Set to dominate the halls of CES 2026 is Las Vegas, Micro RGB TV is out to take on television’s picture quality heavyweights.
While OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) has been the gold standard for some of the best TVs for many years, there are several other display technologies vying for the attention of those in the market for a new big screen.
OLED stands out from the crowd thanks to the fact that, like plasma before it, OLED doesn’t rely on shining a white backlight through coloured pixels to create a picture. Instead, each individual OLED pixel is its own coloured light.
Turn off an OLED pixel, and it’s perfectly black, even if the pixel beside it is brightly lit. This is what allows OLED to produce really deep blacks with great contrast and plenty of detail in the shadows.
Alternatively, LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) televisions rely on shining a dimmable backlight through coloured pixels, which means they can struggle to completely block that light in dark scenes. If some of that light bleeds through, the picture can look a bit washed out.
These days, most LCD televisions have a bright but energy-efficient LED (Light-Emitting Diode) backlight.
The upside of using a backlight means that LED LCD televisions are generally brighter than OLEDs, which can be important if you’re watching in a brightly lit room. (To be fair, today’s OLEDs are more efficient, brighter and more resistant to the burn-in issues that plagued earlier versions.)
Mini LED improves on LED LCD by breaking the backlight into hundreds or even thousands of miniature white LED lights, which can be dimmed between zones. This significantly improves the picture when bright and dark objects appear on the screen at the same time.
Micro RGB TV hits the big time
The new generation of Micro RGB TV screens goes one step further than Mini LED by replacing the miniature white LED backlights with tiny clusters of red, green and blue LED backlights. While capable of combining to create white, that can also produce any colour, at any brightness.
Purists will point out that relying on any kind of backlight still puts Micro RGB TV at a disadvantage compared to OLED, but there is another perspective to consider.
Some view the emerging Micro LED technology as the holy grail, combining the best of OLED and LED. Micro LED does away with the backlight, which helps with the deep blacks. Instead, it relies on individual coloured LED pixels, which helps produce very bright, vibrant colours.
We’ve only seen a handful of Micro LED televisions so far, from the likes of Samsung and Hisense, but they’re typically enormous and ridiculously expensive. Micro LED’s day will come, but for now, it’s out of reach for most lounge rooms.
So, where does that leave Micro RGB TV? As the latest, brightest and most colourful rival to OLED, available at a wider range of sizes but still on the expensive side, at least for now.
So who makes Micro RGB TV?
All the usual suspects have entered the Micro RGB TV fray yet, as usual, they’ve all given it different confusing.
To be fair, the actual name of the technology is RGB LED. Samsung has dubbed it Micro RGB, although it has also used the confusing term “RGB MicroLED” – incorrectly implying that it lacks a backlight similar to Micro LED.
Meanwhile, LG favours “Micro RGB evo”, TCL opts for “RGB Micro LED”, and Hisense calls it “RGB-MiniLED” but has also used the term TriChroma.
Is Micro RGB TV worth getting excited about?
It depends on the sharpness of your eyes and the depth of your pockets. Micro RGB TV is another improvement on what some people will always consider to be an imperfect technology, because it relies on a backlight.
OLED fans are unlikely to budge until Micro-LED prices come down from the stratosphere. But for those looking for a new LED champion to take the fight to OLED, Micro RGB TV is the one to watch.
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