(Credit: Rob Pegoraro)
RGB LED, the newest thing in TV technology, promises substantial advances in color and brightness, but also faces a few non-trivial obstacles, starting with a name that may not make it clear why you’d want to pay exponentially more.
You can describe any TV you’d buy today as an RGB set, since they all compose their pictures from those core colors of red, green, and blue. The technology that various manufacturers are marketing with some form of “RGB” doesn’t add any new colors (unlike the four-color Quattron technology that Sharp introduced at CES 2010 and sold for a few years afterward), but it does generate those colors more directly.
Instead of having individual white or blue light-emitting diodes illuminating the pixel-sized elements in a liquid-crystal array that display red, green, or blue colors, RGB LED replaces each of those LEDs with a trio of red, green, and blue LEDs to expand the range of colors that the screen can display.
At IFA in Berlin last month, Samsung and Hisense made RGB LED a central part of their press conferences; the latter firm also brought out a trio of dancing robots called Redbot, Bluebot, and Greenbot in its exhibit space. TCL, meanwhile, featured a 163-inch screen at its IFA exhibit, while Sony confined RGB to a backstage demonstration of a prototype set.
They’re all using slightly different names for the technology, which can compound the risk of customer confusion: Hisense calls it RGB-MiniLED, Samsung has Micro RGB, Sony went with Sony RGB Technology, and TCL's solution is RGB Micro LED. At CES, Hisense and Samsung tried other monikers: TriChroma and RGB MicroLED, respectively.
Sony’s IFA setup—a prototype version of an RGB LED TV planned for sale in 2026, positioned next to a Bravia 9, each with a 75-inch screen showing the same content—had the advantage of allowing an up-close, side-by-side comparison of RGB to a current set, rather than seeing an RGB display in isolation.
To my non-videophile eyes, the differences between the two screens were noticeable but not overpowering. The RGB display showcased colors from a clip from Frozen 2 as brighter, revealed more details in the darker areas of a nighttime scene from Life of Pi, and enhanced the fiery glow of a clip of a blacksmith hammering an ingot.
Professional video analysts have come away impressed with RGB.
“When I got eyes-on with Samsung's version at their US headquarters, the difference in color fidelity and saturation was not subtle,” emailed Avi Greengart, president and lead analyst of Techsponential. “Reds could be a deep crimson red; greens and yellows practically exploded off the screen.”
When PCMag’s Will Greenwald tested the Hisense 116UX RGB set, he found it the brightest TV with the widest color range of any model he’d evaluated.
At current prices, you will need to value that bonus brightness of RGB highly to justify its cost. That 116-inch Hisense and Samsung’s 115-inch RGB model each list for $30,000.
As expensive as that is, it falls between two other backlighting technologies that Samsung has already brought to market—one for middle-class budgets, the other for ruling-class budgets.
Mini LED sets such as the Sony Bravia 9 use more and smaller LED backlights than standard LED backlights, allowing for finer control of a screen’s darker and brighter areas. MicroLED—not to be confused with Micro RGB—has a single LED per pixel, which allows for the most precise control possible of a set’s brightness, but is also an eye-wateringly expensive way to build a TV.
“Samsung doesn't even provide prices for standard-sized MicroLED sets, because its MicroLED system called The Wall is modular and requires professional installation,” Greengart said. “I have seen configurations as low as $100,000 and as high as $1+ million.”
A third TV technology, OLED (organic light-emitting diode), directly illuminates each pixel to yield pitch-dark blacks and vibrant colors, but can’t match the brightness of LED-backlit sets. OLED also remains economically out of reach at the giant sizes of the RGB sets now reaching the market.
“If you want the best TV under 85 inches, OLED is your best bet,” Greengart said. “However, making OLED panels larger than that with good yields has not been economical.”
One example: LG’s 2025 OLED lineup features an 83-inch set with a $6,500 list price, but stepping up to the 97-inch model will cost you $18,500 more. But in much smaller display sizes, OLED has become cheap enough to appear in midrange phones.
A Sony executive at IFA suggested that RGB technology would not put OLED out to a pixel pasture anytime soon. "We're not saying OLED will go away,” said Shoji Ohama, the company’s head of home entertainment in Europe. He cited OLED’s ability to display a pure, zero-light black, which RGB LED can only approximate.
The key question with RGB LED, then, is if and when prices for these sets can come out of the stratosphere, much less experience the steep descent that mini LED has seen as brands like TCL and Hisense have brought it to market at three-figure prices.
“It isn't clear to me whether micro RGB will rapidly ride the technology price curve down; MicroLED has stubbornly remained the venue of professional athletes and tech billionaires,” Greengart said.
Post-IFA, TCL offered one sign that could happen when it introduced a lineup of RGB sets in China with prices starting at the equivalent of $1,150 for a 65-inch model.
Samsung did not comment on cost trends for RGB LED. Sony’s Ohama, however, hinted that the RGB’s foundation in the LED architecture that sets have used for backlighting for the past 15 or so years might allow for cost reductions over time. He also suggested that RGB could work for smaller screen sizes, not just ever-larger panes of glass: “Our advantage is scalability.”
Greengart, meanwhile, suggested one number for manufacturers to keep in mind when considering how to position RGB in the TV marketplace: the $10,000 that “the earliest adopters were willing to pay for bleeding-edge display technologies like plasma in the past.”