GoKawiilFor 2026, Sony is coming out with a new TV backlight, which it's been working on for several years. The company claims its True RGB technology will let its TVs produce "purer color, greater brightness, and the largest color volume ever achieved in Sony's home TV history." Using individually controlled red, green and blue LEDs, the potential is there for a jump in performance.
"But wait," you might be asking, "aren't all backlights RGB LEDs?"
Actually, no. Nearly all are just blue LEDs. At least, that's been the case until recently. Sony itself was a pioneer in RGB backlighting about 20 years ago. This evolution of the tech that was once called Triluminos might even rival OLED in terms of picture quality.
Sony's True RGB is not the only RGB mini- or micro-LED in town, though, with Hisense, LG, Samsung and TCL also working on their own versions of the tech. Of course, Sony says its iteration is best.
Backlights, RGB and otherwise
Two company's takes on LED backlighting. All four of these TVs are showing the same image. Each TV at the top is the same model as the one in front of it, just with their liquid crystal layer removed so you're looking directly at the LED backlight. Note how the TVs on the right, with more zones and better backlight control, can show a brighter lantern. Geoffrey Morrison/CNET
First, a brief step back to explain backlights. All modern TVs that aren't OLED are LCD. These have various names, like QLED, QNED and, of course, the misleading "LED." Mini-LED is an advancement that has smaller LEDs than other LED LCD technologies, and typically more of them. Then there are micro-LED backlit LCDs which use the same concept but have slightly smaller LEDs. It's worth noting that these are distinct from micro-LED TVs, which aren't LCDs, but they're mostly used for commercial displays.
An LCD is a liquid crystal display, which has a liquid crystal layer that creates the image. However, that layer doesn't create the light. It can only manipulate it. The job of creating the light falls on (you guessed it) the backlight. This backlight can be a series of LEDs arranged across the back of the TV or embedded in the edges or frame of the TV.
We dive into this more in our article on how LCD TVs use mini-LED, dual panels and quantum dots to take on OLED, but to understand what makes this new Sony tech interesting, all you need to understand is that a backlight with a bunch of LEDs creates light, and the layer in front of it manipulates that light to form an image.
Blue LEDs, used in most backlight designs, excite red and blue quantum dots (middle layer in this diagram) or other phosphors to create red and green light. This now "white" light (technically just red, green and blue) is then manipulated by an LCD layer to create the image you see. Sony
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