For many years, if someone asked for a TV recommendation, there was an easy answer: choose an OLED TV. That’s been the status quo for about the past five years. But I’ve now seen what’s coming next from Sony and it could rip up the rulebook.
There’s been a quiet battle raging between OLED and other LED-based TV technologies over the past decade. OLED’s advantage has been in illumination, with each pixel producing its own light. That means that turning it off means absolute black, while colour control and accuracy is easier to achieve.
Competition has come from QLED (LED with quantum dots) which offer brightness and rivalling or better colour volume, or more recently, Mini-LED, which added in much better light control with multiple dimming zones for greater accuracy.
At IFA 2025 I experienced Sony’s new RGB LED tech behind closed doors and it’s one of the most impressive TV demos I’ve ever seen. While year-over-year we often see iterative updates, RGB LED has the potential to be a big step forward in the picture that your TV can produce.
How is RGB LED different to Mini-LED?
Currently, Mini-LED TVs like the Bravia 9 have a layer of white Mini-LEDs that provide the illumination. In the new RGB LED tech, this white layer is replaced with red, green and blue LEDs. In doing so, it removes the sort of blooming that can surround colours set in dark backgrounds where some of that white light escapes.
I saw a comparison of the new Sony RGB LED technology on a prototype display, sitting alongside a Mini-LED set. The difference was night and day, with the RGB LED clearly showing greater light control, for deep blacks while also offering more vibrant colours.
In one scene from Black Widow, where a bright red light was in the background in a dark tunnel, the Mini-LED set clearly showed blooming around this red light, where the RGB LED did not.
Mini-LED is known for its increased brightness over OLED, which is one of the major advantages (as well as increased affordability in the best mid-range TVs), but this RGB LED prototype was capable of 4000 nits, which is searingly bright.
You might not need that brightness, but it’s good to know that this tech can offer it, future-proofing your TV, as well as allowing movie studios to create even more impactful scenes. Perhaps that’s something you’ll need to get the most out of Dolby Vision 2.
Is RGB LED better than OLED?
Well, it might just be. In the same demo, I saw Sony’s RGB LED tech compared to two types of OLED TVs – W-OLED (which is what LG uses, for example in the LG OLED G5) and QD-OLED (which you’ll find in the Samsung S90F).
Sony didn’t confirm the brands that these OLED TVs were, but did confirm it was an RGB Tandem OLED display.
I wasn’t prepared for how well RGB LED would stand-up against OLED. While those OLED TVs offer a far superior black handling than the Mini-LED they were set against, the RGB LED was comparable. Where the RGB LED took things beyond OLED was in the brightness that could be achieved, as well as the richness of the colours.
Colours are something that OLED is known for, but Sony is saying that you’ll get four times the colour volume of QD-OLED. Beyond that, Sony is talking about “reference-level colour accuracy”, implying that this is a level beyond what we’ve seen before on standard televisions.
Not just for large TVs
Sony isn’t the first company to show off RGB LED. Samsung announced a Micro RGB TV last month using similar technology, while Hisense has also moved into RGB LED too.
Both these existing RGB LED models are huge – over 100 inches – but that’s not all this tech can do. Sony firstly outlined to me that there’s big advantage for larger screens, having the power to deliver the visuals, cutting through reflections while offering enhanced viewing angles too.
But I asked Daisuke Nezu, Senior General Manager from Sony, whether the tech would be limited to larger sizes and he confirmed that it wouldn’t. Potentially, that might mean that a premium Sony Bravia TV with RGB LED tech down at reasonable 55 or 65-inch sizes could be anticipated.
The race is on for RGB LED TVs of the future
While Hisense has a TV on the market (just), the prices are also huge. That’s always the case for new TV tech. Sony is staying schtum about when we might see an RGB LED TV in production, but the best guess is that a Bravia 9 II could be announced as a new flagship model at CES 2026 – but that’s not confirmed in any way.
Sony says that the thing that will make it’s RGB LED models stand-out compared to rivals is its long experience in backlight control and its picture processing. That’s one of the things that Sony has been really good at in recent years, while that precise backlight control driven by custom Sony hardware, could give Sony the advantage.
Of course, this was a controlled demo – I couldn’t access the settings or select the sample clips – so everything needs to be approached with caution, but colour me impressed.
RGB LED is going to be the talk of TV tech for the next couple of years, so buckle up, because change is coming.
