GoKawiilis a senior reviewer covering TVs and audio. He has over 20 years experience in AV, and has previously been on staff at Digital Trends and Reviewed.
RGB LED TVs have been the talk of the TV world this year, with models coming from all the manufacturers, and the first one of 2026 is here — the Hisense UR9. It’s the first look at the viability of the new backlight technology outside of demo rooms, and it’s a step above the traditional mini-LED TVs of years past. HDR is colorful and accurate, it has great brightness, and it is capable of showing colors beyond the P3 color space for movies and TV shows that have wider color. But at $3,500, the 65-inch model I reviewed is priced comparably to high-end OLEDs from LG and Samsung, which is tough competition.
Hisense released the very first RGB LED TV last year, the $30,000 116-inch Hisense 116UX, so it’s not too surprising that its top-end models, the UR9 and UR8, are RGB LED TVs and not traditional mini LED (you need to step down to the U7SG for that). It’s also the first company to release a more affordable 2026 model, but it’s still more expensive than the flagship mini-LED TVs of last year, like the TCL QM9K.
The Hisense UR9 is available in four sizes: 65 inches ($3,500), 75 inches ($5,000), 85 inches ($6,000), and 100 inches ($9,000). This puts it in direct competition with flagship OLED displays from LG and Samsung, and is a high bar for the UR9 and any other RGB LED TV. I got a look at the 65-inch variety.
The 65-inch UR9 is 1.8 inches thick across the whole chassis and uses a pedestal stand. Like the U8QG last year, the Hisense UR9 has only three HDMI 2.1 inputs. Its fourth input is a USB-C DisplayPort connection, which is situated along the left edge of the TV instead of with the other connections on the back. I’m not a fan of this placement because if you want to have your computer continually connected to the TV, the cable is clearly visible. The TV supports 180Hz native refresh rate, AMD Freesync Premium Pro, HDR 10+, and Dolby Vision. A future update will enable Dolby Vision 2, but we’re not going to see any Dolby Vision 2 content available for a while.
How I test TVs I set up each TV in my living room on my home theater credenza. I stream movies and shows through the TV’s apps, play discs on a Magnetar UDP900 MkII 4K Blu-Ray player (including the Spears & Munsil Ultra HD Benchmark disc) and movies from a Kaleidescape Strato E player, and play games on my Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5. This is done at different times of the day and under different lighting conditions, with curtains open, with lamps and overhead lights on, or with blackout curtains up to keep the room dark. While I am a certified ISF Level 3 calibrator, I do not calibrate the TVs before measurement, as the overwhelming majority of TV owners don’t bother. So it’s important to know how well the TVs perform out of the box, with minor tweaks in the menu anyone can do. For measurement, I use Portrait Displays’ Calman color calibration software, a Murideo 8K Seven pattern generator, an X-rite i1 Pro 3 spectrophotometer, Portrait Displays’ C6 HDR5000 colorimeter, a Konica Minolta LS-100 luminance meter, and Leo Bodnar 4K lag tester.
One of the touted benefits of RGB LED TVs is their ability to achieve 100 percent of the BT.2020 color space. That’s talking about chromaticity, which is based on saturation and hue and is independent of brightness (or luminance). You might have seen color space triangles on a CIE 1931 diagram. But what this chart doesn’t show us is how colors perform across different brightness levels, or in our living rooms. (For a deep dive on this, Caleb Denison released an excellent video a couple weeks ago.)
Also, the vast majority of HDR content uses the P3 color space, which is smaller than BT.2020. So even if a TV is capable of extending beyond P3 and into BT.2020 colors (which the UR9 absolutely is), with most movies and TV shows it doesn’t matter. It’s also a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg situation — we need TVs that can accurately display BT.2020 before the color space is fully adopted by TV and movie creators, but if there’s no content, why get a BT.2020 TV?
Now, while it’s comparatively not a lot, there is some great video out there that extends beyond the P3 color space and into BT.2020 colors. One example is the BBC documentary series Planet Earth II, which I watched with a Kaleidescape Strato E player. Episode 3 looks at the jungles of the world, and the greens of the trees in particular looked incredibly vibrant on the Hisense UR9. There’s also a segment about hummingbirds in Ecuador that shows off the dazzling colors of the tiny creatures, which the UR9 handled very well. It’s on par with what I saw on the $7,000 TCL X11L, and a more colorful picture than I’ve seen from OLEDs like the LG G5 or Sony Bravia 8 II. Without any motion compensation, there was some judder as the camera panned through the jungle. Changing the motion setting to Film helped to smooth that out without giving it an unnatural effect.
One of the potential issues with RGB LED TVs is color crosstalk, something that LG Display — notably a maker of OLED panels — made a video about back in December. An example could be when someone is walking past a colorful mural and the red from the artwork causes the person’s face to look a little red, which then changes to be slightly blue when they pass the blue part of the mural. I didn’t see this happen on the UR9 with any of the material I watched.
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