Micro RGB TVs first arrived last year with little fanfare and a confusing name, so you may have mistaken it for other panel tech or not even noticed. That is not likely to be the case this year, though — it’s the hot new “luxury” display technology and is all over the place at CES 2026. So why do we even need these new TVs and how are they different from OLED, Micro LED and Mini LED models? Here’s how it works and how it compares.
A brief history of flat panel display tech
To better understand Micro RGB, it helps to see how flat panel display technology has evolved over the last 20 years. The first LCD TVs used liquid crystals that become transparent to light when voltage is applied, letting a rear backlight shine through as a pixel. Those pixels combine to create moving or still images, with color created via an RGB filter layer placed in front.
The main problem is that LCD crystals let some light partially leak through, so blacks are dark grey instead of pure black. And for a backlight, early LCD TVs used a white screen lit by dim and power-hungry fluorescent lights, which caused uneven light distribution. And finally, the RGB filter color layer reduced a panel’s brightness.
The next step up, then, was to use LED backlights instead, placed at first at the edges of the white screen and then later directly behind it (the first TV with this tech was Sony’s 2004 Qualia). That added the benefits of higher brightness, lower power consumption, improved color balance and even light distribution. It also allowed individual dimming zones that improve contrast by allowing near-pure blacks in shadow areas of an image.
Samsung's Neo QLED 8K TV from CES 2025Samsung
Quantum dot (QD) technology came on the scene around 2013 with Sony’s Triluminos televisions. This type of LCD panel employs a semiconductor nanocrystal layer (rather than an RGB filter layer) that can produce pure monochromatic red, green, and blue light when struck with a blue backlight. Unlike previous LCDs, they offer higher brightness and color accuracy thanks to the purity (narrowness) of the base RGB colors. The best-known TVs using this tech are Samsung’s QLED models.
The latest evolution of QD LED technology is Mini LED. That combines the accuracy of quantum dot tech with hundreds or even thousands of LED dimming zones. Those models offer high brightness and color accuracy along with good contrast, but still don’t deliver perfect blacks and can display “blooming” in scenes with bright points of light due to leakage into neighboring pixels.
Both of those problems were solved with OLED technology, which first came on the market in 2007 with Sony’s XEL-1 model. The panels are made using sheets coated with organic LEDs, each paired with a transistor that can switch the LED on or off. On regular OLED TVs, OLED pixels are white and a filter layer generates colors, much as with LED TVs. However, with QD-OLEDs, OLED pixels are blue and color is created via a quantum dot layer, like LED QD displays. The latest version of QD-OLED featured on several new monitors at CES 2026 (Samsung’s 5th-gen QD-OLED) uses an RGB stripe pattern to reduce color “fringing” on text.
This is the first, and still the only widely commercialized TV tech that can switch its light source off on a pixel-by-pixel basis, allowing perfect black levels and near-infinite contrast. However, due to their organic nature, OLED TVs suffer from a lack of brightness and the potential for “burn-in” that can kill pixels.
There is another type of self-illuminating tech called Micro LED. Rather than organic, it uses microscopic inorganic LEDs to form the individual pixel elements. Those can also be turned on or off individually, so they offer the same pure blacks and sky-high contrast as OLED. At the same time they’re potentially brighter than OLED and don’t suffer from burn-in. The tech is still prohibitively expensive to manufacture, though, so none have arrived to market other than Samsung’s The Wall, which costs a cool $40,000.
Micro RGB
Devindra Hardawar for Engadget
Before talking about Micro RGB, let’s look at color space and gamut both for HDR, which uses the BT.2020 standard, and SDR, commonly associated with the REC.709 standard. REC.709 is ideal for regular HD content like TV broadcasts and YouTube videos. It can display a limited set of colors and brightness is generally capped at 100 nits.
BT.2020, however, is designed for high-end HDR streaming and 4K or 8K content creation (via Dolby Vision, HDR 10 or HDR10+). It has a much wider color gamut, meaning it can display a wider variety of colors and a bigger chunk of the visible color spectrum. It’s also designed for significantly higher brightness levels of 1,000 nits or more.
To achieve the color accuracy required for BT.2020, TVs must have extremely accurate red, green and blue pixels. Up until last year, the most color-accurate TVs used quantum dot technology and achieved a maximum of around 85 percent BT.2020 coverage (some projectors can cover 100 percent or more of the BT.2020 spectrum as they use RGB lasers to create colors).
That brings us to Micro RGB (also known as RGB Mini LED), the most advanced LED panel yet. Unlike the uniform white or blue backlights found on Mini LED models, it features individually-controlled, precise red, green and blue LED backlights that shine through a liquid crystal layer. It also offers more local dimming zones. The net result is higher color accuracy and better contrast than regular Mini LED displays, but with potentially greater brightness than OLED. Since each pixel still can’t be turned on and off like OLED or Micro LED, though, contrast falls short of those technologies.
Wikipedia
So far, there is one and only one Micro RGB TV on the market, Samsung’s 115-inch 4K MR95F model. The color accuracy is impressive with 100 percent coverage of the challenging BT.2020 HDR standard, an industry-first and huge leap over quantum dot tech. That means it can produce billions of colors natively and display a higher percentage of them in the visible spectrum than any TV to date.
Samsung left out a few key specs like the local dimming zone count, only saying that it has four times more than its similarly-priced 115-inch Q90F QLED model (so likely around 3,600). The company also failed to disclose the total brightness in nits, but the figure should be impressive given the potential of Micro RGB.
We were gobsmacked with the MR95F Micro RGB model in person. Engadget editor Sam Rutherford said it produced “stunningly rich and vivid colors that put Samsung’s other top-tier TVs to shame,” including the aforementioned Q90F. It also came with an equally stunning $29,999 price tag.
A couple of other manufacturers including HiSense have also released RGB Mini LED models similar to Samsung’s Micro RGB, but they differ slightly in that the RGB modules are larger than the ones found on Samsung’s latest TVs.
Which companies will have Micro RGB tech at CES 2026?
Samsung
Luckily, the number of Micro RGB TVs is about to dramatically increase. Earlier this month, Samsung announced a full lineup using the technology with 55-, 65-, 75-, 85-, 100- and 115-inch screen sizes, saying they’d set “a new standard for premium home viewing.” Those sets will also offer 100 percent BT.2020 HDR coverage under a new certification standard called Micro RGB Precision Color 100. While certainly likely to carry more reasonable prices than the first model, they’ll probably still be Samsung’s most expensive TVs when released later this year.
And on Sunday, Samsung also revealed a 130-inch Micro RGB prototype meant to showcase the technology. Once again, it blew us away partially just because of the huge size, but also due to the incredible "color accuracy and richness," as Engadget editor Devindra Hardawar put it. "I couldn’t help but notice how everyone just looked a bit stunned, like the monkeys from 2001 seeing the monolith for the first time," he added.
At the same time, LG announced its first Micro RGB “evo” TV lineup in 75-, 86- and 100-inch models. The company is also promising 100 percent BT.2020 color gamut coverage and said the sets will have over a thousand local dimming zones for color control. Not only that, it said that its new TVs will deliver 100 percent coverage in SDR modes as well, both for Adobe RGB and the challenge P3 standard.
It was interesting to compare LG's Wallpaper and other OLED sets with the new Micro RGB tech, with our editor Devindra again being amazed. "LG already announced its Micro RGB set a few weeks ago, but that didn't prepare me for standing in front of the 100-inch demo TV it brought to CES," he said. "Throughout a variety of clips, colors looked wonderfully rich, and the overall texture of the images looked surprisingly life-like."
For its part, Hisense also unveiled a lineup of "evo" TVs that it calls RGB Mini-LED instead of Micro RGB. It's offering them at two price points, called the UR9 and UR8, with sizes ranging from 55 up to 100 inches. The company is promising an even wider color gamut than Samsung and LG with up to 110 percent BT.2020 coverage and "color control achieving 134 bits," the company said.
On top of that, HiSense had a surprise up its sleeve with the launch of an enormous 163-inch Micro LED TV to compete with Samsung's The Wall. The company actually calls it RGBY Micro LED, because it introduces a fourth yellow color into the RGB mix. The reason, according to the company, is that yellow expands the color spectrum "where human vision perceives the most nuance."
Update January 5, 2026 at 5:18 PM: The article now includes information about HiSense's latest RGB Mini LED and Micro LED TVs.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/home-theater/what-are-micro-rgb-tvs-and-why-are-they-everywhere-at-ces-2026-182441543.html?src=rss