Shopping for a new TV in 2026 can feel more complicated than ever. With OLED, Mini-LED and now newer RGB-backlit LCD technologies all promising specific strengths for certain types of content, figuring out which type of TV will best suit your household’s needs can be a daunting task.
OLED TVs have traditionally been aimed at movie buffs due to their rich organic colours, infinite contrast ratio and perfect blacks, while LCD-based sets promise higher brightness, which means they’re often better suited for use in brighter viewing conditions (like lounge rooms that get lots of sun) but to also allow HDR elements to shine at their very best.
Sony’s new True RGB technology aims to change that, bringing together the best of both worlds to deliver a viewing experience unlike anything we’ve seen before. The new backlight technology has launched in the Japanese company’s flagship Bravia 9 II and Bravia 7 II TVs, and it’s undoubtedly the most exciting new TV technology of 2026.
What is RGB and how is it different from other LED TV backlighting?
RGB is the latest buzzword in TV town and, at its core, it’s an advancement in Mini-LED backlighting technology. Although it’s been adopted by several notable TV manufacturers for their 2026 models (under varying confusing names), Sony’s implementation arguably ups the ante in a big way.
The big change in RGB panel technology is that it does away with traditional white-LED based backlighting and instead uses sets of red, green and blue diodes to generate the desired colours directly at the light source. In almost all previous LCD-LED TV panels (and that includes both Mini-LED and QLED ones) the final on-screen colour you see is produced by allowing bright-white LEDs to blast light through red, green and blue colour filters — essentially little windows — in the liquid crystal layer.
One of the main side effects of this is that the filters end up blocking a lot of available light in their quest to get the right hue and limiting both how many colours and at what intensities can be produced.
Sony’s True RGB TVs (and other RGB Mini-LEDs) still have an LCD filter layer. However, as the backlight itself is already emitting a mix of red, green and blue light in roughly the right proportions to match desired on-screen colour, the LCD filter layer is finessing rather than fighting the light. This shift from heavy white-light filtration to native colour emission is what lets Sony push brightness and colour volume without the picture washing out.
What makes True RGB more advanced than other RGB Mini-LED technologies?
While most implementations of RGB TV tech will produce more vibrant and, in some cases, more accurate colours when compared to conventional Mini-LED panels, the specific way in which the RGB backlighting is implemented and controlled can result in compromises — not all RGBs are equal, especially when it comes to displaying complex, highly colourful scenes.
For example, when processing scenes that contain a large number of contrasting colours and/or fast motion, some of the more cost-conscious RGB panels can slip back into ‘white mode’ backlighting (where all three diodes are turned on to the same intensity) because they can’t keep up with what the content requires. That, in turn, can have an effect on the resulting pictures by reducing the overall colour saturation — one of the key advantages that, by their physical characteristics, RGB TVs are supposed to be capable of.
Sony’s True RGB tech is still based on producing light via sets of three individual diodes — one red, one green, one blue — but they’re paired with the company’s proprietary RGB Backlight Master Drive Pro engine and upgraded XR Processor, a combination which allows for much more precise control over each LED, resulting in more accurate and nuanced colour reproduction.
It’s not just up against other RGB TVs where that makes a difference. In fact, Sony claims its True RGB TVs can deliver up to four times greater colour volume than OLED. By this, Sony is really talking about how much richly saturated colour the TV can show at high brightnesses. By comparison, while OLED is generally thought of as the top panel technology for saturation, in some instances, they can lose some punch at the very brightest highlights. This is because OLED panels employ brightness-limiting features to control heat and prevent panel damage. Sony’s True RGB TVs aren’t susceptible to the same risks, and so can push the red, green and blue diodes behind the LCD layer much harder. This enables the backlight to hold onto that saturation even when the TV is asked to reproduce very intense highlight detail.
What’s more, because Sony’s True RGB never relies on a white backlight in trickier scenes, you’re getting much greater colour accuracy all of the time. It’s this steadfast approach that earns the ‘True RGB’ naming.
Sony’s True RGB nails colour volume, and it can shine bright
Not only are Sony True RGB TVs capable of delivering colour volume up to four times greater than most OLED TVs, they’re able to hit extremely high brightness levels too — particularly on the Bravia 9 II range. While Sony doesn’t make any official claims when it comes to brightness, third-party testing has shown Bravia 9 II models can reach up to 4,000 nits of peak brightness — and Sony has said that’s the level it believes more and more movies will be mastered in.
Sony’s very own BVM-series of mastering monitors have become the industry-standard used in Hollywood, and the BVM-HX3110 is capable of hitting that magic 4,000 nit figure. We’ve measured the Sony Bravia 9 II and recorded a figure of 3,990 nits in a 10% HDR window in Professional mode.
Furthermore, in our tests we measured 827 nits fullscreen brightness — for context, that’s around double that of the similarly priced flagship LG OLED G6.
Such high figures are possible because, firstly, LED is naturally capable of higher brightness, and secondly, because each individual True RGB backlight package contains not one but three tightly-packed diodes, when they combine they’re able to reach very high peaks. Sony’s RGB backlight driver is also able to individually control and monitor the LEDs, allowing only the necessary areas and colours to hit the high peaks, resulting in significantly improved contrast levels that, until now, have only been associated with OLED TVs.
More diodes per backlight means finer control
Because it uses three LED diodes instead of just one, True RGB technology offers more granular control over individual LEDs than traditional Mini‑LED TV panels. Even if a traditional Mini-LED TV has thousands of dimming zones, it’s common for one zone to be fed light when only a small percentage of that zone’s LEDs actually need it.
For example, with traditional white single-diode LED backlighting, when a specular highlight (these are small very-bright spots, like sunlight glinting off metal) sits inside a dimming zone, that whole zone is brightly illuminated — and the result is that many pixels within the defined area are flushed with more backlighting than they actually need. Even when that light is being blocked by the LCD layer, there’s almost always some light leakage, which causes what’s known as blooming or haloing.
A clear way to picture what blooming looks like is to think of on-screen subtitles. When being rendered on older single-diode LED TV backlight systems, you’ll often see a white glow around the outer edges of the words. This is caused by the fact that in order to produce the high brightness needed to make those subtitles stand out, larger dimming zones around those words need to be lit up.
With Sony’s True RGB backlight system, because the brightness of each individual red, green and blue diode can be dialed up or down at a far more granular level, the backlight controller can be much more precise in both the intensity and the colour of light produced. While that won’t completely eliminate blooming, in many cases it can reduce it substantially — often to the point where it’s only visible if you go hunting for it.
The benefits of this tighter level of backlight control extend both to brightness and contrast, allowing True RGB to produce OLED‑like fine-detail in darker areas, while still getting the kind of blinding HDR highlights and daytime punch that only the brightest LED sets can deliver.
To find out more about Sony's groundbreaking True RGB TVs, visit the official Australian Bravia product pages: