Sony says it’s developing a new backlight tech for LCD TVs, using RBG LEDs. “But wait, aren’t all backlights RGB LEDs?” If that’s what you’re thinking, no, actually most aren’t. What’s your next thought? “Surely someone has done this before?” Actually, yes, Sony did, about 20 years ago. But this evolution of the tech, originally known as Triluminos, promises better color and contrast than what was possible before. It might even rival OLED in terms of picture quality.
At the moment Sony is only talking about the technology, not any specific product where it might be found. However, the fact Sony’s talking about it does imply we’ll see this tech in real TVs soon. Here’s why it’s interesting.
Backlights, RGB and otherwise
Two company’s takes on LED backlighting. All four of these TVs are showing the same image. Each TV at the top is the same model as the one in front of it, just with their liquid crystal layer removed so you’re looking directly at the LED backlight. Note how the TVs on the right, with more zones and better backlight control, can show a brighter lantern.
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’s MicroLED displays, which aren’t LCDs, but they’re not quite normal TV size… yet.
LCD, or liquid crystal display, has a liquid crystal layer (hence the name) 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 there’s a backlight with a bunch of LEDs that creates light, and a layer in front of it that manipulates that light to form an image.
Blue LEDs, used in most backlight designs, excite red and blue quantum dots (middle layer in this diagram). This now RGB light is then manipulated by an LCD layer to create the image you see.
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, also creates red and green light. For the most part this can work really well, and many displays using this method look really good. There are some limitations, which this new Sony backlight method aims to fix.
R’s, G’s and B’s
In Sony’s new design, the backlight uses RGB LEDs, potentially offering finer control.
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. 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. With lots of LEDs there’s finer control and less chance of blooming. For more, check out our article OLED vs. LED vs. Mini-LED vs. LCD: What’s the Best?
Sony’s advancement here is RGB mini-LEDs, which are typically just one color, usually blue (more on this in a moment). By having more discrete control over not only brightness but also color, there’s the potential for far better color volume.
Which brings us to…
Color volume
Take this with a grain of salt, as it’s from Sony and trying to hype the company’s new tech, but theoretically, the different technologies could perform this way. Color volume charts can be confusing at first glance, but essentially the larger the cube, the brighter the colors are without losing saturation. How bright can a deep red be? If a movie shows a bright blue sky, how bright can it be while still being a deep blue color? Sony is saying its RGB backlight can do this better than blue LED, mini-LED, or either flavor of OLED.
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.
Displays of all kinds have long sacrificed color accuracy for brightness. Their designers figured, often rightly, that brightness sold 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.
The only light you need in a TV is red, green and blue. In this marketing diagram, Sony is asserting that it’s able to produce far more red than what’s possible with other mini-LED designs.
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. That’s very, very 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.
This is all theoretical, of course. This is a new tech and we have yet to see it in a real product. 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. Sony also isn’t the only one working on RGB backlights for the near-future. Samsung, Hisense, and TCL are also working on versions of the technology. All versions of the tech have great potential, but of course we’ll have to see how they’re actually implemented before we can say which company did it best.
Sony hasn’t revealed potential availability, but we’ll likely see more at CES 2026, next January.
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 and medieval castles. He also documents epic 10,000-mile road trips and more.
You can check out Budget Travel for Dummies, his travel book, and his bestselling sci-fi novel about city-size submarines. Follow him on Instagram and YouTube.
Add comment