For a way wonderful they’ve come to look, at present’s televisions include a brain-numbing assortment of acronyms for buyers to parse.
It is just like the scariest feast I’ve ever attended. Bear in mind LED, QLED, mini LED, micro LED, OLED, QD OLED? Meet RGB LED!
Sadly, all these acronyms do really imply one thing, and this yr’s fashionable newcomer—RGB LED—implies shockingly correct colours. Hiding behind upcoming panels from Hisense, Sony, Samsung, and LG introduced at CES 2026, RGB LED (unhelpfully additionally referred to as micro RGB or RGB mini LED) is the recent panel expertise to speak about this yr. I simply want they’d name it “Supercolor,” or one thing people may really bear in mind.
What Is RGB LED?
Courtesy of Samsung
Trendy TVs compete on the qualities of their backlighting and their shade illustration. Edge-lit LED TVs of the previous had been skinny, however their darkest tones tended towards the grey as a substitute of the actually black.
This has been mounted lately by numerous applied sciences. Quantum dots assist colours seem higher on the newest LED TVs (usually referred to as QLED). Tech like multi-zone LED (and extra just lately mini-LED) backlighting makes use of hundreds of tiny white LEDs to light up particular sections of the display screen from behind. OLED (“natural LED”) TVs, launched by LG slightly over a decade in the past, do one thing related however extra precisely, with every pixel appearing as its personal backlight.
New RGB LEDs TVs convey shade to the beforehand shade-based backlighting world of LED TVs, with the illumination arrays behind the display screen gaining the flexibility to backlight the panel in entrance of them with purple, inexperienced, or blue. This implies attractive shade accuracy, together with a theoretical general brightness that may outcompete OLED TVs.
A historic criticism of OLEDs has been that they simply aren’t vivid sufficient for well-lit rooms, and that the person pixels can burn into the show with extended publicity to the identical content material. Frankly, our TV opinions staff has seen these points largely evaporate over the previous few generations of OLED panels (and up to date Quantum Dot OLEDs), all with actually eye-burning brightness.
What RGB LEDs do promise is scarily correct colours along with stated excessive brightness. They’ve been in a position to show 100% of the BT.2020 shade scale, which is one thing prior-generation LED TVs had been merely not able to. Because of this, for folk watching the (admittedly) restricted quantity of content material, usually animated, that makes use of this expanded shade palette—shout out to contributor Caleb Denison of CalebRated for his suggestion of Inside Out 2 as a take a look at disc—it is best to be capable of see shades that had been beforehand unattainable to see.
Early Arrivals
{Photograph}: Ryan Waniata
That is the primary significant technology of RGB LED TVs that can be accessible to shoppers, with the aforementioned high gamers within the house all having introduced some model of RGB LED display screen or one other for launch in 2026.
