My mini-LED monitor has a terrible energy rating, and that doesn't scare me

Published Aug 25, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT Shivansh began his tech journey as an avid reader of tech publications, which inspired him to launch his career in video media at Sillycorns. He has led content across multiple tech YouTube channels and Instagram accounts, crafted go-to-market (GTM) strategies for Vivo, and consulted on digital growth. Coming full circle to his roots in written media, he now delivers deep-dive tech journalism. Outside of his professional work, Shivansh loves watching movies, riding bikes, and playing cricket. For two years, I watched fireworks on a monitor with an HDR sticker on its bezel. The fireworks, however, always looked washed out, and I kept craving pure contrast. Since pure contrast was costly, I settled for mini-LED, the near-OLED compromise. Except, it didn't feel much like a compromise. The fireworks it showed left me stunned, and I was super happy. One day, I turned over its box to see what its HDR sticker looked like. I looked for the HDR sticker, but the energy label caught my attention first. It turned out my mini‑LED monitor was consuming a significant amount of energy. I was still happy because more energy meant a brighter display. What I didn't see coming was a critical blind spot this energy label was hiding. The worst part is that even if I could see it, I wouldn't understand its true gravity. So let me walk you through the way I figured out how big a deal this blind spot was. A monitor is a lamp behind multiple tiny windows And these windows have their own blinds This starts with understanding the pixels we hear about all the time. Most of us imagine pixels produce light, but they don't, at least for my panel. On an LCD monitor like my mini-LED display, think of them more like tiny windows with blinds. The light already comes from behind them; the pixels simply control how much passes through. Several layers stand in the way. The first cuts the light roughly in half. The next acts like a tinted window and blocks about two-thirds of what's left. Then another layer takes away even more, leaving only around 5% of the original light to reach your eyes. So where does all that lost light go? Much of it can turn into heat. Not enough to warm up your desk, obviously, but the basic idea is that roughly 95% of the light the backlight produces never reaches your eyes. To prevent this loss, the mini-LED inventors made a smart move: They stopped making light for the parts of the screen that would be black. They cut one big lamp into thousands of small ones. They wired those lamps into small groups with switches. These small groups of lamps, called dimming zones, became the key to better contrast. The more zones you had, the more precisely the display could keep bright highlights blazing while letting dark areas stay truly dark. That meant mini-LEDs could deliver much better HDR while wasting far less light. In scenes with large dark areas, this can reduce the amount of backlight power needed compared with a conventional backlight that illuminates the whole panel. This left me confused: if my new mini-LED monitor is actually more efficient than the one it replaced, why does the energy label show the same wattage as my outgoing screen? Efficient and cheap to run are not the same thing I also stayed confused for longer than I admit The term efficient means the monitor makes more light per watt. And since engineers aren’t going to pocket the extra watts, that efficiency usually gets turned into more light. The Commission's own numbers say it flatly. Manufacturers sold televisions in 1990 that burned close to nine times as much power per unit as the televisions from 2020 (8.8 W/dm² vs 1 W/dm²). Over these thirty years, the average screen got five times bigger. And because the efficiency was real, the wall socket never noticed. In my case, the power draw stayed almost the same. The reason wasn’t that I had swapped in a larger, more efficient monitor. I had a more efficient monitor that used its higher efficiency to push more brightness. It was not entirely for the brightness, though. A mini-LED display needs thousands of active and passive drivers, which require a timing controller to handle dynamic backlight at high frequencies. To process all of this, the processor also needs to be more powerful, and that takes extra electricity. So the thing is: despite my mini-LED monitor being more efficient, it does not consume less power than the electricity label suggests. After understanding all of this, I checked what the label was measuring, and this led me to the most interesting part. The label carries two classes, and neither refers to watts The HDR letter hides beneath The label, like every other in the EU, shows a large A-to-G scale. This measures the energy consumption while playing SDR content. I spent a week saying nobody measured HDR content, but when I checked beneath the SDR letter, I found a small letter for HDR as well. The efficiency class is derived from an energy-efficiency index that relates measured on-mode power to the display's viewing area. So a bright, efficient panel from 2020 can wear the same letter as a dim, inefficient panel from 1990, as we saw above. However, if their areas differ, they will still land far apart on your bill. The bill will similarly differ a lot, actually more than twice, if the user only watches HDR content and not SDR. So the question is: what share of time does a general user spend watching HDR content? Because if that's even half as much time as for SDR, then the grades on these energy labels are very deceptive. Scan the QR code on your monitor's energy label, or search for the model in EPREL, then read the two consumption figures side by side. On the particular mini-LED monitor I checked, the HDR figure was more than twice the SDR figure. The case for grading in SDR is actually better It's about making a test perfectly repeatable So I looked at what my monitor used to do all day. A PDF viewer, a text editor, a default Windows wallpaper, and a few browser tabs. All of this is SDR. So grading a product on the state it's in most of the time isn't a cheat. I rarely watch HDR content or play games in HDR. However, monitors aren't graded in SDR only because they will mostly be used in SDR. HDR power can differ substantially from SDR power, so the EU regulations prescribe a separate, standardized HDR measurement and display its result separately. In theory, an HDR scene is mastered to a specific peak brightness or energy consumption. But in practice, energy consumption can vary widely. This happens because of unpredictable backlight processing by the TV's hardware, such as the coprocessor, timing controllers, and active driver arrays. The grading test, in fact, prevents the obvious cheat. There are hard brightness floors in the annex that stop brands from using dim defaults to cheat the score. And for the SDR and HDR letters, here's how they divide the work. SDR HDR Label position Primary A-to-G scale Secondary, smaller class Measures SDR HDR Used for main A-G label Yes No So all the information is on the label, and the label is not hiding anything. But if that's true, why did I say that the label is hiding 'a critical blind spot'? The SDR letter is right for me, but it may not be for you Picture the person this electricity label was designed for: a 24-inch office monitor that peaks near 250 nits, will never show an HDR frame, and will sit under a ceiling light for six years. That's me, and hence, the SDR label is my whole truth. Now picture a person the label wasn't designed for: four hours of daily use, half watching HDR content and half playing games at ultra-high graphics with HDR on. If that person is you, the label is hiding a critical blind spot. This blind spot can show up later as an electricity bill that's twice as high as you expected. And, to be fair, that extra energy won't go to waste. You're paying for higher brightness, precise backlight processing, a faster refresh rate, and fireworks that look like razor-sharp rays of light cutting through an otherwise pitch-black sky.