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

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

The brand’s 116-inch RGB LED TV, dubbed UX Trichroma TVUsing a new type of LED lighting system with the potential to shake up the market. The system cannot turn every tiny pixel on or off OLED or MicroLEDBut it offers incredible brightness, superb accuracy and other interesting benefits as well as equally interesting contrast. The secret behind its brilliance lies in the color.

What is RGB LED?

It’s all about the backlighting. Traditional LED TVs use multiple dimming zones (called local dimming) and thousands of increasingly small LEDs to combat light spilling around bright objects on dark backgrounds. Still, even Best LED TV Bright images will produce some noticeable light bleed (or haloing) around them, while providing less interesting contrast than emissive light sources that provide completely black backdrops like OLED and MicroLED, where each pixel has its own backlight.

Unlike traditional LEDs, which generate white or blue light and then run it through a color filter, Hisense’s new RGB LED panel uses thousands of optical lenses, each containing red, green and blue LEDs to create “pure color 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 benefits.

Because its RGB panel creates color in the light source, RGB LEDs can be incredibly bright while offering enhanced backlight control and greatly reduce light bleed. Hisense calls this technique “RGB local dimming,” as opposed to traditional LED-based local dimming, where an LED TV’s backlight consists of zones of LEDs for better contrast but still inevitable light bleed.

In theory—and from the brief time I spent with the Trichroma TV at CES—Hisense’s RGB technology offers a wider range of colors as well as deeper black levels and better contrast than current LED TVs, giving even OLED and MicroLED a run for the money. Gives

RGB vs. OLED: The Brightness War of 2025

Right now OLED TVs are hard to beat for sheer picture performance OLED’s mix of perfect black levels, near-infinite contrast, powers excellent off-axis viewing and a wide range of colors. best tv you can buy Yet for all its advantages, OLED has limitations—namely, brightness levels that can’t match the most powerful LED TVs.

This may sound dismissive considering the best OLED TVs already shine brilliantly in a vacuum. Flagships like Panasonic’s Z95A (9/10, Wired recommends), LG’s G4and Samsung’s S95D (8/10, Wired recommends) all achieved a remarkable 2,000 nits of peak brightness, surpassing the brightest LED TVs of just a few years ago. An upgrade for 2025 could potentially push recent models past the 2,000 net milestone. In fact, recent panels from Samsung and LG Display claim to be as bright as 4,000 nits in very small windows (though that seems unlikely to translate to real-world content).