Hisense’s RGB LED could be the future for cheap screens

Hisense didn’t bring many TVs to CES 2025, but what did make the trip may be a sign of the future of display technology.

The brand’s 116-inch RGB LED TV, called the UX Trichrome TVuses a new type of LED lighting system with the potential to shake up the market. The system cannot turn each pixel on or off OLED or MicroLEDbut it offers similar contrast at the same time with incredible brightness, fantastic accuracy and other intriguing benefits. The secret behind its brilliance is in the colors.

What is RGB LED?

It’s all about backlighting. Traditional LED TVs combat light spillage around bright objects on dark backgrounds by using multiple dimming zones (called local dimming) and thousands of ever-smaller LEDs. However, even the the best LED TVs it produces some bleeding light (or haloing) around bright images, while providing a less impressive contrast than emissive light sources that provide a perfectly black background such as OLED and MicroLED, where each pixel is its own backlight.

Unlike traditional LEDs, which produce white or blue light and then pass through color filters, Hisense’s new RGB LED panel uses thousands of optical lenses, each containing red, green and blue LEDs to produce “pure colors directly at the source”. According to Hisense, this results in the “widest color range ever achieved in a MiniLED display”. The TV is claimed to produce 97 percent of the BT.2020 color space, the most expansive display color standard available. The technology also provides other performance advantages.

Because its RGB panel produces colors at the light source, the RGB LED can be fantastically bright while offering enhanced backlight control and greatly reducing light bleed. Hisense calls this technique “RGB local dimming”, as opposed to the tradition of LED-based local dimming, where the backlight of an LED TV consists of LED zones for better contrast, but also inevitably has light bleeding.

In theory – and in the short time I spent with the Trichroma TV at CES – Hisense’s RGB technology delivers deeper black levels and better contrast with more expansive colors than current LED TVs, even giving OLED and MicroLED a run for their money. the money

RGB vs. OLED: The Brightness War of 2025

It’s hard to beat OLED TVs for pure picture performance right now. OLED’s blend of perfect black levels, near-infinite contrast, excellent off-axis display, and expansive colors power better TV you can buy However, for all its advantages, OLED has its limitations, that is, brightness levels that cannot match the most powerful LED TVs.

It might sound silly considering that the best OLED TVs are already brilliant in a vacuum. Flagships like the Panasonic Z95A (9/10, WIRED Recommends), LG G4and Samsung’s S95D (8/10, WIRED Recommends) all come remarkably close to peak brightness of 2,000 nits, surpassing the brightest LED TVs from just a few years ago. An update for 2025 could potentially push the latest models beyond that 2,000 nit milestone. In fact, the latest panels from Samsung and LG Display claim to achieve brightness as high as 4,000 nits in very small windows (although this seems unlikely to translate to real content).