Sony's fixing the wrong panel problems while showing off its new 'RGB LED' backlight tech with outrageous colours and brightness

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.