2026 Is the Year of the RGB LED TV

For however excellent they've travel to look, today's televisions travel with a brain-numbing assortment of acronyms for shoppers to parse.

It's similar the scariest meal enactment I've ever attended. Remember LED, QLED, Mini LED, Micro LED, OLED, QD OLED? Meet RGB LED!

Sadly, each these acronyms bash really mean something, and this year's fashionable newcomer—RGB LED—implies shockingly close colors. Hiding down upcoming panels from Hisense, Sony, Samsung, and LG announced astatine CES 2026, RGB LED (unhelpfully besides called Micro RGB oregon RGB Mini LED) is the blistery sheet exertion to speech astir this year. I conscionable privation they'd telephone it “Supercolor,” oregon thing folks could really remember.

What Is RGB LED?

Modern TVs vie connected the qualities of their backlighting and their colour representation. Edge-lit LED TVs of the past were thin, but their darkest tones tended toward the grey alternatively of the genuinely black.

This has been fixed successful caller years by assorted technologies. Quantum dots assistance colors look amended connected the latest LED TVs (often called QLED). Tech similar multi-zone LED (and much precocious mini-LED) backlighting uses thousands of tiny achromatic LEDs illuminate circumstantial sections of the surface from behind. OLED ("organic LED") TVs, introduced by LG a small implicit a decennary ago, bash thing akin but much accurately, with each pixel acting arsenic its ain backlight.

New RGB LEDs TVs bring colour to the antecedently shade-based backlighting satellite of LED TVs, with the illumination arrays down the surface gaining the quality to backlight the sheet successful beforehand of them with red, green, oregon blue. This means gorgeous colour accuracy, on with a theoretical wide brightness that tin outcompete OLED TVs.

A historical disapproval of OLEDs has been that they conscionable aren't agleam capable for well-lit rooms, and that the idiosyncratic pixels tin pain into the show with prolonged vulnerability to the aforesaid content. Frankly, our TV reviews squad has seen those issues mostly evaporate implicit the past fewer generations of OLED panels (and caller Quantum Dot OLEDs), each with genuinely eye-burning brightness.

What RGB LEDs bash committedness is scarily close colors successful summation to said utmost brightness. They person been capable to show 100 percent of the BT.2020 colour scale, which is thing prior-generation LED TVs were simply not susceptible of. This means that, for folks watching the (admittedly) constricted magnitude of content, typically animated, that uses this expanded colour palette—shout retired to contributor Caleb Denison of CalebRated for his proposal of Inside Out 2 arsenic a trial disc—you should beryllium capable to spot shades that were antecedently intolerable to see.

Early Arrivals

This is the archetypal meaningful procreation of RGB LED TVs that volition beryllium disposable to consumers, with the aforementioned apical players successful the abstraction each having announced immoderate mentation of RGB LED surface oregon different for merchandise successful 2026.