Transcript
Scott Wilkinson (0:00)
In this episode of Home Theater Geeks, I talk about a lawsuit brought against Hisense from a disgruntled consumer. Does he have a case? Stick around.
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Scott Wilkinson (0:19)
This is twit. Hey there, Scott. Matt Wilkinson here, the home theater geek. In this episode I'm going to talk about an article I recently saw in my news feed. One of the newsletters I get. The industry newsletters is called Display Daily. And in it last week was a story about a lawsuit that kind of piqued my interest in, tweaked my anger the law. The article is called Lawsuit alleges Hisense Misled consumers with QLED Marketing. And we're going to put a link in the show notes to that article so you can see it. The suit was filed in US District Court for the Southern District of New York and it was brought by a guy named Robert Macios or Masioche. I think I'm going to say Macios just because I don't really know. That's kind of what it looks like. He claims that Hisense USA engaged in false advertising and deceptive business practices regarding its TV products. Macios had bought a 43 inch Hisense QD5 5, which we can see in the first graphics just, just a picture of the QD5, which is a fairly low end Hisense TV. He bought it in November 2024 for 160 bucks from Best Buy. Now they market the QD5 along with the QD6, QD65, QD7U 7U 7N and other models as featuring QLED technology. Now, QLED technology, QLED stands for Quantum Dot Light Emitting Diode. And Hisense claims that it, quote, dramatically increases the color space and improves color saturation, allowing consumers to see color like you've never seen it before. Yeah, okay. Typical marketing hype. You've heard it before a million times. Now, Macios contends that these television that these televisions either do not contain QLED technology or contain it in such negligible amounts that it does not meaningfully enhance the display the performance as advertised here. He wants various forms of relief, including a permanent injunction preventing Hisense from continuing this allegedly deceptive practice. Actual and punitive damages, of course, and more. He also demands a jury trial. He wants his day in court. Now, in my opinion, this is a totally bogus lawsuit. Assuming that the QD5 and other Hisense QLEDs do in fact contain quantum dots, which I have no reason to believe they don't. Negligible amounts as he claims in his lawsuit makes no sense at all. So I want to explain how QLED TVs work. And we're going to look at a graphic and I'm going to tell you how it works. Now this looks very complicated, but I've circled the elements that are the most important for us to look at and consider. At the right, you have blue in this graphic. Mini LEDs. They don't have to be mini LEDs. They could be regular sized LEDs, but you have blue LEDs. That's the backlight. You might have a diffuser plate which diffuses the light from the LEDs and makes it more uniform. Then the, the blue light hits a qdef, otherwise known as a quantum dot enhancement film. And this is a film of plastic that is saturated, impregnated, if you will, with red and green quantum dots. The red and green quantum dots get hit by the blue light. Blue photons are absorbed, some of them, not all of them, but some of them are absorbed by the red and green quantum dots, which then re emit photons at the red or green wavelength. Now, when you combine the red and green from the quantum dots and the blue from the backlight, you get white. So the white, the white light then goes through a bunch of elements, a bunch of layers. It hits the liquid crystal display, which is the actual element that makes the image. Each sub pixel in the liquid crystal layer has a color filter, a red, green or blue color filter that displays the red, green or blue part of the image. And then that finally gets displayed and it's a full color image. The lower element, the lower picture here, the quantum dot enhancement film QDEF is combined with the diffuser plate. That's the only difference between these two graphics. So the important thing to remember is blue backlight passes through a QDEF which generates some red and green. Some of the blue gets through without being converted. That forms white, goes through the liquid crystal, just the part of the display which forms the image, then through color filters which separate out the red, green and blue parts. But that all gets combined by your eye, finally in the end, in the display. So that is how quantum dot QDEF Q qled, sorry, works. It has a QDEF in it which is saturated with quantum dots. Now, you can't have a negligible amount of quantum dots in that qdef. I know this is a bit of Alphabet soup, so forgive me, I even get a little confused myself once in a while. The quantum dots are embedded in the qdef and if it has a negligible amount of them, then too much of the blue light is going to get through and not be absorbed by the quantum dots to form red and green. And if you do that, then you're going to produce a very blue image. I'm going to show you a picture of the CIE diagram, which is how color television works. You can see the triangle is what the display can reproduce. So you see blue in the lower left, you see green at the top, and you see red at the lower right. You might hopefully you can see a point in the middle called D65. That's the ideal white point. That's the target of where the white light coming off the QD EF should be. If there are very few quantum dots in the qdef, more blue will get through than should. And pull that white point towards the blue and the picture will look blue. So hisense would have a lot more problems, a lot bigger problems than this lawsuit if that's what was happening. So it can't be happening. It just can't.