Could This New Type of TV Spell Trouble for OLED?
LG has revealed a new MRGB95 television, and it looks set to sit alongside the company’s OLED models in 2026 – and potentially succeed them further down the line.
The headline announcement is that the MRGB95 is what LG calls a ‘Micro RGB Evo’ TV. Despite the slightly confusing name, this is not a Micro LED display with self-emissive pixels like those produced by Samsung. Instead, it’s LG’s interpretation of RGB Mini LED technology, which has already been shown by Sony, Samsung and TCL, and brought to market by Hisense with its 116UX, over the past year or so.
The key selling point is the use of red, green and blue (RGB) LEDs directly within the backlight. This means colour is generated by the backlight itself, rather than passing through an LCD or Quantum Dot layer, as is the case with conventional Mini LED TVs. The theory is that removing the colour filter improves crucial picture quality aspects such as colour gamut, brightness and contrast.
LG claims the MRGB95 features “more than a thousand dimming zones with exceptional accuracy”. That’s obviously a long way from OLED, which effectively has a dimming zone per pixel thanks to its self-emissive nature, but it’s still a respectable figure for a backlit TV. And as we’ve learned repeatedly, raw zone count matters less than how intelligently those zones are controlled.
That control will be handled by LG’s Alpha 11 Gen 3 processor, which makes its debut here outside of an OLED model. According to LG, the chip “uses OLED precision to control each of the RGB LED backlights, bringing 13 years of LG OLED’s technical excellence to the RGB category.”
The MRGB95 also introduces LG’s new ‘RGB Primary Colour Ultra’ mode – a rather flashy name intended to highlight the colour capabilities of RGB Mini LED. LG says this mode can deliver 100 per cent coverage of the BT.2020, DCI-P3 and Adobe RGB colour gamuts.
If those claims hold up, it would be hugely impressive, though real-world performance will depend heavily on picture settings. No TV, after all, delivers that level of accuracy straight out of the box in its vivid preset.
LG has also been keen to emphasise the MRGB95’s upscaling credentials, with a ‘Dual Super Upscaling’ system that reportedly runs two different AI upscaling processes at the same time. This will be especially important given that the TV will only be available in very large screen sizes: 75, 86 and 100 inches.
There’s still no confirmation of how many HDMI 2.1 ports the MRGB95 will offer, though it would be disappointing if it didn’t match the four found on LG’s C5 and G5 OLEDs. We do know the processor supports 4K/165Hz gaming, so that feature is presumably on the table.
Unfortunately, LG hasn’t shared any concrete details on pricing or release timing just yet. Even so, it’s hard not to feel a bit excited.
Our TV and AV editor, Tom Parsons, spent a decent amount of time last year with a prototype Sony TV using an RGB Mini LED panel and came away extremely impressed. He reported:
“I was hugely impressed by Sony’s RGB LED prototype. It’s true that Sony could have been masking some flaws (there was no demonstration in a pitch-black room, for example), but the upgrades over the Bravia 9 and my beloved A95L were so stark, and the apparent downsides so hard to spot, that I can’t help but be really excited for the tech to go on sale.”
More recently, senior staff writer Lewis Empson had a shorter hands-on session with a Samsung prototype using the same technology – which Samsung refers to as ‘Micro RGB’. His reaction was similarly upbeat, saying: “I’m sure we’ll see great things come from it in the not-so-distant future.”
Such praise doesn’t come lightly from either.
So, are you excited by RGB Mini LED? Or do you think OLED still has nothing to fear? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
