What would happen when an LCD TV does not depend on white light anymore, but it creates color on the backlight itself? The central question of CES 2026 is that question: Micro RGB backlighting, which is a next level of Mini-LED in which grids of tiny red, green, and blue LEDs replace the traditional white/blue backlight-plus-filters. The idea is incremental until it is put into action. Having the backlight with independent drivers, the HDR highlights can be pushed more with hues not washed out as seen often in bright rooms where high-end television sets are usually unable to sustain the saturation.
Scale is the most important engineering action. The best implementations of Samsung and LG employ RGB LEDs less than 100 m (usually placed into arrays) that act not like a homogenous flashlight but like a sparse light field, which can be controlled. Samsung has associated this to the wide-gamut performance directly citing 100 percent of the BT.2020 wide color gamut under VDE certification. The RGB LED prototypes of Sony have aimed at approximately 90 percent Rec.2020 coverage, and have employed dense zone counts and the ability to control light individually in RGB channels to carve light with an abnormally fine granularity. Since the LCD layer continues to gate the image, Micro RGB is not a self-emissive display (like OLED or MicroLED); rather it makes the backlight an active companion instead of a tradeoff.
With such a partnership the stakes are increased on manufacturing. Sub-100mu tri-color arrays demand interconnect-to-interconnect mass-transfer steps and relative stability; some of the methods mentioned include eutectic bonding that is employed to enhance mechanical stability and conductivity on a small scale. Control electronics are no less important than the LEDs themselves: with tens of thousands of emitters per local-dimming zone, a given prototype is then modulating each color channel individually. Though the LCD panel may still be the pixel, such fine control of backlight can eliminate the common LCD pitfalls of flat colour in the brightness domain, and smeary gradients in the shadow detail domain, by supplying the panel with a purer, more focussed light.
Brightness headroom is the most evident benefit that Micro RGB has over OLED. OLED is able to produce ideal blacks since each pixel may be switched off, although it has a limit to sustained brightness, particularly when showing large bright images. The micro RGB systems are able to drive higher peak brightness and at full screen brightness and the inorganic LEDs also eliminate burn-in in the risk profile. The tradeoff is also still visible in some scenes: since Micro RGB is zone-based, not pixel-based, then haloing still can be seen around small bright objects on dark backgrounds, and sometimes slightly tinted in color when the separate RGB channels roll off at different rates.
Also explained in CES 2026 is that Micro RGB is a branding tangle, rather than a single standard. Hisense has marketed bigger RGB modules (frequently referred to in the 100200mm range) under such names as TriChroma, whereas Samsung has made use of the m micro designation to focus on smaller emitters. Samsung also positioned its booth large, or more precisely had a 130 inch Micro RGB television on display with its glare reducing strategy and intentions on downsizing Micro RGB to a more manageable living-room scale.
The extended importance is easy: LCD is not over. Micro RGB backlights achieve higher purity of RGB light at source to eliminate reliance on color conversion layers which bleed efficiency and limit gamut, providing LCD with a new pathway to a new route to luxury image quality without becoming emissive. The other problem is not a headline spec it is, repeatable yield, thermal control, and control sophistication that can provide that color-and-brightness wow factor, panel after panel, size after size.
