TCL is suing Samsung, arguing that the Mini LED TVs Samsung sells aren't truly Mini LED.
On August 31, TCL North America sued Samsung Electronics America in US federal court, alleging that Samsung repackaged ordinary LED TVs as Mini LED, misleading consumers and stealing TCL's market share through low prices.
The products in question are Samsung's M70H, M80H, and M90H, launched in 2026. TCL is asking the court to prohibit Samsung from continuing to promote these products as "Mini LED", and is also demanding that Samsung correct its advertising, return related profits, and compensate for losses.
Samsung responded by saying it will actively respond to the lawsuit and insisted that its product descriptions are accurate and reliable.
So the core of the current debate between the two parties is: what constitutes a Mini LED?
Is it still considered Mini LED without local dimming?
This debate sounds technical, but the underlying principle is simple.
Most so-called LED TVs are, strictly speaking, still LCD liquid crystal TVs. The "LED" refers to the backlight system that provides the light source for the liquid crystal panel. The liquid crystal screen itself does not emit light, so a set of lamps must be installed behind the screen, similar to shining a flashlight from behind a transparent painting.
Ordinary LED TVs are mainly divided into side-entry and direct-down types. Many entry-level models can only adjust the backlight as a whole; some products with local dimming functions have fewer and larger dimming areas, making it difficult to precisely match the subtle changes in brightness and darkness in the image.
For example, imagine a TV showing a pitch-black night sky with only a few bright stars. A conventional LED TV struggles to illuminate just the stars without also lighting up the surrounding darkness, so blacks tend to look gray and a halo appears around bright objects.
Mini LED addresses this issue by making the backlight LEDs smaller and increasing their number, allowing more LEDs to be packed into the same area and dividing them into more and finer dimming zones. The brightness of the backlight is increased in bright areas of the image and decreased or even turned off in dark areas.
When these light-emitting units are arranged in a matrix behind the entire LCD panel and adjust brightness by zone according to image content, this technology is called "Full Array Local Dimming", abbreviated as FALD.
TCL is now accusing Samsung of removing the crucial "zone control" feature, while still using the Mini LED name.
Standards that were once vague have been turned into a business by Samsung
In a lawsuit filed with the court, TCL disassembled and compared Samsung's M70H with its own ordinary Crystal UHD TV, the U800F.
According to TCL, the ordinary U800F has 54 LEDs internally, while the M70H has only 52, two fewer; these LEDs are arranged in two light bars, with a size of approximately 0.5 millimeters, also larger than what is commonly understood as Mini LED in the industry.
More importantly, TCL claims that the M70H lacks an independent LED control chip and hardware partition control circuit. All the LEDs can only be turned on or off simultaneously, and the backlight, reflective membrane, power board, control board, processor, and light bar structure are almost identical to those of ordinary Crystal UHD TVs.
To put it bluntly, TCL believes Samsung took a basic LED-backlit LCD TV, changed its name and packaging, and sold it as a more premium Mini LED TV.
It is worth noting that this accusation is not entirely one-sided from TCL.
RTINGS, a TV review agency, purchased and tested the 65-inch Samsung M80H and found that the TV indeed lacks local dimming, unable to independently control the backlight in different areas of the screen. RTINGS directly commented that Samsung's promotion of the product as Mini LED is "extremely misleading", and its contrast and HDR performance are even inferior to the lower-priced TCL QM6K.
On Samsung community, Reddit, and TV forums, there have been constant questions over the past few months about whether the M70H and M80H are truly Mini LED TVs, including why they don't have local dimming, only software dimming, and whether they can still be called Mini LED.
More subtly, Samsung's own product materials also state: "Supreme Mini LED Dimming is software-based technology, not full-array hardware-based technology."
In other words, Samsung did not entirely conceal the lack of a hardware partition for optical control, it just placed the statement in the footnote of the product page and specifications table.
Samsung is capable of producing full-array local dimming, and its higher-end Neo QLED series has already adopted this feature. However, true full-array local dimming comes at a higher cost, and what Samsung needs now is a more affordable product to counter TCL. Taking US market prices as an example, the smallest 45-inch M70H is priced at just $349.99, while the 65-inch QN80H with full-array Mini LED costs around $1,599, a price difference of nearly five times.
Samsung's move has been met with a similar response from TCL.
Why Samsung still thinks its marketing is not a problem is because Mini LED has yet to have a globally unified and mandatory definition to date.
It's not like 4K, where the number of pixels can be clearly counted. Currently, there is no globally unified mandatory standard that stipulates: the size of the lamp beads must be less than a certain size, the quantity must reach a certain number, and it cannot be called Mini LED without FALD.
RTINGS, while criticizing Samsung's marketing, also acknowledged that Mini LED itself remains closer to an industry marketing term. Market research firm Omdia has consistently counted Samsung's M-series as Mini LED TVs, noting that Samsung uses white-light Mini LED packaging and has reduced costs and selling prices by eliminating components such as quantum dot films.
So the real point of contention between the two parties is: TCL believes that Mini LED has formed a clear consumer perception - it must have a large number of small LEDs and hardware zone control for dimming. Samsung cannot take advantage of the lack of mandatory standards to put a TV without local dimming into a Mini LED box.
Samsung may argue that Mini LED refers to the type of backlighting diodes, which does not necessarily mean it must come with FALD, and that the company has already clarified in the footnotes that the related dimming is a software technology.
Notably, the timing of this lawsuit reflects a very real market battle unfolding behind the scenes.
According to Omdia data, in the first quarter of 2026, TCL still held the top spot in global Mini LED TV shipments with a 30.2% share. In March, Samsung launched its more affordable M series, and by the second quarter, Samsung had risen from third to first, with a 28.2% share, while TCL fell to 23.3%.
According to TCL's statement in the lawsuit, after the M series was launched, Samsung's sales of Mini LED TVs increased several times, with about 60% coming from the M series.
Samsung has won back market share with lower prices, but TCL believes these lower prices come from cuts to the core Mini LED hardware.
What's even more interesting is that the logic TCL is now using to sue Samsung is the same logic Samsung used against TCL just this year.
In March this year, Samsung won a false advertising lawsuit against TCL in Germany.
QLED is not a completely new type of screen like OLED, it is essentially still a liquid crystal TV, but with quantum dot material added between the backlight and the liquid crystal screen, which "purifies" the light, making reds more red and greens more green, allowing the TV to display more vivid colors even at high brightness.
Samsung had alleged that certain TCL televisions were marketed as QLED despite not delivering the quantum dot display performance consumers typically expect. A German court ruled in Samsung's favor, prohibiting TCL from continuing to promote and sell the affected products as QLED TVs. As of now, no public information indicates that the ruling has become final.
QLED primarily addresses color issues, while Mini LED mainly tackles backlight and contrast problems. The two lawsuits involve different technologies, but their legal logic is almost identical: one cannot simply include a small related component in a product and then use the entire technology's name; if the core effect expected by consumers is not achieved, it may constitute misleading information.
This time, TCL essentially gave Samsung's logic back to them unchanged.