Sony’s Dazzling New Display Adds to the RGB LED TV Hype – WIRED
LED TVs are about to get a lot better. As demonstrated by Hisense and to some extent Samsung at CES 2025, a new backlight technology called RGB LED is poised to improve the quality and efficiency of TVs that use LED backlights and LCD panels to work their magic.The innovative new tech should help LED TVs give more premium-priced emissive screens like OLEDs, which create light imaging at the pixel level, a serious run for their money. As of today, Sony has officially put its hat in the RGB TV ring.Unlike more traditional LED TVs that use pure white or blue LEDs (or the tinier mini-LEDs) that light up display layers like color filters and an LCD panel to create an image, RGB LED TVs use tri-colored red, green, and blue lights that create colors directly at the source of the panel stack. This can provide significant advantages over today’s best mini-LED TVs, including higher brightness, less blooming (light bleed around bright images), and purer, more accurate colors.Pure Color RGB LEDPure Color mini-LEDWhile Samsung hasn’t disclosed much about its RGB tech, Hisense claims its 116-inch UX Trichroma RGB TV, unveiled in Las Vegas in January, provides color accuracy at an astonishing 97 percent of the next-gen BT.2020 color gamut spec. The TV also claims an eye-blasting 10,000 nits peak brightness, though that’s unlikely to equate to much real-world content, mastered at 4,000 nits or less. The TV is set for release in 2025, with pricing yet to be disclosed.Turns out, Sony has been working on its own version of this technology for its mini-LED panels for years now. Not to be outdone by its competitors, the TV pioneer flew a crew of global journalists and reviewers, myself included, to its Tokyo headquarters for a firsthand look at its latest and greatest home theater creations. Its RGB LED TV prototype was the pièce de résistance.Panel structure of RGB screensPanel structure of mini-LED screensEven for those of us steeped in TV technology and its flurry of acronyms, it’s not easy breaking down a new display type you’ve barely seen in action. Luckily, nobody explains TV tech better than Sony’s engineers.At its Tokyo HQ demo, Sony took the face off its RGB prototype to show the backlight system in action. In fact, the company took half the face off, so we were able to see the raw backlighting and fully realized image side-by-side in one display. To our collective amazement, the RGB LEDs were able to create wholly recognizable color images. The backlight-only images looked almost like 8-bit pixelated versions of the regular scenes at the left, but even small details were often apparent. Again, this was just the backlights making the picture, working in concert with Sony’s XR Backlight Master Drive algorithm technology.We then got to see the fully assembled RGB prototype next to Sony’s best traditional mini-LED TV, the Bravia 9 (9/10, WIRED Recommends), and its 2023 flagship OLED, the A95L (9/10, WIRED Recommends), and again the results were impressive.While the prototype wasn’t able to create the same perfect black levels and focused contrast of the OLED model, it had strikingly effective blooming control and image focus. Its colors looked richer and more saturated than both TVs, and its brightness easily outdid even the Bravia 9, one of the most fiery TVs in its class. Sony says the display can produce 99 percent of the baseline DCI-P3 color spectrum, and 90 percent of the more advanced BT.2020 spectrum, both major feats. Just as intriguing is the display’s claimed level of color control at low brightness, designed to improve accuracy over current displays in dimly lit scenes.Interestingly, this is not the first RGB LED display in Sony’s 60-plus-year TV catalog. Sony introduced a now archaic version of RGB LED tech in 2004, though that version can hardly be compared to today’s displays. The best mini-LED TVs comprise thousands of lights and hundreds of dimming zones for much better brightness, accuracy, and precision than in the early days.Still, as striking as these latest RGB mini-LEDs are, they’re not nearly as tiny as the millions of pixels that make up 4K TVs, so they can’t come close to creating the precise color gradations required for the billion-plus colors modern TVs can display on their own. As the engineers demonstrated, the RGB prototype utilizes color filters, Sony’s proprietary XR Color Booster, and other technologies to produce the final product.This necessitates a hand-off between the tri-colored backlights and the rest of the panel, all of which must be coordinated by a TV’s processors. According to Sony, this is at the heart of what sets its RGB TV’s performance apart from other brands. That’s part of what makes the Japanese brand’s entry into the RGB TV horse race so intriguing.Sony laid out multiple ways its RGB displays outdo today’s best LED TVs during my time in Japan. The ability to create subtractive colors between the backlights and the color filters helps lead to higher efficiency for improved brightness, potentially equating to Sony’s renowned professional monitors. The lack of white light behind the panel reduces light spillage and allows for more focused colors, for better blooming control, and the creation of colors at the light source allows for a higher bit-depth in color gradation and better saturation than traditional LED displays. This means richer and more accurate color reproduction.Maybe the most compelling trait of RGB LED TVs is their improved off-axis performance for when you’re not viewing head-on. The prototype’s brightness and colors looked excellent for an LED TV when stepping to the side, something Sony says is due to both the new display’s cell structure as well as its advanced control over color gradation.Poor off-axis viewing has long been my biggest gripe with LED TVs, especially compared to OLED counterparts. Even the most premium mini-LED TVs today struggle with a loss in color saturation and brightness from the side, and it’s an even more common problem with midrange models.That’s particularly noticeable with larger screen sizes, which is otherwise a major benefit of LED TVs: Because of how they’re made, they’re much easier (and cheaper) to produce in large sizes than OLED TVs. This, to me, is the most promising potential benefit of RGB LED technology in the near term: Affordable large TVs with improved performance, no matter where you sit. That’s a real-world advantage even the least nerdy TV buyer can appreciate.It’s also worth noting that Sony engineers told us the prototype we saw in Tokyo is already three years old, which makes me wonder how many improvements have been made in the meantime. I’d wager a lot. We don’t yet have an exact date for when Sony will launch its first RGB LED TV, let alone pricing, but the company will start mass production this year, with a general road map for TVs hitting walls in 2026.Could Sony’s RGB TV be the first approachable version of this technology that regular folks can bring home? That’s the company’s hope. For now, all we know for sure is that Sony’s new display tech is on its way, and that RGB LED technology is clearly here to stay.In your inbox: WIRED’s most ambitious, future-defining storiesDOGE takeover: Elon Musk’s toxicity could spell disaster for TeslaBig Story: A crypto crimefighter’s descent into Nigerian prisonI dated multiple AI partners at once. It got real weirdSummer Lab: Explore the future of tech with WIREDMore From WIREDReviews and Guides© 2025 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. 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