Hisense isn’t bringing many TVs to CES 2025, but what did make the trip could be a sign of the future of display technology.
The brand’s 116-inch RGB LED TV, which it calls… TV UX Trichromauses a new type of LED lighting system with the potential to radically change the market. The system can’t turn every tiny pixel on or off like OLED or MicroLED, but it offers similarly stunning contrast along with incredible brightness, great resolution, and other interesting features. The secret behind its brilliance lies in the colors.
What is RGB LED?
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 noticeable light bleed (or halo) around bright images, while providing less pronounced contrast than emitted light sources that provide a completely black background like OLED and MicroLED, where each pixel is its own backlight.
Unlike traditional LEDs, which produce white or blue light and then run it through color filters, Hisense’s new RGB LED panel uses thousands of optical lenses, each containing red, green and blue LEDs to produce “pure colors straight from the source.” According to Hisense, this results in “the widest color gamut ever achieved in a MiniLED display.” The TV is claimed to produce 97 percent of the BT.2020 color space, the widest display color standard available. The technology offers other performance advantages as well.
Because its RGB panel produces colors at the light source, RGB LEDs can get fantastically bright while providing improved backlight control and dramatically reduced light bleed. Hisense calls this technology “RGB Local Dimming,” as opposed to traditional LED-based local dimming, where an LED TV’s backlight consists of areas of LEDs for better contrast but still inevitably light bleed.
In theory — and in the short time I spent with the Trichroma TV at CES — Hisense’s RGB technology offers deeper black levels and better contrast along with wider colors than current LED TVs, even giving OLED and MicroLED a run for their money.
RGB vs. OLED: The brightness wars of 2025
It’s hard to beat OLED TVs for sheer picture performance right now. OLED’s combination of perfect black levels, near-infinite contrast, excellent off-axis viewing, and wide colors power the best TVs you can buy. However, despite all its advantages, OLED has its limitations, namely brightness levels that the most powerful LED TVs cannot match.
That may seem dismissive considering that the best OLED TVs are already bright in a vacuum. Flagships like Panasonic’s Z95A (9/10, WIRED recommends), LG G4and Samsung’s S95D (8/10, WIRED recommends) all come remarkably close to a peak brightness of 2,000 nits, besting brighter LED TVs of just a few years ago. A 2025 upgrade will likely push the latest models beyond 2,000 lumens. In fact, the latest panels from Samsung and LG Display claim up to 4,000 nits of brightness in very small windows (although this is unlikely to translate to real-world content).