Hisense didn’t bring many TVs to CES 2025, but what did make the journey may well be a sign of the future of display technology. The brand’s 116-inch RGB LED TV, dubbed the UX Trichroma TV, uses a new kind of RGB (red, green, and blue) LED lighting system with the potential to shake up the market. The system can’t turn each tiny pixel on or off like OLED or micro-LED, but it offers still-striking contrast alongside incredible brightness, fantastic accuracy, and other intriguing benefits.
Hot on its heels, Sony revealed its own RGB LED prototype at a Tokyo press event I attended in late February 2025. As with Hisense, Sony's new screen tech, set for an ambiguous 2026 release, showed serious improvements across the board over traditional LED TVs. The secret behind this new technology's brilliance is in the colors.
Updated March 2025: We’ve added new information following hands-on time with Sony’s new RGB LED prototype, potential plans for a 2026 Sony product release, and other new display tech.
What Is RGB LED?
It's all about the backlighting. Traditional LED TVs produce white or blue light run through color filters and an LCD panel to create an image. The best models combat light spillage from bright objects on dark backgrounds using multiple dimming zones (called local dimming) and thousands of increasingly small LEDs. Yet, even the best LED TVs will produce noticeable light bleed (or haloing) around bright images, while providing less striking contrast than emissive light sources that provide a perfectly black backdrop like OLED and micro-LED, where each pixel is its own backlight.
Unlike today's traditional LED backlight systems, RGB LED panels use thousands of red, green, and blue LED modules to produce “pure colors directly at the source.” According to Hisense, this results in the “widest color gamut ever achieved in a mini-LED display.” Its new TV is claimed to produce 97 percent of the BT.2020 color space, the most expansive display color standard available. Sony's system provides similarly impressive advancements, including a higher color bit rate for richer saturation and greatly improved color accuracy. Sony says its new tech “enables faithful reproduction of delicate hues and subtle gradations of light across every corner of the display.” RGB LED provides other performance advantages too.
Photograph: Ryan Waniata
Because an RGB panel produces colors at the light source in concert with color filters, RGB TVs get fantastically bright while offering enhanced backlight control and greatly reduced light bleed for improved contrast. Hisense calls this technique “RGB local dimming,” as opposed to traditional LED-based local dimming.