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📣 Sony announces a new RGB LED backlight as 2026 technology for future TVs
🌈 RGB LEDs illuminate TVs with a color-matching backlight instead of a layer of white LEDs
📈 This allows RGB LEDs to produce more pure colors, less blooming, and wider viewing angles
😎 Sony claims this new backlight panel can hit 4,000 nits of peak brightness
🚫 Eliminates the need for a quantum dot layer for more accurate colors than a Mini LED or QD-OLED TV
Sony has revealed its new RGB LED backlight as one of its 2026 technologies for future TVs.
The company didn’t specify which models will feature this new perfectly color-matching backlight technology, but The Shortcut attended an exclusive technology demonstration in Tokyo and saw it in action as a prototype.
This new backlight works almost exactly as the name suggests. Instead of a panel of white to blue-ish white backlight LEDs, RGB LEDs match the color of the pixels on the LCD panel. I saw a full-sized panel of these RGB LEDs in action, and they basically create a lower-resolution backlight pattern that matches the exact color tones displayed on the LCD panel.
Since the blacklight matches the color of the LCD panel, there’s virtually no blooming. Colors, meanwhile, look both brighter and more pure as there isn’t a separate layer of white-colored backlights washing out the picture. The RGB LED backlight TV was able to produce noticeably deeper reds. The contrast is also much higher since the RGB LED backlight brightens the screen with the exact colors the LCD panel needs—thus making the picture pop more.
Sony also claims this new RGB LED backlight panel will help its future TVs achieve the same 4,000-nits of peak brightness as Sony’s professional monitors. I saw the RGB LED backlight prototype next to Sony’s already impressively bright Bravia 9 Mini LED TV, and the former was noticeably brighter while also presenting better black levels.
RGB LED TVs also drop the quantum dot layer used by most Mini LED and some QD-OLED TVs like the Samsung S95D. This helps reduce the optical stack of panels inside the TV, and the LCD cells can produce more pure color as well. Sony claims its RGB LED backlight generates four times the color volume of a QD-OLED screen like the Sony A95L.
Now, Sony said it only considers RGB LED as another panel technology that it will develop alongside its Mini LED, QD-OLED, and Micro LED displays. RGB LED isn’t necessarily the end-all and be-all of Sony’s TV technology. Sony isn’t the only company developing RGB LEDs either; the Hisense 116UX TriChroma TV we saw at CES 2025 also features RGB local dimming technology.
Sony has only described this technology as a 2026 technology, so the soonest we could see it integrated into a commercial product will probably be CES 2026. I’m certainly excited after all the technology demos in Tokyo, and I can’t wait for RGB LED backlights to revolutionize future TVs.
Kevin Lee is The Shortcut’s Creative Director. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam.
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