Micro RGB TVs first arrived last year with little fanfare and a confusing name, so you may have mistaken it for other panel tech or not even noticed. That is not likely to be the case this year, though — it’s the hot new “luxury” display technology and is all over the place at CES 2026 . So why do we even need these new TVs and how are they different from OLED, Micro LED and Mini LED models? Here’s how it works and how it compares.
A brief history of flat panel display tech
To better understand Micro RGB, it helps to see how flat panel display technology has evolved over the last 20 years. The first LCD TVs used liquid crystals that become transparent to light when voltage is applied, letting a rear backlight shine through as a pixel. Those pixels combine to create moving or still images, with color created via an RGB filter layer placed in front.
The main problem is that LCD crystals let some light partially leak through, so blacks are dark grey instead of pure black. And for a backlight, early LCD TVs used a white screen lit by dim and power-hungry fluorescent lights, which caused uneven light distribution. And finally, the RGB filter color layer reduced a panel’s brightness.
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The next step up, then, was to use LED backlights instead, placed at first at the edges of the white screen and then later directly behind it (the first TV with this tech was Sony’s 2004 Qualia ). That added the benefits of higher brightness, lower power consumption, improved color balance and even light distribution. It also allowed individual dimming zones that improve contrast by allowing near-pure blacks in shadow areas of an image.
Samsung's Neo QLED 8K TV from CES 2025 (Samsung)
Quantum dot (QD) technology came on the scene around 2013 with Sony’s Triluminos televisions. This type of LCD panel employs a semiconductor nanocrystal layer (rather than an RGB filter layer) that can produce pure monochromatic red, green, and blue light when struck with a blue backlight. Unlike previous LCDs, they offer higher brightness and color accuracy thanks to the purity (narrowness) of the base RGB colors. The best-known TVs using this tech are Samsung’s QLED models.
The latest evolution of QD LED technology is Mini LED. That combines the accuracy of quantum dot tech with hundreds or even thousands of LED dimming zones. Those models offer high brightness and color accuracy along with good contrast, but still don’t deliver perfect blacks and can display “blooming” in scenes with bright points of light due to leakage into neighboring pixels.
Both of those problems were solved with OLED technology, which first came on the market in 2007 with Sony’s XEL-1 model . The panels are made using sheets coated with organic LEDs, each paired with a transistor that can switch the LED on or off. On regular OLED TVs, OLED pixels are white and a filter layer generates colors, much as with LED TVs. However, with QD-OLEDs, OLED pixels are blue and color is created via a quantum dot layer, like LED QD displays. The latest version of QD-OLED featured on several new monitors at CES 2026 (Samsung’s 5th-gen QD-OLED) uses an RGB stripe pattern to reduce color “fringing” on text.
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