For 2026, Sony is coming out with a new TV backlight, which it's been working on for several years. The company claims its True RGB technology will let its TVs produce "purer color, greater brightness, and the largest color volume ever achieved in Sony's home TV history." Using individually controlled red, green and blue LEDs, the potential is there for a jump in performance. 

"But wait," you might be asking, "aren't all backlights RGB LEDs?"

Actually, no. Nearly all are just blue LEDs. At least, that's been the case until recently. Sony itself was a pioneer in RGB backlighting about 20 years ago. This evolution of the tech that was once called Triluminos might even rival OLED in terms of picture quality. 

Sony's True RGB is not the only RGB mini- or micro-LED in town, though, with Hisense, LG, Samsung and TCL also working on their own versions of the tech. Of course, Sony says its iteration is best.

Backlights, RGB and otherwise

First, a brief step back to explain backlights. All modern TVs that aren't OLED are LCD. These have various names, like QLED, QNED and, of course, the misleading "LED." Mini-LED is an advancement that has smaller LEDs than other LED LCD technologies, and typically more of them. Then there are micro-LED backlit LCDs which use the same concept but have slightly smaller LEDs. It's worth noting that these are distinct from micro-LED TVs, which aren't LCDs, but they're mostly used for commercial displays.

An LCD is a liquid crystal display, which has a liquid crystal layer that creates the image. However, that layer doesn't create the light. It can only manipulate it. The job of creating the light falls on (you guessed it) the backlight. This backlight can be a series of LEDs arranged across the back of the TV or embedded in the edges or frame of the TV.

We dive into this more in our article on how LCD TVs use mini-LED, dual panels and quantum dots to take on OLED, but to understand what makes this new Sony tech interesting, all you need to understand is that a backlight with a bunch of LEDs creates light, and the layer in front of it manipulates that light to form an image. 

Typically, the LEDs in modern backlights are all blue. This blue light not only creates all the blue light you see, but when interacting with quantum dots or other phosphors, it also creates red and green light. For the most part, this can work really well, and many displays which use this method look really good. Some limitations exist, however, which this new Sony backlight method aims to fix.

R's, G's and B's

Though RGB backlights have been done before, the tech has advanced in ways that improve what was possible in those old versions. Most notably, this new tech is a variant of mini-LED. As its name suggests, mini-LED has smaller individual LEDs but more of them compared with a traditional LED backlight. More LEDs allows for better control of the backlight array and usually means better image quality. Since the liquid crystal layer can't completely block light, the backlight itself has to go dark to create black. 

The issue is that less-expensive models will only have a few "zones" that can be addressed individually. This can result in blooming. For example, picture a streetlight on a dark night. On an OLED TV, the light is bright and the rest of the screen can be totally black. On a budget LED LCD, the light is bright, but it has a sort of halo around it where the LEDs are bright but the content wants them to be dark. Lots of LEDs offer finer control and less chance of blooming. This inherent drawback has additional issues with RGB backlighting, but more on that in a moment.

For a deeper dive into the main TV technologies, check out OLED vs. LED vs. Mini-LED vs. LCD: What's the Best?

Sony's advancement with True RGB is, as the name suggests, RGB mini-LEDs. Having more discrete control over not only brightness but also color creates the potential for far better color volume.

Which brings us to...

Color volume, color issues

The name of the game here is "color volume." Essentially, this is how much color can be created at different brightness levels. A display can be very bright, but it might sacrifice color saturation to be that bright. For instance, imagine someone on TV wearing a red shirt with a bright spotlight on them. A TV that doesn't have good color volume might display that shirt as a shade of pink instead of the red it actually was. 

One of the ways TV manufacturers can boost brightness is by sacrificing color accuracy. Some designers have figured, often rightly, that brightness sells more TVs than color. These days, all TVs are plenty bright, so they need to find ways to improve image quality in other ways. Side by side, with the right content, a TV with better color volume can look richer, more realistic, more vibrant. 

Can this new backlight tech rival OLED in terms of overall picture quality? Well, it'll depend. It's likely it will be brighter than OLED, as mini-LED TVs often are, and Sony is saying this new tech could create displays with 4,000 nits (though non-RGB TVs, like the TCL QM8L, claim up to 6,000 nits). That's still extremely bright, and the company promises better color volume as well.

Since the backlight still won't be able to "turn off" individual pixels like OLED, its contrast ratio technically won't be as good. However, with enough zones and good processing, both of which Sony has said it's been working on, it's possible that with most content the difference will be hard to distinguish. 

However, there is a potential issue. As mentioned above, despite the many zones of mini-LED designs, there are far fewer zones than there are pixels. With a traditional backlight, this can lead to blooming, as in a bright area around bright objects that should be dark.

To return to the example mentioned above, a streetlight with the dark sky in the background can have a gray halo around it that should be black. With RGB backlighting, that blooming gets extended to color as well. Colors can "bleed" into areas they shouldn't be, potentially decreasing the color accuracy of those areas. This is called "color crosstalk" and could mean that RGB mini-LED displays look worse in real-world viewing than their claimed performance and synthetic measurements suggest.

LG Display, the company that makes the display hardware that LG Electronics sells to consumers, made a video about this. Keep in mind LG Display is very pro-OLED, so while the concept here is worth discussing, we'll have to wait and see how this all looks on actual displays later this year.

True RGB: True hype or truly cool? 

This is all theoretical, of course. This is a new tech, and we have yet to see it in a real product (though a release is imminent). Sony has historically made some great-looking TVs. Sony has also, historically, made some really expensive TVs. This could be the former, but it will definitely be the latter. Whether the tech's performance will justify its price is something we'll have to wait and see.

As mentioned earlier, Sony isn't the only one working on RGB backlights. Samsung, Hisense and TCL are also working on their own versions of the technology. So it's clear a lot of engineers think this is the best way to eke out a little more performance from LED LCD before the industry moves on to some future tech like micro-LED or nano LED. 

Which is to say, True RGB and other RGB mini-LEDs have the potential for some impressive performance, but like any new tech there are also drawbacks. Either way, we'll have to see how they're actually implemented before we can say how good the tech is and, of course, which company does it best.

In addition to covering audio and display tech, Geoff does photo tours of cool museums and locations around the world, including nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, medieval castles, epic 10,000-mile road trips and more.

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