Thin LCD TVs “fail faster” due to edge-lit backlights

Enlarge / Samsung’s 2022 The Frame is one of the edge-lit TVs that RTINGs tested. (credit: Samsung)

Thin LCD-LED TVs are appealing because they’re easy to find space for and are aesthetically pleasing. To stay slim, most thin TVs, like Samsung’s The Frame pictured above, use edge-lit backlights. But beyond the image quality limitations of these designs, new testing from RTINGs suggests that there are inherent flaws in edge-lit TV designs that hurt durability.

Review site RTINGs has been running extreme tests on dozens of TVs and a few monitors that are meant to simulate years of use. So far, RTINGs is up to 10,000 hours of testing, which it says is equivalent to about six years of use. In a YouTube video this week, a representative for the publication’s research team said that in the past few months, testing has revealed a “clear, but troubling trend” of LCD TVs with edge-lit backlights being “inherently prone to significant durability issue.” She added that edge-lit TVs “fail faster than other LCD TV designs,” or those with full array local dimming (FALD) or direct-lit (or global dimming) backlights.

For its torture test, RTINGs tested 11 edge-lit TVs and reported that seven of them have “noticeable” uniformity issues. Of those seven, two models are from LG, and five are Samsung TVs.