Latest news with #RGBLED
Yahoo
16-03-2025
- Yahoo
Sony's fixing the wrong panel problems while showing off its new 'RGB LED' backlight tech with outrageous colours and brightness
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Sony has taken the wraps off a new backlight tech for LCD panels known as RGB LED. In really simple terms, it's similar to existing mini-LED backlight tech, such as that offered by the BenQ MOBIUZ EX321UX, but with coloured RGB lighting zones as opposed to monochrome blue LEDs moderated by a quantum dot layer. Sony claims the results include much wider colour rendering, plus increased brightness. How much better? Sony says colour space coverage is increased to 90% Rec.2020, while peak brightness jumps up to 4000 nits, all while delivering improved viewing angles. To put that into context, those kinds of numbers are similar to a professional video grading monitor costing tens of thousands of dollars. So, in at least some respects, this technology looks very impressive indeed. The colours are likely to be outrageous, as is the peak brightness and overall visual pop and punch. However, there is a catch. According to FlatpanelsHD, the demo screen Sony showed off had 3,840 dimming zones. That's an increase over most existing mini-LED displays. Sony's current high-end 75-inch Bravia 9 TV has 2,800 dimming zones and the BenQ monitor mentioned above has 1,152 zones. However, it still means that the display tech shares one dimming zone across 2,160 pixels on a 4K panel. In other words, if you want to light up just one pixel, you also have to drive a backlight zone covering another 2,159 pixels. Of course, few image details are just one pixel. But a point of light like a star might be just tens of pixels, which is still much, much smaller than the 2,000-plus pixels of an RGB LED dimming zone. Likewise, correctly rendering the edge of a bright object on a dark background requires per-pixel precision. So, this new tech does little to solve the basic lighting precision problem of mini-LED compared to a per-pixel technology like OLED. The difference here is that instead of uniform white halos around small, bright details, the halo colour will vary according to the colour of the object being rendered. Sony says it has a new advanced backlight control chip to help compensate for the inherent shortcomings of low-resolution local dimming. But the fundamental issues remain. How much all of this is a problem depends on both personal preference and the image being shown. For a really bright movie or game scene, something sunny and outdoor, this new panel tech will probably be utterly amazing. But for darker scenes, or images with a mix of very bright and very dark objects, it will retain major issues. Of course, OLED tech has its own issues. The best current OLED monitor tech, such as the Dough Spectrum Black 32 OLED, can only hit a feeble 275 nits for full-screen brightness. And even next-gen OLED panel technology from LG and Samsung is only promising to increase that to around 400 nits, miles short of the thousands of nit mini-LED and indeed Sony's new RGB LED can achieve. All of which means for the foreseeable future, there will be no single screen tech that excels everywhere. But given how bright and vivid mini-LED tech already is, I can't help feeling Sony is solving the wrong problem here. What backlit LCD panels need more than anything is more lighting precision, not even more outright punch. Anyway, as for when you might see this new RGB LED tech in a screen you can buy, that's not totally clear. Sony says the technology will go into mass production later this year, so it will probably be in TVs some time in 2026. Whether it comes to PC monitors is another matter. But if it truly does offer clear advantages, you can probably expect something similar to appear in PC monitors before long. Best CPU for gaming: Top chips from Intel and gaming motherboard: The right graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher SSD for gaming: Get into the game first.
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WIRED
13-03-2025
- Entertainment
- WIRED
Sony's Dazzling New Display Adds to the RGB LED TV Hype
Mar 13, 2025 12:45 PM Sony's incoming RGB tech joins Hisense and Samsung in the race to define the future of LED TVs. LED TVs are about to get a lot better. As demonstrated by Hisense and to some extent Samsung at CES 2025, a new backlight technology called RGB LED is poised to improve the quality and efficiency of TVs that use LED backlights and LCD panels to work their magic. The innovative new tech should help LED TVs give more premium-priced emissive screens like OLEDs, which create light imaging at the pixel level, a serious run for their money. As of today, Sony has officially put its hat in the RGB TV ring. A New Kind of LED Unlike traditional LED TVs that use pure white LEDs (or the tinier mini-LEDs) that light up display layers like color filters and an LCD panel to create an image, RGB LED TVs use tri-colored red, green, and blue lights that create colors directly at the source of the panel stack. This can provide significant advantages over today's best mini-LED TVs, including higher brightness, less blooming (light bleed around bright images), and purer, more accurate colors. Pure Color RGB LED Courtesy of Sony Pure Color mini-LED Courtesy of Sony While Samsung hasn't disclosed much about its RGB tech, Hisense claims its 116-inch UX Trichroma RGB TV, unveiled in Las Vegas in January, provides color accuracy at an astonishing 97 percent of the next-gen BT.2020 color gamut spec. The TV also claims an eye-blasting 10,000 nits peak brightness, though that's unlikely to equate to much real-world content, mastered at 4,000 nits or less. The TV is set for release in 2025, with pricing yet to be disclosed. Turns out, Sony has been working on its own version of this technology for its mini-LED panels for years now. Not to be outdone by its competitors, the TV pioneer flew a crew of global journalists and reviewers, myself included, to its Tokyo headquarters for a firsthand look at its latest and greatest home theater creations. Its RGB LED TV prototype was the pièce de résistance. Panel structure of RGB screens Courtesy of Sony Panel structure of mini-LED screens Courtesy of Sony Sony Has Entered the Chat Even for those of us steeped in TV technology and its flurry of acronyms, it's not easy breaking down a new display type you've barely seen in action. Luckily, nobody explains TV tech better than Sony's engineers. At its Tokyo HQ demo, Sony took the face off its RGB prototype to show the backlight system in action. In fact, the company took half the face off, so we were able to see the raw backlighting and fully realized image side-by-side in one display. To our collective amazement, the RGB LEDs were able to create wholly recognizable color images. The backlight-only images looked almost like 8-bit pixelated versions of the regular scenes at the left, but even small details were often apparent. Again, this was just the backlights making the picture, working in concert with Sony's XR Backlight Master Drive algorithm technology. Courtesy of Sony; Composite: Wired We then got to see the fully assembled RGB prototype next to Sony's best traditional mini-LED TV, the Bravia 9 (9/10, WIRED Recommends), and its 2023 flagship OLED, the A95L (9/10, WIRED Recommends), and again the results were impressive. While the prototype wasn't able to create the same perfect black levels and focused contrast of the OLED model, it had strikingly effective blooming control and image focus. Its colors looked richer and more saturated than both TVs, and its brightness easily outdid even the Bravia 9, one of the most fiery TVs in its class. Sony says the display can produce 99 percent of the baseline DCI-P3 color spectrum, and 90 percent of the more advanced BT.2020 spectrum, both major feats. Just as intriguing is the display's claimed level of color control at low brightness, designed to improve accuracy over current displays in dimly lit scenes. Interestingly, this is not the first RGB LED display in Sony's 60-plus-year TV catalog. Sony introduced a now archaic version of RGB LED tech in 2004, though that version can hardly be compared to today's displays. The best mini-LED TVs comprise thousands of lights and hundreds of dimming zones for much better brightness, accuracy, and precision than in the early days. Still, as striking as these latest RGB mini-LEDs are, they're not nearly as tiny as the millions of pixels that make up 4K TVs, so they can't come close to creating the precise color gradations required for the billion-plus colors modern TVs can display on their own. As the engineers demonstrated, the RGB prototype utilizes color filters, Sony's proprietary XR Color Booster, and other technologies to produce the final product. This necessitates a hand-off between the tri-colored backlights and the rest of the panel, all of which must be coordinated by a TV's processors. According to Sony, this is at the heart of what sets its RGB TV's performance apart from other brands. That's part of what makes the Japanese brand's entry into the RGB TV horse race so intriguing. A Great View From Any Angle Sony laid out multiple ways its RGB displays outdo today's best LED TVs during my time in Japan. The ability to create subtractive colors between the backlights and the color filters helps lead to higher efficiency for improved brightness, potentially equating to Sony's renowned professional monitors. The lack of white light behind the panel reduces light spillage and allows for more focused colors, for better blooming control, and the creation of colors at the light source allows for a higher bit-depth in color gradation and better saturation than traditional LED displays. This means richer and more accurate color reproduction. Maybe the most compelling trait of RGB LED TVs is their improved off-axis performance for when you're not viewing head-on. The prototype's brightness and colors looked excellent for an LED TV when stepping to the side, something Sony says is due to both the new display's cell structure as well as its advanced control over color gradation. Poor off-axis viewing has long been my biggest gripe with LED TVs, especially compared to OLED counterparts. Even the most premium mini-LED TVs today struggle with a loss in color saturation and brightness from the side, and it's an even more common problem with midrange models. That's particularly noticeable with larger screen sizes, which is otherwise a major benefit of LED TVs: Because of how they're made, they're much easier (and cheaper) to produce in large sizes than OLED TVs. This, to me, is the most promising potential benefit of RGB LED technology: Affordable large TVs with improved performance, no matter where you sit. That's a real-world advantage even the least nerdy TV buyer can appreciate. It's also worth noting that Sony engineers told us the prototype we saw in Tokyo is already three years old, which makes me wonder how many improvements have been made in the meantime. I'd wager a lot. We don't yet have an exact date for when Sony will launch its first RGB LED TV, let alone pricing, but the company will start mass production this year, with a general road map for TVs hitting walls in 2026. Could Sony's RGB TV be the first approachable version of this technology that regular folks can bring home? That's the company's hope. For now, all we know for sure is that Sony's new display tech is on its way, and that RGB LED technology is clearly here to stay. Page 2
