Much like the audio industry’s compression-driven loudness war, which reached its distortion-fueled apex (and not the good kind) with Metallica’s Death Magnetic in 2008, the television industry has been having its own battle the past couple of years: the brightness war. Sparked by the introduction of HDR and its higher brightness mastering levels, brands began to push display technology to achieve the necessary light output for HDR movies.
As we hit the 10th anniversary of HDR’s introduction (to the consumer space, at least), 2025 felt like a new crescendo in the “who can be brighter” back-and-forth between brands. Not only did we get our first 5,000-nit TVs (albeit under very specific settings) from TCL and Hisense, we also got a big step forward in OLED technology with Primary RGB Tandem technology from LG Display. It was only a short while ago that TVs were struggling to hit 2,000 nits — now they are capable of more than twice that brightness.
While I don’t think the brightness war has reached its Death Magnetic moment, 2025 could be a precursor to such a reckoning.
TV tech reaches new heights
The biggest TV technological achievement we saw in 2025 was Primary RGB Tandem panels in displays from LG, like the LG G5, the Panasonic Z95B, and the Philips OLED950 and OLED910 (neither of which is available in the US or Australia). It was a significant change in OLED panel composition, moving from a three-stack panel consisting of a yellow layer sandwiched between two blue layers to a four-stack design with a red-blue-green-blue layer configuration. This greatly improved the potential light output from the OLED panel (LG Display claims up to 4,000 nits) and color purity.
Not to be outdone, companies like TCL and Hisense followed in the footsteps of Sony and its Bravia 9 from 2024, increasing the capability of mini-LED displays to staggering levels. Improvements were also made in backlight control, combatting the biggest drawback in LED TVs — black levels that suffer from light blooming — bringing their black level performance even closer to OLEDs. Both Hisense and TCL expanded the local dimming capability of their TVs, and TCL decreased the optical distance between the backlight and the screen, minimizing blooming even further.
2025 also saw the introduction of a new TV technology to the consumer market. The mini-LED tech that’s (literally) behind high-end and midrange LED TVs uses white or blue LEDs with quantum dots or color filters to create colored light. But at CES 2025, Hisense showed off its new RGB mini-LED, which uses individual small red, green, and blue LED backlights. TCL recently announced its own RGB mini-LED — the Q10M — which will first be released in China. And Samsung showed off its own version of the tech, but called it micro-RGB because the individual backlights are even smaller (this is not to be confused with the emissive micro-LED technology Samsung has been developing for years). When I saw it in August it was absolutely stunning. The TV has incredible brightness and vibrant colors. Sony has also been developing RGB TV technology, which it’s confirmed to me will be debuted in the spring of 2026.
The potential of this RGB technology is huge, but the manufacturing challenges of it and the processing required means they’re all massively expensive, ranging from $12,000 up to $30,000, depending on manufacturer and size. Still, I fully expect lots of exciting news at CES 2026 — and in the months after — about more TVs with mini-RGB (or micro-RGB, in Samsung’s case) technology. For example, when I talked to Samsung at the reveal event for the micro-RGB TV, it said exciting things were on the horizon for the TV. That could mean more manageable sizes (maybe a 65-inch model), even if it doesn’t mean more accessible pricing. The fact that the micro-RGB LEDs are so tiny could allow them to be packed closer together in smaller TVs. Here’s hoping.
Image: Samsung
When is enough brightness enough?
With all of these technological innovations, though, comes the potential for even higher brightness. This can be useful for combating ambient light in a sun-drenched living room, but it could also cause you to squint if the light is too bright in a darker environment.
Extra brightness isn’t inherently bad. But if we already have mini-LED TVs capable of 5,000 nits, which should theoretically be able to display HDR content mastered at 4,000 nits (currently the highest brightness mastering level), is there a need to continue to push beyond that? Since OLED is still behind mini-LED when it comes to brightness, we’ll likely see continued improvement there. But if mini-LED manufacturers are pushing brightness merely for the ability to say they’re the brightest, a better use of resources would be to develop better picture processing and improved black level performance.
At the height of the loudness war, compression — the tool relied upon to make audio tracks louder — became overused and diminished dynamic range, robbing music of its nuance. Loud for the sake of being loud ruined many recordings. Thankfully, the industry has in general backed off from that a bit, mainly because of loudness specifications from streaming services (which has its own set of issues). In the same way, an image that’s bright for the sake of being bright is as harsh on the eyes as a highly compressed audio track is on the ears. There will, at some point soon, be a moment when it’s been pushed too far.
What it comes down to is how well a TV will handle all of the brightness it’s capable of. Will it blast us with light — a visual version of Death Magnetic — or will it use its processing to give us dazzling specular highlights? The answer is not how bright a TV can get, but how well its brightness can be used to create an engaging image that dazzles and entertains us.
