Sony says it is using RBG LED to develop new backlight technology for LCD TVs. “But wait, aren’t all backlit RGB LEDs?” If that’s what you think, no, most aren’t. What is your next idea? “Someone must have done it?” In fact, yes, Sony did it, About 20 years ago. However, this development of the technology, originally called Triluminios, promises better colors and contrasts than previous ones. It may even fight OLED As far as picture quality is concerned.
Currently, Sony is just talking about technology, not any specific product that can be found. But the fact that Sony is talking about does hint that we will soon see the technology on real TV. That’s why it’s interesting.
Backlight, RGB, etc.
LED backlighting for both companies. All four TVs show the same image. Each TV on the top is the same as the one in front, just remove its LCD layer so you can view the LED backlight directly. Note how the TV on the right has more area and better backlight control that can show a brighter lantern.
First, a brief step to explain the backlighting. All modern TVs that are not OLED are LCD. These names come in multiple names, such as QLED, QNEND, and of course the misleading “LED”. Mini Leadership is an advancement of smaller LEDs than other LED LCD technologies, usually more. Then Microglass It’s not LCDs that are displayed, but they are not normal TV sizes yet…
An LCD or LCD display has a liquid crystal layer (hence the name) that creates an image. However, the layer is not created Light. It can only manipulate it. You guessed the backlight and the work of creating the light fell. This backlight can be a series of LEDs on the back of the TV or embedded in the edges or frames of the TV. We dig more into our article How LCD TVs use mini-dominated, dual-panels and quantum dots for OLEDbut to understand what’s interesting about this new Sony Tech, you need to understand is that there is a backlight with a bunch of LEDs that produces light, and a layer in front of it can manipulate light to form an image.
Blue LED, used in most backlight designs, excites red and blue quantum dots (middle layer in this figure). The RGB light is then manipulated through the LCD layer to create the image you see.
Usually, modern backlit LEDs are blue. This blue light not only creates all the blue light you see, but also produces red and green lights when interacting with quantum dots. This works well in most cases, and many monitors using this method look really good. There are some limitations, and this new Sony backlighting method is designed to fix it.
R, G and B
In Sony’s new design, the backlight uses RGB LEDs, which may provide more refined control.
Although RGB backlighting has been completed before, the technology has advanced in ways that improve these older versions possible. Most notably, this new technology is a variant of mini-leading. As the name suggests, Mini-LEDs have smaller single LEDs, but there are more LEDs in them than traditional LED backlights. More LEDs provide better control of the backlight array, which usually means better image quality. Since the liquid crystal layer cannot completely block light, the backlight itself must be darker to create black. Cheap models will only have some “regions” that can be solved separately. This may lead to flowering. For example, shooting street lights on a dark night. On OLED TVs, the lights are bright and the rest of the screen may be completely black. On the budget LED LCD, the lights are bright, but there is a halo around it, and the LEDs are bright, but the contents want them to be dimmed. In many LED cases, there is better control and less chance of flowering. For more information, please check out our article OLED vs. LED vs. Mini Leadership vs. LCD: What’s the best?
Sony’s advancement here is the RGB mini-leading, which usually has only one color, usually blue (more later). By controlling not only brightness but also color more discretely, it is possible to obtain better color volumes.
This brings us…
Color volume
Take it with a grain of salt because it comes from Sony and is trying to hype the company’s new technology, but in theory, different technologies can be performed this way. At first glance, the color volume chart can be confusing, but essentially, the larger the cube, the brighter the color without losing saturation. How bright is the crimson red? If the movie shows a bright blue sky, how big will it be while still becoming a dark blue? Sony says its RGB backlight can do this better than the flavor of blue LEDs, mini-leading or OLEDs.
The name of the game is “Color Collect”. Essentially, this is how many colors can be created at different brightness levels. The monitor may be very bright, but it may sacrifice color saturation to make it so bright. For example, imagine someone on TV wearing a red shirt with bright spotlights. A TV without good color volume may show that shirt is a pink shade instead of it actually being red.
For a long time, various displays of various colors are accurate to achieve brightness. Their designers usually correctly believe that brightness sells more TVs than colors. All TVs are very bright these days, so they need to find ways to improve image quality in other ways. Using the right content side by side, TVs with better color volumes look richer, more realistic and more energetic.
The only lights needed in the TV are red, green and blue. In this marketing picture, Sony asserts that it can produce much reds than other mini-leading designs.
Can this new backlighting technology competitor be in terms of overall image quality? Well, that will depend on. Just like mini TVs often, it may be brighter than OLEDs, Sony says the new technology can be used with 4,000 Nitt. It’s very, very bright and the company promises it can be better. Since the backlight still can’t “turn off” a single pixel like an OLED, its contrast is not technically as good. However, with enough area and good processing that Sony has been doing, both have been working hard, it may be difficult to distinguish the differences.
Of course, this is all theoretical. This is a new technology and we haven’t seen it in real products yet. Sony has created some great-looking TVs in history. Historically, Sony has also made some very expensive TVs. This may be the former, but it is certainly the latter. We must wait and see whether the performance of the technology will prove that its price is reasonable. Sony is not the only one who works in RGB backlighting. Samsung, Hersense and TCL are also working on versions of the technology. All versions of this technology have great potential, but of course, we have to see how they actually implement before we can tell which company is doing the best.
Sony has not disclosed potential availability yet, but we may see more at CES 2026 next January.
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