2026 will be the battle of “RGB” in TV technology – what. the. heck. is. that?

If you’re still catching up on Quantum Dots, OLED, Mini LED and are thinking that Plasma is still a TV technology, you’ve got a big shock coming with a whole new style of TV technology set to dominate the next year or more.

Right from the get-go I’ve got some horrible news – RGB is not the technology, Hisense announced their “World First” RGB Mini LED at CES – an enormous 116 inch TV coming to Australia this year.

This week, Samsung announced their own “World First” with “Micro RGB” at IFA in Berlin. For them, displayed and launched in a 115 inch model.

But notice the subtle difference there? Hisense is Mini LED, Samsung is Micro. There’s a lot to unpack about that, but in essence the little lights that sit behind your TV’s LCD panel are smaller on Samsung than on Hisense, and likely there are many more of them too.

What on earth is RGB though?

Well, on a traditional full array LED backlit TV there are hundreds, if not thousands of LED lights. They shine when that area of the screen is bright or colourful, but not when the picture is black. This ensures a nice amount of light and brightness for you to see the intended picture.

Thanks to Hisense, we got a really great look at this at IFA this year.

On the left side of the display is a traditional LED array. Think of these as TV’s with the front of the panel removed.

These white lights are large, they are spaced out from each other and they shine light around the area.

Over the last few years all TV brands have moved to incorporate “Mini LED” into their ranges.

With Mini LED there are many more lights, the lights are much smaller and, you’ll notice they are blue.

Because of the Blue colour, there are then additional filter layers added to create the right look for the end panel colour.

Critically, there’s no set number of Mini LEDs on a TV, with a more expensive model lightly to have a more dense array of Mini LED’s while a cheaper TVs might have a wider spread.

One of the critical measures of a great TV though is colour accuracy and brightness.

With the Blue Mini LED shining, and the filtered layers above it, there is a compromise on colour range, and also on brightness.

Enter the new RGB Battle. Red-Green-Blue, a tiny little light that can shine any or all of those colours to create a backlight colour that is close to the colour of the picture it is illuminating.

This side by side demonstration is by far the greatest way to get a glimpse of what your TV is doing “under the hood”

And it also shows very clearly the advance in the backlight technology through the years

I think genuinely from this you can get a sense for why this new RGB backlight will be a game-changer.

That’s not to say that Mini LED isn’t an outstanding technology – it clearly is! But, let’s take it one step further.

How the Samsung Micro RGB and Hisense RGB Mini LED compare we can’t truely say just yet, other than to say our understanding is that Samsung’s lights are much smaller, and if they do pack them in in a more dense fashion, you’d think it would create a colour and contrast that might just come even closer to rivalling the king of TV technology – OLED.

We, like you – have a lot of learning to do over the next few months to fully understand this new TV landscape!

Safe to say though, 2026 will be the year of RGB TVs – the question is can either of these companies make this technology in smaller form factors, and fit them into the existing price structure.,

Time will tell.

EFTM’s coverage of IFA 2025 is supported in part by Belkin, Ecovacs, Reolink and Samsung