Sony's Latest TV Tech: LCDs, But Make Them Fancy

After a long day filled with snark, what better way to unwind than by watching TV? And, naturally, what better way to extend the snark than by writing about the latest in TV tech? Enter Sony, who just unveiled their fancy new RGB LED technology for LCD TVs. Apparently, we weren’t already drowning in enough acronyms and marketing buzzwords.

The Announcement: A New Take on LCD Backlighting

Sony has been quietly working on RGB LED backlighting for LCD TVs, claiming it will redefine picture quality. Unlike current LED backlights, which rely on blue LEDs and quantum dots to approximate red and green, this new system has individual red, green, and blue LEDs. The result? A wider color gamut (90% Rec.2020), peak brightness of up to 4000 nits, better energy efficiency, and improved viewing angles. Sony is also claiming superior zone dimming, which should make blacks blacker and contrast punchier.

Mass production starts in late 2025, with Sony branding it as “2026 technology” (because nothing says future-proof like a marketing calendar). Unlike competitors who slap “miniLED” and “microLED” labels on everything, Sony is simply calling theirs “RGB LED.” Bold move, considering that at the end of the day, we’re still talking about an LCD with a backlight.

How Much Better Can Picture Quality Get?

Let’s be real for a second. OLEDs already offer near-perfect contrast, vibrant colors, and incredible viewing angles. QD-OLED, in particular, has been giving us 90% Rec.2020 color and fantastic HDR performance. So how much more picture quality are we even asking for? At a certain point, we’re debating decimal points in color volume charts while most consumers are still watching their TVs in torch mode with motion smoothing on.

Sony’s demo featured a head-to-head comparison with its own QD-OLED, showing off the RGB LED’s higher brightness and more impactful HDR highlights. That’s great—until you remember that deep blacks and perfect pixel-level dimming are still the domain of OLED. Sure, Sony’s RGB LED backlight boasts 3,840 dimming zones (which is great for an LCD), but next to the 8.3 million dimming zones of a 4K OLED panel, it’s still like comparing a paint-by-numbers kit to a Monet.

The Zone Dimming Conundrum

Sony is hyping up its 66-bit backlight control, which is a significant step up from the current Bravia 9’s 22-bit miniLED control. But even with thousands of zones, blooming and halo effects remain an issue—Sony’s prototype even introduced a fun new twist where halos take on red, green, or blue tints instead of the usual white. Because what your high-end TV experience really needed was a neon glowstick effect around bright objects.

So, Who’s This For?

Sony is pitching this as flagship tech, meaning it’ll likely be reserved for their top-tier Bravia models (or possibly something even more premium). It’s also “scalable,” meaning we could see it in massive display sizes where OLED struggles. There’s even talk of Hollywood mastering monitors adopting RGB LED, which could be a big deal for content creators.

But for the average TV buyer? It’s yet another high-end tech leap that will probably be wildly expensive and slightly better in some specific scenarios—while OLED and QD-OLED continue to dominate in the ways that matter most.

The Verdict

Sony’s RGB LED technology is undoubtedly impressive. It’s pushing LCD tech to new heights, bringing higher brightness, better colors, and improved efficiency. But let’s not pretend we’re reinventing the wheel here. If you already have an OLED TV, you’re still living in the future. If you’re still on an LED TV from five years ago, this might be your next big upgrade. But at this point, the real question is: do we really need more tech or just better ways to stop people from watching 4K HDR content in the default “Vivid” mode?

Sony’s RGB LED TVs are coming—just in time for us to wonder if we really needed them in the first place.