Why RGB LED Could Be the Future for Cheap Screens

Hisense didn’t bring many TVs to CES 2025, but what did make the journey may well be a sign of the future of display technology. The brand’s 116-inch RGB LED TV, dubbed the UX Trichroma TV, uses a new kind of RGB (red, green, and blue) LED lighting system with the potential to shake up the market. The system can’t turn each tiny pixel on or off like OLED or micro-LED, but it offers still-striking contrast alongside incredible brightness, fantastic accuracy, and other intriguing benefits.

Hot on its heels, Sony revealed its own RGB LED prototype at a Tokyo press event I attended in late February 2025. As with Hisense, Sony's new screen tech, set for an ambiguous 2026 release, showed serious improvements across the board over traditional LED TVs. The secret behind this new technology's brilliance is in the colors.

Updated March 2025: We’ve added new information following hands-on time with Sony’s new RGB LED prototype, potential plans for a 2026 Sony product release, and other new display tech.

What Is RGB LED?

It's all about the backlighting. Traditional LED TVs use white LEDs to light up color filters and an LCD panel to create an image. The best models combat light spillage from bright objects on dark backgrounds using multiple dimming zones (called local dimming) and thousands of increasingly small LEDs. Yet, even the best LED TVs will produce noticeable light bleed (or haloing) around bright images, while providing less striking contrast than emissive light sources that provide a perfectly black backdrop like OLED and micro-LED, where each pixel is its own backlight.

Unlike today's traditional white LED backlight systems, RGB LED panels use thousands of red, green, and blue LED modules to produce “pure colors directly at the source.” According to Hisense, this results in the “widest color gamut ever achieved in a mini-LED display.” Its new TV is claimed to produce 97 percent of the BT.2020 color space, the most expansive display color standard available. Sony's system provides similarly impressive advancements, including a higher color bit rate for richer saturation and greatly improved color accuracy. Sony says its new tech “enables faithful reproduction of delicate hues and subtle gradations of light across every corner of the display.” RGB LED provides other performance advantages too.

Because an RGB panel produces colors at the light source in concert with color filters, RGB TVs get fantastically bright while offering enhanced backlight control and greatly reduced light bleed for improved contrast. Hisense calls this technique “RGB local dimming,” as opposed to traditional LED-based local dimming.

In theory—and in the brief time I spent with these new panels at CES in Las Vegas and Sony's labs in Tokyo—RGB tech provides deeper black levels and better contrast alongside more expansive colors than current LED TVs, even giving OLED and micro-LED a run for the money.

RGB vs. OLED: The Brightness Wars of 2025

It’s hard to beat OLED TVs for sheer picture performance right now. OLED’s blend of perfect black levels, near-infinite contrast, excellent off-axis viewing, and expansive colors powers the best TVs you can buy. Yet for all its advantages, OLED has limitations—namely, brightness levels that can’t match the most potent LED TVs.

That might sound dismissive, considering that the best OLED TVs are already searingly bright in a vacuum. Top 2024 flagships like Panasonic’s Z95A (9/10, WIRED Recommends), LG’s G4, and Samsung’s S95D (8/10, WIRED Recommends) all get remarkably close to 2,000 nits peak brightness, outshining the brightest LED TVs from just a few years back. An upgrade for 2025 could potentially push the latest models past that 2,000 nit milestone. In fact, the latest panels from Samsung Display and LG Display claim to get as bright as 4,000 nits in very small windows (though this seems unlikely to translate for real-world content).

Even so, LED TVs maintain a brightness advantage, with last year's models like TCL’s QM8 and Hisense's U9 already managing to top 4,000 and 5,000 nits peak brightness, respectively. That may sound like overkill right now, where most content is mastered for a max 1,000 nits peak brightness, but new tools like Sony’s HX3110 master monitor will more easily allow producers to master video at up to 4,000 nits to make small highlights like sunlight reflecting on water look more realistic. As Sony engineer Hugo Gaggioni puts it, brightness when properly controlled “becomes a new color accuracy weapon.” That's a big reason we’re seeing an explosion in TV panel innovation across the industry.

At a stunning 10,000 nits peak brightness, displays like Hisense’s UX Trichroma should have no trouble sustaining remarkably high average picture level (APL) and fiery peak brightness for the next step in HDR video. That much potency likely also contributes to its incredible color accuracy, alongside its ability to produce colors directly at the light source. Though I wouldn't expect all future RGB TVs to hit those numbers right away, it’s easy to see the advantages of this technology as it trickles down into more affordable TV models.

Sony goes beyond brightness in comparing RGB to OLED, boasting its next-level color gradation control. As Sony puts it, “The [RGB LED] system can achieve what is challenging for existing OLED panels: the expression of colors with moderate brightness and saturation.” In other words, colors look more accurate, even in low-lit scenes. In the few scenes I saw at Sony's RGB LED demo, the prototype panel clearly outclassed the stunning 2023 Sony OLED flagship, the A95L (9/10, WIRED Recommends), in color saturation. The OLED still held the advantage in black levels and image focus, but it was an impressive demonstration of RGB LED's skills.

Brightness and color accuracy aside, RGB LED may be a good alternative for those worried about OLED burn-in. OLED’s makeup of organic compounds can degrade at different rates over time, leading to potential variations in brightness and color. Burn-in is increasingly less common in modern OLEDs, so it's not something we worry about for most viewers, but it remains a concern over the life of an OLED display, especially for users like high-volume gamers where static images are consistently onscreen.

What About Micro-LED?

Like OLED, micro-LED is emissive, with each tiny pixel able to turn on or off individually for near-infinite contrast. Since it doesn’t use organic compounds, it isn’t subject to the same burn-in concerns as OLED. It's able to get much brighter too—Hisense’s 136-inch micro-LED TV, also unveiled at CES 2025, offers the same claimed 10,000 nits peak brightness as its RGB TV. For all these reasons, many view micro-LED as the display technology of the future.

While micro-LED has theoretically been nipping at the heels of LED and OLED technologies for years now, in practice it remains elusive. Due to its use of millions of tiny LEDs that must be individually placed, it’s incredibly difficult to produce at scale. Apple famously abandoned the technology for the Apple Watch (for now, anyway), and though Samsung has been producing and selling micro-LED TVs for the past couple of years, you’ll pay six figures for the privilege.

In addition, the current micro-LED manufacturing process requires using multiple modular panels for larger screens, resulting in visible lines. Hisense’s own micro-LED TV was incredibly striking from a distance, but up close I couldn’t help noticing small gaps between the modular panels, reducing the overall wow factor.

RGB LED doesn’t suffer from these drawbacks. It’s easier (and likely much cheaper) to produce than micro-LED, and it doesn’t require modular panels. While its thousands of mini-LED clusters can't provide the same contrast as micro-LED’s millions of lights, its potency provides the same striking brightness alongside remarkable color accuracy. Even off-axis performance appears strong so far, a common challenge for traditional LED TVs.

Is QDEL a Thing Yet?

To add another display wrinkle, there's been much excitement in TV-enthusiast circles about a new display type on the move called Nano LED or QDEL, which stands for quantum dot eluminiscent. This latest confusing screen acronym uses quantum dots similar to the ones currently leveraged in some OLED and LED TVs to improve colors, but instead of enhancing colors for another display type, they're excited with electricity to create light at the pixel level like OLED and micro-LED displays.

This new emissive display type is being heralded as a potential OLED replacement due to advantages like burn-in resistance and a theoretical boost in brightness. QDEL should eventually be less expensive and complex to manufacture than micro-LED, though it may not be as cost-effective as RGB LED. It's still a nascent technology, and we don't expect even a prototype at the TV level for a couple of years, so for now it's simply another new technology to keep tabs on.

The Race Is On

Hisense and Sony aren't the only brands showing off innovative RGB technology. Samsung brought a new prototype to CES 2025, proclaiming its own RGB tech called “RGB MicroLED,” which seems to operate in a similar principle to both rival panels, albeit with some potentially complex differences.

I reached out to Samsung for a statement about its new prototype. “Unlike conventional LED TVs that rely on white backlighting, this product uses micro-sized RGB (red, blue, and green) LEDs to control each color independently,” says Lydia Cho, head of product for home entertainment at Samsung Electronics America. “This results in sharper, deeper, and more vibrant colors than ever before. This breakthrough technology marks the future of display technology, specifically showcasing the potential for even more color accuracy and vibrancy.”

While Samsung reps couldn’t tell me much more about the prototype, PR reps on the show floor claimed it isn’t emissive tech like traditional micro-LED. They also said that Samsung’s RGB tech may be leveraged to bridge the gap between traditional LED TVs and the much-hyped vision for micro-LED as the future of display technology.

The Screens of the Future?

With so many potential advantages to this new mini-LED RGB tech, the future of TV may be taking shape right in front of us. Hisense's RGB UX Trichroma TV is slated for availability in 2025, with Sony and (at some point) Samsung to follow. While neither brand has announced an official launch, Sony points to 2025 mass production and a 2026 road map. Hisense product experts hinted that we could see the tech land in more of its models in the next few years.

Based on what we know about this tech so far, it seems poised to spawn yet another battleground in the TV “brightness wars.” If it performs (and arrives) as expected, RGB’s obvious advantages in color accuracy, brightness, dimming control, and scalability all seem poised to make it a leader in the race for the best TV for your dollars.

It’s early days for RGB displays, and way too soon to count out other new display technologies—or OLED, for that matter, which stands as the best TV tech real people can buy right now, and continues to evolve. We’ll find out a lot more in the next few years, but we expect that the future is brighter, cheaper, and better looking. Hisense’s first Trichroma display is slated to land this year—and its future looks impressive indeed.