For the way glorious they’ve come to look, today’s televisions include a brain-numbing assortment of acronyms for customers to parse.
It is just like the scariest feast I’ve ever attended. Keep 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 12 months’s standard 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 known as Micro RGB or RGB Mini LED) is the recent panel know-how to speak about this 12 months. I simply want they’d name it “Supercolor,” or one thing of us might really keep in mind.
What Is RGB LED?
Courtesy of Samsung
Modern TVs compete on the qualities of their backlighting and their colour 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 in recent times by numerous applied sciences. Quantum dots assist colours seem higher on the most recent LED TVs (typically known as QLED). Tech like multi-zone LED (and extra lately mini-LED) backlighting makes use of 1000’s of tiny white LEDs illuminate particular sections of the display from behind. OLED (“natural LED”) TVs, launched by LG a little bit over a decade in the past, do one thing related however extra precisely, with every pixel performing as its personal backlight.
New RGB LEDs TVs carry colour to the beforehand shade-based backlighting world of LED TVs, with the illumination arrays behind the display gaining the flexibility to backlight the panel in entrance of them with purple, inexperienced, or blue. This implies beautiful colour accuracy, together with a theoretical general brightness that may outcompete OLED TVs.
A historic criticism of OLEDs has been that they only aren’t shiny 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 critiques 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 capable of show one hundred pc of the BT.2020 color 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, sometimes animated, that makes use of this expanded colour palette—shout out to contributor Caleb Denison of CalebRated for his suggestion of Inside Out 2 as a check disc—you need to have the ability to see shades that had been beforehand inconceivable to see.
Early Arrivals
{Photograph}: Ryan Waniata
That is the primary significant technology of RGB LED TVs that will probably be out there to shoppers, with the aforementioned high gamers within the house all having introduced some model of RGB LED display or one other for launch in 2026.
