GoKawiilRGB Mini-LED backlights. Geoffrey Morrison/CNET
In 2026, nearly every TV manufacturer has jumped on what seems to be the next big thing in TVs: tiny red, green and blue LEDs. This new backlighting system is an evolution of the current technology which has been in use for 20 years. While an “LED TV” typically uses only blue LEDs paired with quantum dots, phosphors or color filters to illuminate an LCD, RGB Mini-LED (or Samsung’s Micro RGB) uses thousands of tiny RGB LEDs.
Not surprisingly, there are a bunch of benefits to using RGB LEDs. The marketing is full of superlatives about brightness and color. What these companies don’t love talking about are the downsides, which can be noticeable in practice. If you’re looking for the best TVs available today, it’s possible you’re shopping for either an RGB Mini-LED or an OLED, so it’s important to understand the pros and cons of both technologies to figure out what’s right for you. To help on that front, here’s how RGB Mini-LED works.
Backlights
All TVs on the market today, except for OLED, use light-emitting diodes to create light. This light is then manipulated by a liquid crystal (or LCD) layer to create the image you see. In the olden days, LCD TVs used fluorescent tubes to create light. This evolved to LEDs, first a few dozen, then hundreds and now thousands. Mini-LED is the latest evolution, with tens of thousands of LEDs arrayed across the back of the TV.
This is a photograph of two TVs showing the same content. The top TV has had its LCD layer removed. You’re looking directly at the LED backlight. Notice how the LEDs in the black parts of the image are off, while the LEDs behind the origami crane are lit up. Geoffrey Morrison/CNET
The more LEDs the better, generally speaking, because the LCD layer can’t fully block the light. So it’s impossible to get the sort of per-pixel perfect blacks that are possible with OLED. Instead, LEDs are grouped in zones that are able to dim when the content needs it. The LEDs behind dark areas of the image are dimmed so that area is darker. With enough zones, this is harder to notice, but it can still be visible. For instance, in the image above, you can see how the lit LEDs don’t exactly match the outline of the crane. This mechanism is important for one of the potential downsides of RGB Mini-LED, as I’ll discuss later.
A Samsung marketing illustration of a traditional LED, mini-LED and RGB mini-LED. The company misleadingly call RGB mini-LED “Micro RGB,” even though the technology has nothing to do with microLED. Samsung
There’s also microLED, which, despite the name, is a fundamentally different technology. It doesn’t use LCD at all and is instead millions of direct-view LEDs. It’s currently far more expensive than Mini-LED, so it’s not really a competitor at the moment. I wanted to mention it to clarify that despite Samsung’s misleading marketing, Micro RGB is not microLED. It’s just the company’s name for RGB Mini-LED.
Color
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