For how excellent they've come to look, today's televisions come with a brain-numbing assortment of acronyms for shoppers to parse.

It's like the scariest dinner party I've ever attended. Remember LED, QLED, mini LED, micro LED, OLED, QD OLED? Meet RGB LED!

Sadly, all these acronyms do actually mean something, and this year's popular newcomer—RGB LED—implies shockingly accurate colors. Hiding behind upcoming panels from Hisense, Sony, Samsung, and LG announced at CES 2026, RGB LED (unhelpfully also called micro RGB or RGB mini LED) is the hot panel technology to talk about this year. I just wish they'd call it “Supercolor,” or something folks could actually remember.

What Is RGB LED?

Courtesy of Samsung

Modern TVs 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 the gray instead of the truly black.

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

New RGB LEDs TVs bring color to the previously shade-based backlighting world of LED TVs, with the illumination arrays behind the screen gaining the ability to backlight the panel in front of them with red, green, or blue. This means gorgeous color accuracy, along with a theoretical overall brightness that can outcompete OLED TVs.

A historic criticism of OLEDs has been that they just aren't bright enough for well-lit rooms, and that the individual pixels can burn into the display with prolonged exposure to the same content. Frankly, our TV reviews team has seen those issues largely evaporate over the past few generations of OLED panels (and recent Quantum Dot OLEDs), all with truly eye-burning brightness.

What RGB LEDs do promise is scarily accurate colors in addition to said extreme brightness. They have been able to display 100 percent of the BT.2020 color scale, which is something prior-generation LED TVs were simply not capable of. This means that, for folks watching the (admittedly) limited amount of content, typically animated, that uses this expanded color palette—shout out to contributor Caleb Denison of CalebRated for his recommendation of Inside Out 2 as a test disc—you should be able to see shades that were previously impossible to see.

Early Arrivals

Photograph: Ryan Waniata

This is the first meaningful generation of RGB LED TVs that will be available to consumers, with the aforementioned top players in the space all having announced some version of RGB LED screen or another for release in 2026.

There are some issues that lovers of OLED (and makers of OLED like LG Display) would like to point out, namely that there can be color bleed between the green and blue backlighting, thus messing with real-world color accuracy. In practice, these screens will still likely be more accurate than previous-generation TVs by a good margin, but we have yet to get our first batch of review units to confirm this. From what WIRED team members have seen at CES this year, the new sets look gorgeous.

Color blooming can also be a potential issue; a historic problem with backlighting on LED TVs is that, because it's not pixel-level brightness, it causes a bit of “blooming” around the edge of a bright element within the image, making a black background show hints of grey. This is also possible with colored backlighting systems like RGB LED, but it should be dramatically less noticeable because the color being used for illumination isn't pure white.

Content that fully uses BT.2020 is hard to come by. This actually isn't a screenmaker's problem, so to speak, because really this is up to content makers. Now that screens from virtually every manufacturer can actually take advantage of the expanded BT.2020 color spectrum, look for more and more content to trickle in over the coming months and years.

Testing Time

Courtesy of Samsung

The reality is, RGB LED TVs are so new that we just haven't spent enough time with them in our homes and testing rooms to fully know what the real-world issues will be. I know, for example, that a lot of processing is required to make sure that everything on the screen looks good.

What I can absolutely say, and what we have been saying for about a year now, is that these screens will likely be the most important mid-tier TV technology of the next few years, with every major player in the space now planning to add models featuring this backlighting technology.

I look forward to testing out these new displays and comparing their color to other high-end models we've seen in prior years. For most folks, slightly better colors and brighter panels aren't a reason to dash down the store aisles just yet, but better color from content makers and TV manufacturers will inevitably benefit us all long-term, and RGB LED (ahem, micro RGB or RGB mini LED) screens are definitely something to consider.