For how excellent they’ve come to look, today’s televisions come with a brain-numbing assortment of acronyms for shoppers to parse.
It’s like the scariest dinner party I’ve ever attended. Remember LED, QLED, Mini LED, Micro LED, OLED, QD OLED? Meet RGB LED!
Sadly, all these acronyms do actually mean something, and this year’s popular newcomer—RGB LED—implies shockingly accurate colors. Hiding behind upcoming panels from Hisense, Sony, Samsung, and LG announced at CES 2026, RGB LED (unhelpfully also called Micro RGB or RGB Mini LED) is the hot panel technology to talk about this year. I just wish they’d call it “Supercolor,” or something folks could actually remember.
What Is RGB LED?
Courtesy of Samsung
Modern TVs compete on the qualities of their backlighting and their color representation. Edge-lit LED TVs of the past were thin, but their darkest tones tended toward the gray instead of the truly black.
This has been fixed in recent years by various technologies. Quantum dots help colors appear better on the latest LED TVs (often called QLED). Tech like multi-zone LED (and more recently mini-LED) backlighting uses thousands of tiny white LEDs illuminate specific sections of the screen from behind. OLED (“organic LED”) TVs, introduced by LG a little over a decade ago, do something similar but more accurately, with each pixel acting as its own backlight.
New RGB LEDs TVs bring color to the previously shade-based backlighting world of LED TVs, with the illumination arrays behind the screen gaining the ability to backlight the panel in front of them with red, green, or blue. This means gorgeous color accuracy, along with a theoretical overall brightness that can outcompete OLED TVs.
A historic criticism of OLEDs has been that they just aren’t bright enough for well-lit rooms, and that the individual pixels can burn into the display with prolonged exposure to the same content. Frankly, our TV reviews team has seen those issues largely evaporate over the past few generations of OLED panels (and recent Quantum Dot OLEDs), all with truly eye-burning brightness.
What RGB LEDs do promise is scarily accurate colors in addition to said extreme brightness. They have been able to display 100 percent of the BT.2020 color scale, which is something prior-generation LED TVs were simply not capable of. This means that, for folks watching the (admittedly) limited amount of content, typically animated, that uses this expanded color palette—shout out to contributor Caleb Denison of CalebRated for his recommendation of Inside Out 2 as a test disc—you should be able to see shades that were previously impossible to see.
Early Arrivals
Photograph: Ryan Waniata
This is the first meaningful generation of RGB LED TVs that will be available to consumers, with the aforementioned top players in the space all having announced some version of RGB LED screen or another for release in 2026.
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