I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Read More Technology
Sony has set the home entertainment world alight today by not only revealing its next generation of TV technology, but saying that it hopes to have these game-changing new screens available to buy as early as next year. What’s more, building on the message the brand built around the launch of its current flagship Bravia 9 range, Sony’s new TV technology is not based on the OLED technology that’s long been so beloved of home cinema fans.
The new Sony screen technology – which I’ve been lucky enough to spend time in the presence of, as I’ll discuss later – is built around an independent drive RGB LED system. This allows a high-density LED backlight to individually control the red, green and blue primary color elements that go into creating a TV picture, so that each color can emit its own light independently of the others. The image below provides a helpful visualisation of what this means.
No longer having to be restricted to using a single external backlight to control the RGB elements has the potential to deliver a quantum leap in picture quality, opening the door to a much wider color range; much greater color purity and nuance, even at the extremes of that new color range; and larger screen sizes thanks to the uniformity of color viewing angle the new technology can achieve.
Of course, developing a panel that delivers these apparent innate capabilities of independent drive RGB LED technology is only half the story; what you do with these capabilities is at least as important. Which is why Sony is keen to stress that its new display is driven by its own home-grown advanced backlight control technology, designed from the ground up to get the maximum effect from the panel’s ground-breaking characteristics.
In fact, Sony claims that the processing power it’s developed for its new screen technology to avoid colour shifting and ensure that the brightest picture areas are reproduced vividly, without “clipping”, while color nuances in the darkest areas are reproduced without crushing, is around twice as powerful as anything developed to date for conventional local dimming LED screens.
A key part of the processing Sony is developing for its new RGB LED display is focused on dynamically allocating power to each RGB “channel” according to the needs of the picture being shown. Directing power as accurately and efficiently as possible enables Sony’s RGB LED screen to achieve peak brightness levels claimed to go beyond the 4000 nit level benchmark delivered in the content creation world by Sony’s 2024-launched BVM-HX3110 professional mastering monitor.
More importantly, though, unlike power-steering technologies designed for conventional high-brightness LCD TVs, which focus their attentions purely on boosting the peak brightness of stand-out bright highlights, the system being designed for Sony’s RGB LED panels bases its power routing decisions on color gradation as well as pure luminance. As a result, even relatively single-tone image elements, such as rich blue skies or the vibrant reds of a sports car, can be rendered more vividly, but also with more tonal finesse.
The new processor can even function at a phenomenally high bitrate of 96 bits – a level Sony has deemed necessary to enable its RGB LED panel to, in its own words, “not only allow the simultaneous expression of deep blacks and brilliant whites, but also enable the delicate representation of differences in brightness and darkness in scenes with many intermediate colors.”
Combining the color purity potential of the new RGB LED panel with its huge brightness enables the new TV technology to cover, according to Sony, more than 99% of the DCI-P3 color space typically used with today’s high dynamic range content, as well as a jaw-dropping 90% or so of the much larger BT.2020 gamut. In fact, Sony stated that the RGB LED screen is technically capable of delivering four times the color volume of the brand’s much-loved A95L OLED TV.
It’s important to say at this point that Sony is not the only brand working on independent drive RGB LED technologies for TVs. Hisense, in particular, unveiled its own king-sized take on the tech at the recent 2025 CES in Las Vegas. As Sony is understandably keen to stress, though, it has decades of critically acclaimed experience with TV display processing to draw on while working to optimize the performance of its new display.
In fact, Sony even made and sold a full array RGB LED backlight TV as far back as 2004 as part of its legendary Qualia series of ultra-premium, no compromise home entertainment products. Though back then the revolutionary Bravia 005’s screen size topped out at just 46 inches, and good black levels on LCD TVs were practically unheard of…
Despite having plenty of its own RGB LED heritage, Sony’s ambitions for its new RGB LED screens have also seen it look beyond its own R&D department walls. It’s revealed that it’s working with long-running AV tech chip manufacturer MediaTek, for instance, on the development of the powerful new control processors, as well as working on a new LED drive IC with Rohm Co Ltd, and the actual design of the LEDs with Sanan Optoelectronics Co, Ltd. All of which, Sony says, support its view of the direction of next generation displays.
It’s very noticeable, of course, that this view of TV technology’s direction of travel is not based around OLED technology. In fact, at a launch event for the new RGB LED technology that I was lucky enough to attend a couple of weeks back, Sony openly followed up on statements it made around the launch of its Bravia 9 mini LED TVs last year suggesting that it sees LED-based technologies as having more room for development and improvement in the coming years than OLED.
That doesn’t mean Sony doesn’t still set great store in OLED technology for today’s TV environment, of course – it has high-level OLED screens in its current range, and continues to say that it wants to make sure its range always includes screens to suit every taste and budget. But there seems little doubt that so far as the brand’s current vision of the future is concerned, LED-based technologies give Sony’s engineers the most to work with.
There couldn’t be a better illustration of just how deeply Sony’s influence goes in the development of its next-gen RGB LED screen than the sight of reams of cables spooling directly out of the back of the demo screens I saw. These models had clearly arrived in the demo room straight from the deepest, darkest corners of Sony’s R&D division.
The picture emerging from that dizzying tangle of rear wires, though, looked anything but a work in progress. In fact, to put what emerged from the Sony RGB LED demo screens into some immediate context, Sony was brave enough to show off its new screen sandwiched between a Bravia 9 and a Quantum Dot OLED-toting A95L. Two of the most acclaimed and impressive TVs in the current TV world. Yet the pre-production RGB LED’s pictures crushed both of them.
Before getting to that ‘real world’ comparison, though, Sony showed a version of the RGB LED panel with its backlighting system exposed over half of the screen running against a Bravia 9 set up in the same way. This instantly made it clear just how much more granular and precise the RGB LED backlight system is than even the Bravia 9’s sophisticated take on conventional backlighting.
Particularly striking, as you can see from the accompanying image above, is how the RGB LED backlight system includes colour rather than just white light in its illumination system. It’s hard to think of a more instantly obvious way of visually illustrating the difference between regular LED and RGB LED lighting. And I can say, too, that the color detail and light control in evidence with Sony’s RGB LED technology was on another level to anything shown by other brands on similar types of screen at the recent CES.
Seeing the RGB LED backlight exposed in the first part of the demo really helps to understand why the ‘real world’ demo of the RGB LED screen (which doesn’t currently have an official Sony range name) against a Bravia 9 and an A95L was so striking. Every HDR video image the three TVs were fed looked not just significantly brighter on the RGB LED than it did even on the Bravia 9, but also much more vibrant (especially during a clip of a street carnival in Guy Ritchie’s recent live action remake of Aladdin) thanks to the extra range and volume of colour you can get when you’re lighting a screen’s RGB elements individually.
The extra purity of the RGB LED’s expanded color palette was also blisteringly obvious, helping to deliver – in conjunction with Sony’s proprietary power and light control – so much subtlety in color blends that it actually felt like the screen’s resolution was higher than that of the two TVs either side of it. Even though the RGB LED panel was still actually a native 4K one like the others.
This subtlety of light and color meant, too, that the RGB LED picture enjoyed an extra level of depth and three-dimensionality versus the other two premium Sony TVs, despite those two sets themselves being renowned for delivering a better sense of depth than most rivals thanks to the efforts of Sony’s Bravia XR processing system.
Black levels in the RGB LED picture remained steadfastly inky and pretty much bloom-free in the darkened demonstration room too, despite the enormous levels of brightness and color volume erupting from the screen. In fact, another handy quirk (for want of a better word) of the RGB LED lighting system is that blooming even in the tiny areas where it might happen tends to take on a mild reddish color rather than just looking white or grey. Which makes it look much less noticeable and much more like an artefact of your vision than an issue with the display.
Wandering around to the left and right of the Bravia 9 and RGB LED display revealed, too, another promising “side effect” of Sony’s new screen technology: Much wider effective viewing angles. Viewing both screens from down the side reveals some desaturation on the Bravia 9 (despite this TV deploying wide viewing angle technology), especially over skin tones, whereas there was essentially no color shift at all during off-axis viewing with the RGB LED screen.
So advanced did the Sony RGB LED pictures look, in fact, that I couldn’t help but think that while Sony is taking extreme care while developing the processing in the RGB LED to make sure it works beautifully with today’s content, we could also do with a revolution in how content creators go about mastering their masterpieces. Sony is already on the case with that, of course, thanks to its ultra-bright BVM-X3110 monitor. But changing creative minds will still take time.
It also occurred to me that Sony’s RGB LED debutante when it comes to market (hopefully) next year may well cost substantially more than even a regular “flagship” TV from any of the established big TV brands. From what I’ve seen of it so far, I’d cautiously say that no matter what it costs (within reason!), it will probably be worth it.
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