Hisense isn’t bringing many TVs to CES 2025, but what’s making the trip may be a sign of the future of display technology. The brand’s 116-inch RGB LED TV, called the UX Trichroma TV, uses a new type of LED. light system with the potential to shake up the market. These systems can’t turn every tiny pixel on or off like OLED or MicroLED, but they offer the same contrast with incredible brightness, great accuracy, and other exciting benefits. The secret behind the brilliance is the color. What are RGB LEDs? It’s all about the backlight. Traditional LED TVs combat light spillage around bright objects on dark backgrounds by using multiple dimming zones (called local dimming) and thousands of increasingly small LEDs. However, even the best LED TVs will produce some light bleed (or haloing) around bright images, while providing less striking contrast than emissive light sources that provide a perfect black background like OLED and MicroLED, where each pixel is own backlight. Not like that. Traditional LEDs, which produce white or blue light and then apply color filters, Hisense’s new RGB LED panel uses thousands of optical lenses, each containing red, green, and blue LEDs to produce “pure color directly at the source.” According to Hisense, this results in “the widest color gamut ever achieved in a MiniLED display.” The TV is claimed to reproduce 97 percent of the BT.2020 color space, the most expansive display color standard available. The technology also offers other performance advantages. Because RGB panels reproduce the colors in the light source, RGB LEDs can be very bright while offering better backlight control and reduced light bleed. Hisense calls this technique “RGB local dimming,” as opposed to the traditional LED-based local dimming, where the LED TV backlight consists of LED zones for better contrast but still light bleeding. In theory—and in the short term. I waited with the Trichroma TV at CES—Hisense’s RGB technology provides deeper black levels and better contrast along with a wider range of colors than today’s LED TVs, even giving OLED and MicroLED a run for their money. RGB vs. OLED: The 2025 Bright War It’s hard to beat OLED TVs for great picture performance these days. OLED’s blend of perfect black levels, infinite contrast, excellent on-axis display, and expansive colors make it the best TV you can buy. But for all its advantages, OLED has its limitations—namely, a brightness level that can’t match even the most powerful LED TVs. Flagships like Panasonic’s Z95A (9/10, WIRED Recommends), LG’s G4, and Samsung’s S95D (8/10, WIRED Recommends) are all close to 2,000 nits peak brightness, outshining the brightest LED TVs from just a few years ago. An upgrade for 2025 could potentially push the latest model past the 2,000 nit milestone. In fact, the latest panels from Samsung and LG Display claim to be as bright as 4,000 nits in small windows (although this may not translate to real-world content).
