Announced at CES 2026 in January, the set represents a new category of display technology that has been developing quietly across the industry for several years. Its arrival signals a meaningful shift in how television manufacturers are thinking about the limits of existing screen technology.
What Makes It Different
Most televisions today use a backlight that produces white or blue light, which then passes through a colour filter to create the image on screen. The problem with this approach is that the filter absorbs a large amount of the backlight's output, reducing both brightness and colour accuracy. Micro RGB takes a different route. Instead of a single-colour backlight, it uses thousands of tiny individual red, green, and blue LEDs arranged across the back of the panel. Because each LED already produces its target colour directly, there is no need for a filter to convert it. The result is a wider range of colours and higher brightness levels than traditional LED television sets can achieve.
LG says its Micro RGB evo is the only television certified to achieve full colour coverage across three industry standards: BT.2020, DCI-P3, and Adobe RGB. These are the benchmarks used in professional film, broadcast, and digital media production. The set also uses more than a thousand individual dimming zones, allowing it to control brightness with greater precision across different areas of the screen at the same time.
A Broader Industry Shift
LG is not alone in pursuing this technology. Samsung, Hisense, and TCL all presented Micro RGB televisions at CES 2026. Hisense has models already on sale, with its UR9 series measured at over 5,500 nits of peak brightness in testing, a figure significantly higher than most OLED panels, which typically reach between 2,000 and 3,000 nits. TCL has demonstrated prototypes but has not yet confirmed shipping models or pricing for its own range.
Micro RGB does have limitations worth noting. Because it still relies on a traditional LCD panel rather than self-emitting pixels, it cannot fully match the deep black levels that OLED displays produce. In dark scenes, some light bleeding between zones remains a technical constraint. This matters particularly for viewers who watch in low-light environments, where OLED's pixel-level control continues to hold an advantage.
What Comes Next
The technology is currently positioned at the premium end of the market, where it sits alongside high-end OLED sets rather than replacing them. Whether Micro RGB eventually reaches more affordable price points will depend on how quickly manufacturers can improve production efficiency. For now, its arrival demonstrates that display technology still has significant room to develop, and that the competition between different approaches to picture quality is far from settled.
