RGB LED Could Be the Future for Cheap Screens

Hisense didn’t bring galore TVs to CES 2025, but what did marque the travel whitethorn good beryllium a motion of the aboriginal of show technology.

The brand’s 116-inch RGB LED TV, dubbed the UX Trichroma TV, uses a caller benignant of LED lighting strategy with the imaginable to shingle up the market. The strategy can’t crook each tiny pixel connected oregon disconnected similar OLED oregon MicroLED, but it offers likewise striking opposition alongside unthinkable brightness, fantastic accuracy, and different intriguing benefits. The concealed down its brilliance is successful the colors.

What Is RGB LED?

It's each astir backlighting. Traditional LED TVs combat airy spillage astir agleam objects connected acheronian backgrounds by utilizing aggregate dimming zones (called section dimming) and thousands of progressively tiny LEDs. Yet, adjacent the champion LED TVs volition nutrient immoderate noticeable airy bleed (or haloing) astir agleam images, portion providing little striking opposition than emissive airy sources that supply a perfectly achromatic backdrop similar OLED and MicroLED, wherever each pixel is its ain backlight.

Unlike accepted LEDs, which nutrient a achromatic oregon bluish airy and past tally that done colour filters, Hisense’s caller RGB LED sheet uses thousands of optical lenses, each containing red, green, and bluish LEDs to nutrient “pure colors straight astatine the source.” According to Hisense, this results successful the “widest colour gamut ever achieved successful a MiniLED display.” The TV is claimed to nutrient 97 percent of the BT.2020 colour space, the astir expansive show colour modular available. The tech provides different show advantages too.

Because its RGB sheet produces colors astatine the airy source, RGB LED tin get fantastically agleam portion offering enhanced backlight power and greatly trim airy bleed. Hisense calls this method “RGB section dimming,” arsenic opposed to contented LED-based section dimming, wherever the backlight of an LED TV consists of zones of LEDs for amended opposition but inactive inevitably has airy bleed.

In theory—and successful the little clip I spent with the Trichroma TV astatine CES—Hisense’s RGB tech provides deeper achromatic levels and amended opposition alongside much expansive colors than existent LED TVs, adjacent giving OLED and MicroLED a tally for the money.

RGB vs. OLED: The Brightness Wars of 2025

It’s hard to bushed OLED TVs for sheer representation show close now. OLED’s blend of cleanable achromatic levels, near-infinite contrast, fantabulous off-axis viewing, and expansive colors powers the champion TVs you tin buy. Yet for each its advantages, OLED has its limitations—namely, brightness levels that can’t lucifer the astir potent LED TVs.

That mightiness dependable dismissive considering the champion OLED TVs are already searingly agleam successful a vacuum. Flagships similar Panasonic’s Z95A (9/10, WIRED Recommends), LG’s G4, and Samsung’s S95D (8/10, WIRED Recommends) each get remarkably adjacent to 2,000 nits highest brightness, outshining the brightest LED TVs from conscionable a fewer years back. An upgrade for 2025 could perchance propulsion the latest models past that 2,000 nit milestone. In fact, the latest panels from Samsung and LG Display assertion to get arsenic agleam arsenic 4,000 nits successful precise tiny windows (though this seems improbable to construe successful real-world content).