(Credit: Will Greenwald)
I've been optimistic about RGB LED TVs ever since I first saw the technology at CES 2025. That optimism only grew last summer, when I tested the first TV to use it, the Hisense 116UX. It delivered the widest color range and highest brightness I had measured at the time, hinting at a genuine leap forward in display performance.
More recently, I tested my second RGB LED TV—the Samsung R95H—and while it continues to show enormous potential, it also reveals some important challenges the category will need to solve before it can truly compete with OLED for top-tier picture quality.
How RGB LED TVs Work
RGB LED TVs have an LCD panel and a mini-LED backlight system that uses clusters of red, green, and blue LEDs. Conventional mini-LED TVs use only blue or white LEDs to illuminate their screens, relying entirely on the LCD panel itself to control all color levels. Each LED cluster in an RGB LED TV can individually brighten or dim any of its three hues, boosting the color range the TV can display. This technology is called a few different terms by different companies, like Samsung’s Micro RGB and Hisense’s RGB-MiniLED, but they all follow the same concept. And, for consistency, I refer to the entire category as RGB LED.
The R95H is Samsung’s newest RGB LED TV. It isn’t the first Samsung TV of its kind, but it is the first intended for wide adoption. Samsung released the R95F Micro RGB TV last year, but it was only available in a massive 115 inches, and cost $30,000. The R95H is smaller and much more reasonably priced, starting at $3,199.99 for 65 inches and topping out at $6,499.99 for 85 inches. Those prices are comparable with flagship OLED TVs, including Samsung’s own S95H.
Early R95H Testing: Where RGB LED Excels—and Falls Short
Samsung claims the R95H can cover the full BT.2020 color space, a feat that has never actually been achieved in my tests. I evaluated the R95H with my standard equipment: a Klein K-10A colorimeter, a Murideo SIX-G signal generator, and Portrait Displays’ Calman software.
I tested preproduction versions of the RGB R95H and the OLED S95H at Samsung’s QA lab last month. In this early testing, the R95H showed the widest color range I’ve measured to date, but its brightness was disappointingly (and confusingly) low. The chart below shows what I found, and I’ll explain what it means in detail.
(Credit: PCMag)The two charts show color measurements taken on the R95H in Filmmaker mode, with an HDR10 signal shown as dots. The arcs are the full range of color the human eye can perceive, and the triangles are the BT.2020 color space. Without getting too into the weeds, the two charts show the same data, but they look different because the left one (CIE 1931) depicts the color spectrum as it’s absolutely measured, while the right one (CIE 1976) depicts the color spectrum as the human eye perceives color differences. I use CIE 1931 charts in my reviews, but both are valid. And, according to those charts, the R95H covers 87.7% of BT.2020 in terms of absolute wavelength and 91.4% in terms of perceptual difference.
Obviously, both numbers are less than 100%. However, you can see on the charts that blues, magentas, and reds actually reach past BT.2020. So, at least in a sense, the R95H covers a visual color range as large as BT.2020, just not the color space. This seems to be the logic behind Samsung’s claim of full BT.2020 coverage, but it doesn’t really hold up, because it doesn’t reach far enough into greens and cyans.
(Credit: PCMag)This doesn’t mean the R95H has poor color, though. On the contrary, it has a wider color range than any other TV I’ve tested, including the Hisense 116UX and the TCL X11L. It also reaches further than any OLED TV by far. I’ve only recently started consistently measuring the BT.2020 color space coverage of TVs as a percentage, but the 116UX and X11L clearly don’t have as wide a reach into the blues and reds. However, the R95H’s BT.2020 coverage is quantifiably more than that of the excellent LG G6 (78.8% CIE 1931, 85.2% CIE 1976) and the preproduction Samsung S95H OLED TVs I tested (82.5%, 88.8%). The chart above shows the R95H, S95H, and X11L color levels compared with the DCI-P3 color space I typically use for TV color testing.
Mathematically, the R95H has a record-breaking color range, even if it doesn’t hit BT.2020. It’s still very impressive on that front. It didn’t impress me with its peak brightness, however, and, even more surprisingly, showed lower light output than the S95H OLED. LED TVs are almost universally brighter than OLED TVs. The RGB LED Hisense 116UX remains the brightest TV I’ve tested yet (4,012 nits with an HDR10 signal and an 18% white field and 5,889 nits with a 10% white field). The R95H showed peak brightnesses of 1,634 nits and 1,603 nits in the same tests, which are downright modest, if not a bit disappointing, for a high-end mini-LED TV, RGB or not. The S95H, meanwhile, put out 1,715 nits with an 18% field and a very impressive 2,604 nits with a 10% field. Based on everything I know about the technology, it doesn’t make sense. In fact, it makes so little sense that I don’t believe those numbers represent the R95H’s capabilities.
I spoke with other TV experts at the testing event, and they saw similar results. There are two possible explanations for the strange numbers that would make sense. First, since it didn’t have engineers hovering over us while we tested, and let us take measurements as we usually do.
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(Credit: Will Greenwald)The other explanation is that the R95H unit I tested had an automatic brightness feature enabled that none of us caught. Most TVs have an ambient light sensor that automatically adjusts the panel brightness based on the room's lighting. Accurate picture modes like Cinema, Filmmaker, and Movie usually disable the light sensor, and I always check a TV’s advanced picture mode settings to make sure it isn’t enabled. I also usually check the Eco settings of a TV to make sure auto-brightness isn’t turned on there, either. However, some form of auto-brightness might have still been activated, buried deep in a menu, or an image-processing feature that also dims the picture could have been running. That wouldn’t surprise me, given how frustratingly obtuse Samsung’s settings can be.
For the time being, I’m giving Samsung the benefit of the doubt for the R95H and assuming it doesn’t max out at around 1,600 nits brightness, because that would be ridiculous for any current flagship LED TV. Because of how the panel technologies work, there’s no reasonable explanation for an OLED to be brighter.
That said, because it showed a wider brightness range than the R95H, the S95H's colors actually looked more vibrant, despite having a slightly narrower color gamut. And narrow is relative, because the S95H still showed wider color reach than I've seen on any other OLED TV yet, showing that there's still room for the more established premium panel technology to grow.
Where RGB LED Struggles: Light Bloom and Off-Angle Performance
The strangely low light output affected the test footage I observed. Everything I usually watch when testing TVs, from BBC’s Planet Earth II to The Great Gatsby to demonstration footage on the Spears & Munsil Ultra HD benchmark disc, looked very good on the R95H. Colors were varied and natural in Planet Earth II, and shadow details on black suits in The Great Gatsby remained visible. When viewing the Spears & Munsil disc’s torture test shots of brightly colored objects against completely black backgrounds, I noticed light bloom in the form of a slight haze along the edges that dropped off quickly. The light bloom was minimal when viewing the TV straight on, but it became much more visible off-angle.
Off-angle viewing seems like a pretty significant weakness for the R95H, and that might be the case for RGB LED TVs in general. Light bloom expands significantly when viewed from a slight angle, and colors become much less vibrant. The Hisense 116UX showed similar light bloom behavior, though it didn’t seem to desaturate colors quite as much.
I need to test more RGB LED TVs, but light bloom and off-angle viewing issues could be endemic to the technology. At least, they might persist until advancements in the structure of the RGB LEDs or other changes to the layers between them and the LCD panel are made.
OLED Still Has the Edge
Instead of an LCD panel backlit by LEDs, OLED TVs use a single panel of organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), where each pixel is its own light source, able to adjust its brightness and color precisely. It can offer vibrant colors and perfect black levels without a hint of light bloom (haziness on high-contrast edges, like a bright object against a dark background), and can be incredibly thin. The biggest trade-off with OLEDs is that they're almost never as bright as high-end LED TVs. That said, high-end OLEDs remain some of the best-looking TVs you can get.
When I was at Samsung’s lab, the OLED S95H looked significantly better than the RGB R95H. Even though its color range isn't as wide as the RGB model, its picture looked more vivid and lifelike thanks to the brighter panel and more precise light control. OLEDs adjust brightness on a per-pixel basis, so they don’t show light bloom at all.
I’m fairly confident I’ll see much higher peak brightness numbers from the R95H when I get a retail unit into the lab to fully test and can narrow down what factor made the preproduction version seem so dim. I don’t think this will fix the TV’s light bloom, though, and if the LEDs put out even more light, the bloom effect might get even worse. If this level of bloom is typical for the category, RGB LED models will be a harder sell over OLEDs with no bloom, or even high-end conventional mini-LED TVs that show much less bloom (such as the aforementioned TCL X11L).
I’ll be checking out several other RGB LED TVs, including a retail-ready R95H, in the coming months, which will give me a better sense of where the technology is. For now, though, I’m still leaning toward OLED if you want to splurge on a top-of-the-line TV.