Sony’s Dazzling New RGB LED TV Comes in 2026

LED TVs are about to get a lot better. As demonstrated by Hisense and to some extent Samsung at CES 2025, a new backlight technology called RGB LED is poised to improve the quality and efficiency of TVs that use LED backlights and LCD panels to work their magic.

The innovative new tech should help LED TVs give more premium-priced emissive screens like OLEDs, which create light imaging at the pixel level, a serious run for their money. As of today, Sony has officially put its hat in the RGB TV ring.

A New Kind of LED

Unlike traditional LED TVs that use pure white LEDs (or the tinier mini-LEDs) that light up display layers like color filters and an LCD panel to create an image, RGB LED TVs use tri-colored red, green, and blue lights that create colors directly at the source of the panel stack. This can provide significant advantages over today’s best mini-LED TVs, including higher brightness, less blooming (light bleed around bright images), and purer, more accurate colors.

While Samsung hasn’t disclosed much about its RGB tech, Hisense claims its 116-inch UX Trichroma RGB TV, unveiled in Las Vegas in January, provides color accuracy at an astonishing 97 percent of the next-gen BT.2020 color gamut spec. The TV also claims an eye-blasting 10,000 nits peak brightness, though that's unlikely to equate to much real-world content, mastered at 4,000 nits or less. The TV is set for release in 2025, with pricing yet to be disclosed.

Turns out, Sony has been working on its own version of this technology for its mini-LED panels for years now. Not to be outdone by its competitors, the TV pioneer flew a crew of global journalists and reviewers, myself included, to its Tokyo headquarters for a firsthand look at its latest and greatest home theater creations. Its RGB LED TV prototype was the pièce de résistance.

Sony Has Entered the Chat

Even for those of us steeped in TV technology and its flurry of acronyms, it’s not easy breaking down a new display type you’ve barely seen in action. Luckily, nobody explains TV tech better than Sony's engineers.

At its Tokyo HQ demo, Sony took the face off its RGB prototype to show the backlight system in action. In fact, the company took half the face off, so we were able to see the raw backlighting and fully realized image side-by-side in one display. To our collective amazement, the RGB LEDs were able to create wholly recognizable color images. The backlight-only images looked almost like 8-bit pixelated versions of the regular scenes at the left, but even small details were often apparent. Again, this was just the backlights making the picture, working in concert with Sony’s XR Backlight Master Drive algorithm technology.