Hisense didn't bring many TVs to CES 2025, but what made the trip could be a sign of the future of display technology.
The brand's 116-inch RGB LED TV, dubbed TV Trichroma UXusing a new type of LED lighting system that has the potential to shake up the market. The system cannot turn each small pixel on or off OLED or MicroLEDbut it delivers the same impressive contrast alongside incredible brightness, excellent accuracy, and other attractive benefits. The secret behind its brilliance lies in the color.
What are RGB LEDs?
It's all about the backlight. Traditional LED TVs combat light spill around bright objects on dark backgrounds by using multiple dimming zones (called local dimming) and thousands of increasingly small LEDs. However, even Best LED TV will create some noticeable streaks (or halos) around bright images, while also providing less dramatic contrast than emissivity light sources that provide perfect black backgrounds like OLED and MicroLED , where each pixel is its own backlight.
Unlike traditional LEDs that produce white or blue light and then pass it through colored filters, Hisense's new RGB LED panel uses thousands of optical lenses, each containing a red, green LED and blue to create “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 produce 97% of the BT.2020 color space, the most expansive display color standard available. This technology also offers other performance advantages.
Because RGB panels generate color at the light source, RGB LEDs can achieve extremely high brightness while enhancing backlight control and significantly reducing light spillage. Hisense calls this technique “RGB local dimming,” as opposed to traditional LED-based local dimming, where an LED TV's backlight consists of zones of LEDs for better but firmer contrast. There's still a lot of light leaking out.
In theory — and in the brief time I spent with a Trichroma TV at CES — Hisense's RGB technology offers deeper black levels and better contrast along with more expansive colors than LED TVs. Now, it even makes OLED and MicroLED worth the money.
RGB vs OLED: The Brightness War of 2025
Currently, it's hard to beat OLED TVs for sheer picture performance. OLED's combination of perfect black levels, nearly limitless contrast, excellent off-axis viewing, and expansive color powers Best TV you can buy. But for all its advantages, OLED also has limitations—namely, brightness levels that can't match the most powerful LED TVs.
That might sound hard to believe because the best OLED TVs already glow brightly in a vacuum. Flagship like Panasonic's Z95A (9/10, WIRED recommended), LG G4and Samsung's S95D (8/10, WIRED recommended) all achieve a maximum brightness of nearly 2,000 nits, far surpassing the brightest LED TVs of just a few years ago. The facelift for 2025 is likely to push the latest models past that 2,000 nit mark. In fact, the latest panels from Samsung and LG Display claim to have up to 4,000 nits of brightness in very small windows (though this doesn't seem to translate to real-world content).