Hisense’s RGB LED Could Be the Future of Cheap Displays

Hisense didn’t bring 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, named UX Trichroma TVuses a new type of LED lighting system that has the potential to shake up the market. The system cannot turn each tiny pixel on and off OLED or MicroLEDbut it offers incredible brightness, fantastic accuracy and equally amazing contrast, along with other interesting benefits. The secret of its brilliance lies in the colors.

What is an RGB LED?

It’s all about backlighting. Traditional LED TVs combat light scattering around bright objects on dark backgrounds by using multiple dimming zones (called local dimming) and thousands of increasingly smaller LEDs. However, even the best LED TVs will produce noticeable light streaming (or haloing) around bright images, while providing less striking contrast than emissive light sources such as OLED and MicroLED, where each pixel has its own backlight, which provide a perfect black background.

Unlike traditional LEDs, which generate white or blue light and then pass it through color filters, Hisense’s new RGB LED panel uses thousands of optical lenses, each containing red, green and blue LEDs, to create “pure colors 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 produce 97 percent of the BT.2020 color space, the widest display color standard available. The technique also provides other performance benefits.

Because an RGB panel produces colors in the light source, an RGB LED can be fantastically bright and greatly reduce light flux while offering advanced backlight control. Hisense calls this technique “RGB local dimming”, as opposed to traditional LED-based local dimming, where the LED TV’s backlight consists of LED zones for better contrast, but still inevitably has light flux.

In theory—and from my short time with the Trichroma TV at CES—Hisense’s RGB technology delivers deeper black levels and a wider range of colors, along with better contrast than current LED TVs, even giving OLED and MicroLED a run for their money.

RGB and OLED: The Brightness Wars of 2025

OLED TVs are currently hard to beat for sheer picture performance. OLED’s perfect black levels, near-infinite contrast, perfect off-axis imaging and a wide color mix the best TVs you can buy Despite all its advantages, OLED has limitations, namely brightness levels that cannot match the most powerful LED TVs.

This may seem like a no-brainer, given that the best OLED TVs are very bright in a vacuum. Flagships like the Panasonic Z95A (9/10, WIRED Recommends), LG G4and Samsung S95D (8/10, WIRED Recommends) all approach 2,000 nits of peak brightness, surpassing the brightest LED TVs of just a few years ago. An update for 2025 could potentially see the latest models pass the 2000 nit milestone. In fact, the latest panels from Samsung and LG Display claim to be as bright as 4,000 nits in very small windows (though that may not translate to real-world content).