Struggling In The TV Market Sony Finally Has A New Display Technology That’s Said To Be Better Than OLED

Struggling in the TV market Japanese TV maker Sony, who according to retailers was earlier this month was laying off staff in their channel account service area, appear to have come up with a display technology that sets them apart from the South Korean and Chinese rivals as well as LG and their OLED TV technology.

The only problem is that their Australian operation who has poor TV communication marketing with next to no money being invested in external marketing is not telling anyone about the upcoming technology.

Overnight Sony Japan announced the development of a new type of TV display that uses individual RGB LEDs for its backlighting that observers claim, seriously takes on OLED and Mini LED technology.

Their new technology combines the best qualities of both OLED and Mini LED, with overseas journalists flown to Tokyo to see the technology. No Australian journalists were invited.

Named General RGB LED Backlight Technology the new technology that could create a problem for LG and their expensive OLED offering the new technology won’t be available until 2026.

Currently Sony is using bespoke Mini LED backlight technology that first appeared in their 2024 flagship TV, the Bravia 9.

Their new display technology has all the advantages of its Mini LED TVs with the added benefit of their RGB Backlight offering.

Mini LED TVs work by deploying an array of tiny blue LEDs behind the panel.

These LEDs are larger than the actual pixels on the display, but they’re small enough that the TV can brighten or darken multiple areas of the screen with a high degree of precision.

With Sony’s new RGB LED method, each Mini LED backlight zone is made up of a red, green, and blue LED.

The core advantage here is that Sony is able to achieve finer control over colour without compromising on brightness, achieving a level of 4000 cd/m² — on par with the company’s professional reference monitors.

While we have no pricing for the new models their new domestic TV technology does deliver a higher “colour volume” than any commercial TV it’s released to date.

The increased gradation control can also help deliver much wider viewing angles than Mini LED TVs, and Sony says the panels can be built at larger sizes than existing OLED sets.

As for the quality observers who have been show the new display said ‘Imagine watching a movie where the right half of the picture was run through a 16-bit pixel art filter, and you’re pretty much there, except this screen had much better colour reproduction than a Super Nintendo.

One scene showed a bus driving down a street on a sunny day, and it was possible to discern several distinct shades of red in its paint from the backlight alone. Sony says this translates to wider and more accurate colour reproduction.

To demonstrate actual video content, Sony set up a full-screen version of the RGB backlight prototype flanked by two of its best TVs you can buy: last year’s extravagant Mini LED-powered Bravia 9, and the QD-OLED A95L that won the prestigious “King of TV” award at the most recent Value Electronics TV Shootout in New York.

Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel who served on the judging panel at the New York shootout which is considered the best live demo of premium TV’s said “Conscious of the unflattering comparison, a Sony engineer conducting the demo repeatedly went out of his way to make the point that the Bravia 9 was really was a very good TV. Despite this, the RGB LED prototype clearly smoked it.

A scene from Frozen where blue crystals flew through the air looked almost monochrome in comparison, with the prototype revealing deep shades of purple that simply weren’t there on the Bravia. It was clear how the backlighting worked in tandem with the colour grading to deliver a more vivid picture. Viewing angles were hugely improved, with near-non-existent colour shift. Another sequence with bright red lights against a dark background exhibited the tell-tale blueish Mini LED blooming on the Bravia, whereas the RGB LED prototype lit up those areas solely in red”.

Wired Magazine Editors said “We were able to see the raw backlighting and fully realized image side-by-side in one display. To our collective amazement, the RGB LEDs were able to create wholly recognizable colour images. The backlight-only images looked almost like 8-bit pixelated versions of the regular scenes at the left, but even small details were often apparent”.

As usual Sony Australia has not commented on their new TV offering with Melbourne based distributor Audio Active who currently distributes Sony TVs to the specialist custom install channel, set to benefit from the new TV technology.