory with computers and technical equipment for research and analysis.
ARPANET sent its first message on 29 October 1969 from a lab at UCLA to a machine at Stanford, and the message was supposed to read ‘LOGIN’ — but the system crashed after the L and the O, meaning the first word ever transmitted over the network that became the internet was, by accident, ‘LO’.
In 1995, Microsoft shipped a cartoon-house interface called Bob, led by Melinda French, who married Bill Gates while it was in development — it demanded twice the memory of a typical home PC, sold roughly 30,000 copies, and was dead within a year, leaving behind the font Comic Sans and the animated assistant that became Clippy.
Stunning underwater shot of tiger sharks swimming among fish in the ocean depths.
The Greenland shark grows about one centimetre a year, does not reach sexual maturity until around age 150, and a specimen carbon-dated by Danish researchers in 2016 was estimated to be at least 272 years old, meaning it was already swimming the North Atlantic when Mozart was composing symphonies.
A person using a smartphone with a green screen surrounded by fresh fruits and vegetables in the kitchen.
When Apple shipped iOS 12 in June 2018, a small feature called Screen Time slipped onto every iPhone with a counter nobody had quite prepared for — a tally of pickups — and within a day Tim Cook was telling CNN the number of times he picked up his own phone was simply too many
Starry night with radio towers and the Milky Way galaxy visible overhead.
When NASA lost contact with the IMAGE satellite in 2005, an amateur radio operator in Canada named Scott Tilley picked up its signal in January 2018 while hunting for a classified spy satellite, and the spacecraft turned out to be still spinning, still powered, and still trying to phone home after 13 years of silence.