Every few years the television industry finds a new type of display technology to tout as the latest and greatest. And with the exception of plasma TVs, nearly every one of them is named like somebody upturning a bowl of alphabet soup on the carpet. Thereโs been OLED, ULED, QLED, LCD, Mini-LED, MicroLED. Even the old standard for most of the 20th century, CRT, was no exception.
Now thereโs a new one: Micro RGB. It was all the buzz at CES 2026, and nearly every major TV manufacturer has since spread the news that theyโre planning a wide range of Micro RGB TVs for release this year. Itโs more evolutionary than revolutionary, but it offers the most accurate color of any display technology out there. You may yawn that weโve been down this road before, but it could be a game changer.
The Popular Display Types
To understand what makes Micro RGB (red, green, and blue) the hot, new screen technology, you have to understand how other display technologies work. Most panels these days are LED screens based on LCD (liquid crystal display) technology. These display panels require a backlight behind the pixels that collectively make up the image on the screen.
When an LED, QLED, or Mini-LED (what Hisense calls ULED and Samsung calls Neo QLED) display want to show black, they turn the corresponding section of pixels off. But the backlight behind them is always on, so even with the pixels turned off theyโre never truly dark. Think of it like holding a black blanket over an open window. The light behind the blanket shows through a bit. Most LCD-based screens are like that.
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How Micro RGB Compares to LED
Micro RGB, an LCD-based design like most LED panels, still incorporates a backlight behind its pixels. Instead of using the uniformly white or bluish-white…