2026 Is the Year of the RGB LED TV

For how excellent they came to watch, today’s TVs come with an assortment of mind-numbing acronyms for buyers to parse.

This is like the scariest dinner party I’ve ever been to. Remember LED, QLED, Mini LED, Micro LED, OLED, QD OLED? Discover RGB LEDs!

Unfortunately, all of these acronyms mean something, and this year’s popular newcomer, RGB LED, involves incredibly accurate colors. Hidden behind upcoming panels from Hisense, Sony, Samsung and LG announced at CES 2026, RGB LED (also unnecessarily called Micro RGB or Mini RGB LED) is the hot panel technology to talk about this year. I just wish they’d call it “Supercolor”, or something people might remember.

What is RGB LED?

Courtesy of Samsung

Modern televisions compete on the qualities of their backlighting and their color representation. Edge-lit LED TVs of the past were thin, but their darkest tones tended toward gray rather than true black.

This problem has been solved in recent years using various technologies. Quantum dots help colors appear better on the latest LED TVs (often called QLED). Technologies like multi-zone LED (and more recently mini-LED) backlighting use thousands of tiny white LEDs to illuminate specific sections of the screen from behind. OLED (“organic LED”) TVs, introduced by LG just over a decade ago, do something similar but with more precision, with each pixel acting as its own backlight.

New RGB LED TVs bring color to the previously shadow-based world of LED TV backlighting, with lighting arrays behind the screen having the ability to backlight the panel in front of them with red, green or blue. This means exceptional color accuracy, as well as theoretical overall brightness that can outperform OLED TVs.

A historical criticism of OLEDs has been that they simply aren’t bright enough for well-lit rooms and that individual pixels can burn out on the screen with prolonged exposure to the same content. Frankly, our TV review team has seen these issues largely evaporate over the past few generations of OLED panels (and recent Quantum Dot OLEDs), all with truly stunning brightness.

What RGB LEDs promise is incredibly accurate colors on top of that extreme brightness. They were able to display 100% of the BT.2020 color scale, something that previous generation LED TVs simply weren’t capable of. This means that, for people who watch the (admittedly) limited amount of content, usually animated, that uses this expanded color palette, thanks to contributor Caleb Denison of CalebRated for his recommendation of Inside Out 2 as a test disc, you should be able to see nuances that were previously impossible to see.

Early arrivals

Photography: Ryan Waniata

This is the first significant generation of RGB LED TVs that will be available to consumers, with the aforementioned major players in the industry all having announced one RGB LED screen version or another for release in 2026.