Home Tech Hisense’s RGB LED could be the future of cheap screens

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

0 comments
Hisense's RGB LED could be the future of cheap screens

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

The brand’s 116-inch RGB LED TV, called UX Trichrome TVuses a new type of LED lighting system with the potential to revolutionize the market. The system can’t turn every little pixel on or off like OLED or MicroLED, but it offers equally stunning contrast along with incredible brightness, fantastic precision, and other cool benefits. The secret behind its shine is in the colors.

What is RGB LED?

It’s all about backlighting. Traditional LED TVs combat light scatter around bright objects on dark backgrounds by using multiple dimming zones (called local dimming) and thousands of increasingly smaller LEDs. However, even the best LED TVs will produce a slight bleed (or halo) around bright images, while providing less striking contrast than light-emitting 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 it 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 gamut ever achieved in a MiniLED display.” The TV is claimed to produce 97 percent of the BT.2020 color space, the widest display color standard available. The technology also offers other performance advantages.

Because its RGB panel produces colors at the light source, the RGB LED can become incredibly bright while offering improved backlight control and greatly reducing light leakage. Hisense calls this technique “RGB local dimming,” as opposed to traditional LED-based local dimming, where the backlight of an LED TV consists of zones of LEDs for better contrast, but still inevitably has light bleed. .

In theory, and in the brief time I spent with the Trichroma TV at CES, Hisense’s RGB technology provides deeper black levels and better contrast along with more expansive colors than current LED TVs, even rivaling OLED and MicroLED.

RGB versus OLED: The Brightness Wars of 2025

It’s hard to beat OLED TVs for picture performance right now. OLED’s combination of perfect black levels, near-infinite contrast, excellent off-axis viewing, and expansive colors powers the best TVs you can buy. However, for all its advantages, OLED has its limitations, namely brightness levels that cannot be matched by the most powerful LED TVs.

That may seem dismissive considering that the best OLED TVs are already tremendously bright in a vacuum. Flagship models like the Panasonic Z95A (9/10, WIRED recommends), LG G4and Samsung’s S95D (8/10, WIRED recommended) come remarkably close to 2,000 nits of maximum brightness, eclipsing the brightest LED TVs of a few years ago. An update by 2025 could see the latest models surpass that 2,000 nits milestone. In fact, the latest panels from Samsung and LG Display claim to have brightness of up to 4,000 nits in very small windows (although this seems unlikely to translate to real-world content).

You may also like