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

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

The brand’s 116-inch RGB LED TV, called UX Trichroma TVuses a novel LED lighting system that has the potential to shake up the market. The system cannot turn every little pixel on or off OLED or MicroLEDbut it offers similarly impressive contrast alongside incredible brightness, fantastic accuracy and other fascinating benefits. The secret of its brilliance lies in the colors.

What is RGB LED?

It’s about the backlight. Traditional LED TVs combat light scattering around bright objects on dark backgrounds by using multiple dimming zones (called local dimming) and thousands of increasingly smaller LEDs. But even those best LED TVs creates noticeable light leakage (or haloing) around bright images while providing less noticeable contrast than emitting light sources that provide a perfectly black background, such as OLED and MicroLED, where each pixel represents 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 deliver “pure colors directly to the Source”. According to Hisense, this results in the “widest color gamut ever achieved in a MiniLED display.” The TV is said to produce 97 percent of the BT.2020 color space, the most comprehensive color standard available for displays. The technology also offers other performance benefits.

Because the RGB panel produces colors directly at the light source, RGB LEDs can get fantastically bright while providing improved backlight control and significantly reducing light emission. Hisense calls this technique “RGB Local Dimming,” as opposed to traditional LED-based local dimming, where an LED TV’s backlight is made up of LED zones for better contrast, but still inevitably has light leakage.

In theory – and in the short time I spent with the Trichroma TV at CES – Hisense’s RGB technology offers deeper black levels and better contrast, as well as richer colors than current LED TVs, giving even OLED and MicroLED a run for its money can compete for money.

RGB vs. OLED: The brightness wars of 2025

It’s currently hard to beat OLED TVs when it comes to picture performance. The OLED mix of perfect black levels, almost infinite contrast, excellent off-axis viewing and expansive colors is what makes it so best televisions You can buy. But for all its advantages, OLED does have its limitations – namely brightness levels that can’t compete with the most powerful LED TVs.

That might sound pejorative when you consider that the best OLED TVs are already blazingly bright in a vacuum. Flagships like Panasonic’s Z95A (9/10, WIRED recommends), LG’s G4and Samsung’s S95D (8/10, WIRED recommends) all reach remarkably close to 2,000 nits of peak brightness, surpassing the brightest LED TVs from a few years ago. An upgrade for 2025 could potentially push the latest models past the 2,000-nit milestone. In fact, Samsung and LG Display’s latest panels claim to be up to 4,000 nits bright in very small windows (though this probably doesn’t translate to real-world content).