Hisense didn’t bring many TVs to CES 2025, but what did make the trip could be a sign of the future of display technology.

The brand’s 116-inch RGB LED TV, called UX Trichroma TVuses a new type of LED lighting system that has the potential to shake up the market. The system cannot turn every little pixel on or off OLED or MicroLEDbut it offers the same outstanding contrast with exceptional brightness, exceptional accuracy, and other interesting benefits. The secret behind its brilliance lies in the colors.

What is RGB LED?

It’s all about backlighting. Traditional LED TVs combat light spillage around bright objects on a dark background by using multiple dimming zones (called local dimming) and thousands of dimming LEDs. However, even the best LED TV can produce some noticeable light bleed (or haloing) around bright images, while providing less dramatic contrast than emissive light sources that provide a completely black backdrop such as OLED and MicroLED, where each pixel has its own backlight.

Unlike traditional LEDs, which produce white or blue light and then run that through color filters, Hisense’s new RGB LED panel uses thousands of optical lenses, each containing of red, green, and blue LEDs to produce “pure colors directly at the source.” According to Hisense, this results in “the widest color gamut ever achieved in a MiniLED display.” The TV is claimed to produce 97 percent of the BT.2020 color space, the widest display color standard available. The technology also provides other performance advantages.

Because its RGB panel reproduces the colors of the light source, the RGB LED can be brightly lit while offering more backlight control and greatly reducing light bleed. Hisense calls this technique “RGB local dimming,” as opposed to traditional LED-based local dimming, where the backlight of an LED TV consists of zones of LEDs for better contrast but still inevitable. with light bleed.

In theory—and in the short time I spent with the Trichroma TV at CES—Hisense’s RGB tech delivers deeper black levels and better contrast with a wider range of colors than current LED TVs, even the giving OLED and MicroLED a run for the money.

RGB vs. OLED: The Light Wars of 2025

It’s hard to beat OLED TVs for better picture performance today. OLED’s combination of perfect black levels, near infinite contrast, excellent off-axis viewing, and wide colors empowers the best TVs you can buy. Yet for all its advantages, OLED has limitations—namely, brightness levels that can’t match the brightest LED TVs.

That may sound bad considering the best OLED TVs are too bright in a vacuum. Flagships like Panasonic’s Z95A (9/10, Recommended by WIRED), LG G4and Samsung’s S95D (8/10, Recommended by WIRED) all get remarkably close to 2,000 nits peak brightness, surpassing the brightest LED TVs from just a few years ago. An upgrade for 2025 could push the latest models past the 2,000 nit milestone. In fact, the latest panels from Samsung and LG Display claim to be as bright as 4,000 nits in very small windows (although this doesn’t seem to translate to real-world content).