Hisense didn’t bring many TVs to CES 2025, but what made the trip might just be a sign of the future of display technology.
The brand’s 116-inch RGB LED TV, nicknamed the UX Trichroma TVuses a new type of LED lighting system that has the potential to disrupt the market. The system can’t turn every little pixel on or off like OLED or MicroLED, but it offers just as striking contrast as well as incredible brightness, fantastic precision, and other intriguing benefits. The secret to its brilliance lies in the colors.
What is RGB LED?
It’s all about the backlight. Traditional LED TVs combat light scattering around bright objects against dark backgrounds by using multiple dimming zones (called local dimming) and thousands of increasingly smaller LEDs. Yet even the best LED TVs will produce slight bleed (or halo) around bright images, while providing less stark contrast than emissive light sources that provide a perfectly black background like OLED and MicroLED, where each pixel is its own backlight.
Unlike traditional LEDs, which produce white or blue light 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 produce ” pure colors straight from the source.” According to Hisense, this translates to “the widest color gamut ever in a MiniLED display.” The TV is claimed to produce 97% of the BT.2020 color space, the widest display color standard available. The technology also offers other performance benefits.
Because its RGB panel produces colors at the light source, RGB LEDs can become incredibly bright while providing improved backlight control and significantly reducing light loss. Hisense calls this technique “RGB local dimming”, as opposed to traditional LED-based local dimming, where an LED TV’s backlight is made up of areas of LEDs for better contrast but inevitably has 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 as well as more expansive colors than current LED TVs, giving even good value for money to OLED and MicroLED.
RGB versus OLED: the brightness war of 2025
It’s currently hard to beat OLED TVs in terms of picture performance. OLED’s blend of perfect black levels, near-infinite contrast, excellent off-axis viewing, and expansive colors powers the best TVs you can buy. Yet for all its advantages, OLED has its limitations, namely brightness levels that cannot match those of the most powerful LED TVs.
This may seem dismissive given that the best OLED TVs are already extremely bright in a vacuum. Flagship products like the Panasonic Z95A (9/10, WIRED recommends), LG’s G4and Samsung’s S95D (8/10, WIRED recommends) all achieve peak brightness remarkably close to 2,000 nits, outperforming the brightest LED TVs from just a few years ago. An upgrade for 2025 could potentially push the latest models beyond the 2,000 nits mark. In fact, the latest panels from Samsung and LG Display claim to achieve 4,000 nits brightness in very small windows (although this seems unlikely to translate to real-world content).
