Chinese TV maker says its SQD-Mini LED sets suit sunlit homes and large screens better than OLED, but its own Pakistan model sits well below the headline brightness, and prices remain unpublished.
LAHORE: TCL is pitching Pakistan as a front line in its fight with OLED television, arguing that the country’s shift to 75-inch-plus screens and its brightly lit homes favour the Mini LED technology it has spent seven years building over the self-lit panels that have long defined the premium end of the market.
In a position paper issued in Lahore on Wednesday, the Chinese electronics maker said OLED had reached “the limits of what its underlying physics will allow”, and presented its SQD-Mini LED range as the successor. The 75-inch-and-above category is now the fastest-growing segment of Pakistan’s TV market, the company said, without giving sales volumes or naming a data source.
The argument lands as TCL tries to convert a global lead into local margin. The group topped worldwide Mini LED TV shipments in the first half of 2026, selling 2.43 million units, according to Omdia figures cited in its interim results, though Samsung gained share in the second quarter as cheaper Mini LED models multiplied.
The case against OLED
TCL’s critique is specific. It says OLED’s organic materials lose brightness and colour accuracy with age, that static images such as game menus, news tickers and streaming interfaces can burn permanently into heavily used panels, and that lifespan tops out at about 30,000 hours. It also argues that organic deposition does not scale cheaply to the 85- and 98-inch sizes Pakistani buyers increasingly want.
The company put OLED’s peak brightness ceiling at about 2,000 nits, a figure it said can fall short in bright Pakistani rooms and across the wider Middle East and Africa. By contrast, it said, its Mini LED sets deliver full brightness with no burn-in risk and twice the lifespan.
Some of those claims are harder to square with the current market. LG Display and Samsung Display both advertised peak brightness of 4,500 nits for their 2026 OLED panels at the CES trade show in January, according to specialist reviewer HDTVTest, although that figure applies to a small portion of the screen and real-world peaks in a living room tend to sit nearer 2,000 to 3,000 nits. Burn-in, meanwhile, remains an acknowledged risk for OLED owners who leave fixed images on screen for long periods.
What Pakistani buyers can actually get
The gap between TCL’s global flagship and its Pakistani shelf is wide. The X11L, unveiled at CES as the first SQD-Mini LED television, is rated at up to 10,000 nits with as many as 20,736 dimming zones. TCL has launched the X11L in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia but has not said whether it will sell the model in Pakistan.
What reached Pakistani stores is the C7L, introduced at TCL Horizon 2026 at the Expo Centre Lahore in May in sizes from 65 to 98 inches. Its specifications list peak brightness of up to 3,000 nits and up to 2,176 local dimming zones, along with a 144Hz panel and Bang & Olufsen audio. That is roughly 50pc above the OLED ceiling TCL cites, but below the 2026 OLED peaks the panel makers advertise.
YANG Li, general manager of TCL Electronics Pakistan, called the C7L “the pinnacle of display technology” at the May launch. Neither the launch material nor Wednesday’s paper gave Pakistani rupee prices, the single number most likely to decide whether a family in Johar Town or Gulberg trades up to a 98-inch screen.
Built on the factory floor
TCL’s stronger argument is industrial. It said reaching SQD-Mini LED required in-house panel production at scale, a quantum dot research programme running alongside backlight engineering, and a system-level design approach, three things most television brands lack.
Its sister panel maker TCL CSOT has been building Mini LED-capable lines since 2019 and, according to the company, ranks first globally in production of panels 85 inches and larger. TCL said each product generation, from the X10 through the X925 Pro, C935, X11K and X955, doubled as a test bed for the next, with the 6,500-nit X11K validating the backlight design now marketed as the Precise Dimming Series and a parallel programme producing its Super QLED quantum dots.
That vertical integration is why large Mini LED sets can be made more cheaply than large OLEDs, the company argues, because inorganic LED production benefits from manufacturing scale in a way organic deposition does not.
A crowded, contested label
The Mini LED name itself has become a battleground. TCL has sued Samsung in a Los Angeles federal court, alleging that some Samsung sets are marketed as Mini LED without the technology the term implies. Samsung denies the claim, and no court has ruled.
In Pakistan, TCL has spent the past two years building out its retail presence, from its first experience lounge to a series of flagship stores, while widening its range beyond screens with products such as an AI-powered washing machine line launched last month.
Questions left open
The paper says the modern television must handle cinema streaming, live sport, console gaming and smart-home control, often in one evening. Gamers, the group most exposed to OLED burn-in from fixed on-screen menus, are a natural target; TCL has previously published advice on tuning its sets for gaming.
The company did not address power consumption, a practical concern for buyers of very large, very bright screens in a city where night-time outages and rising reliance on solar shape household spending. Nor did it publish independent test data for its lifespan or burn-in claims.
“TCL did not create this moment,” the company said. “It spent years preparing for it.” Whether Pakistani buyers agree will depend less on nits and dimming zones than on the price tag TCL has yet to show them.
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