RGB Mini LED: Sony vs. Hisense – precision instead of overwhelming brightness
The battle of the TVs has entered the next round: while other manufacturers are flexing their extreme brightness muscles, Sony’s weapon of choice is new signal processing to fine-tune colours and contrasts. Sounds like a targeted attack on OLED – and on Hisense.
RGB Mini LED could be the next big revolution on the TV market – and Sony wants a slice of the pie. After Hisense caused a stir earlier this year with the launch of its first RGB Mini LED TV, Sony has now announced its own version.
While Hisense is all about breaking brightness records, Sony’s combined the technology with a newly developed backlight control for even more precise colour gradations. They’ve also revamped their signal processing. This means the new version allegedly enables even more precise control of individual colour channels.
Mass production is due to start this year. The exact date is still tbd. Sony is also remaining tight-lipped about the size and price range of its RGB Mini LED TVs.
What is RGB Mini LED?
Let’s start from the top. So what is RGB Mini LED anyway, and how does it differ from a conventional mini LED TV like Sony’s Bravia 9?
In short, RGB Mini LED uses separate red, green and blue LEDs for backlighting instead of using only blue LEDs like conventional Mini LEDs, which are coated with a phosphor layer to produce white light. RGB LEDs emit white or coloured light directly, so colours appear stronger and more accurate, while the image appears brighter overall.
Source: Sony Newsroom
Why is this important? Because the RGB Mini LEDs provide greater coverage of the BT.2020 colour space than conventional Mini LEDs. If you’re not familiar with the term, the BT.2020 colour space is a standard that displays many more colours than the DCI-P3 colour space previously used for HDR content. The greater the coverage of this colour space, the more lifelike and differentiated the colour representation.
So when Hisense presented its 116UX with RGB Mini LED last January, it was met with great enthusiasm. An LCD TV with 10,000 nit peak brightness and 97 per cent BT.2020 colour space coverage? Sounds like an OLED killer – tech icons like Vincent Teoh of HDTV and Caleb Denison of Digital Trends agree.
Sony’s now also joined the RGB Mini LED game and is combining it with its own «proprietary backlight control technology». Their aim is to control the tiny backlight LEDs even more precisely than the competition from Hisense. However, Sony doesn’t call it RGB Mini LED, but RGB LED. Let’s wait and see which term will stick.
What exactly is Sony promising?
It’s usually all smoke and mirrors when it comes to TVs and brightness. What they do is concentrate the light where it’s the most noticeable, namely on bright light sources. For example, the moon in the night sky or explosions in crashing action scenes. Although this looks spectacular, it often results in other colours appearing flat.
Sony’s now taking a different approach. Instead of just spotlighting, the «proprietary backlight control technology», their innovative backlight control system, is designed to dynamically adapt the light distribution to the scene. This should, for example, result in deep blue skies, which appear rich and bright despite the darkness and don’t show any signs of paleness. Explosions should simultaneously glow in strong reds and oranges without the image losing any of its authenticity.
In addition, there’s a peak brightness of over 4,000 nit – a value Sony otherwise only uses in its reference monitors used in Hollywood. Concretely, this means more colour depth and more oomph. In fact, Sony claims that it’s the highest colour volume the company’s ever achieved in a display. And the fact they’re not only unimpressed by the competition’s 10,000 nit but also pointing out that too much brightness ruins colour accuracy, sounds suspiciously like a dig at Hisense.
What makes Sony different from Hisense?
While Hisense is trying to impress with pure peak brightness and huge colour space coverage, Sony’s new system «only» achieves 90 per cent of the BT.2020 colour space. Although that’s slightly less than Hisense’s, it’s still better than many OLEDs. What’s more, Sony focuses on precise colour and brightness gradations. Their press release mentions improved image processing with 96-bit signal processing.
What does that mean exactly? Quite simply that the more colour information a display can process, the subtler and more natural the colour transitions and brightness gradations appear. Especially in medium brightness ranges, where colours often appear either too pale or too oversaturated (a typical OLED problem), Sony’s internal 96-bit signal processing should provide more depth and precision. Black remains deep and rich in detail without dark areas of the picture being drowned out, while bright highlights shine brilliantly without burning out.
But that’s not all. This finer control of the colour gradations also promises to improve the viewing angle stability – a classic problem of conventional LCDs. Colours usually fade or shift when you’re not looking at the screen from the front. Sony claims to have minimised this so that the TV delivers a consistent image from all angles. More nuances, stronger contrasts, more stable colours. In other words, Sony focuses on perfection instead of boasting pure luminosity.
Sony goes for quality instead of crazy brightness numbers
Sony says its RGB Mini LED system is particularly well suited for cinematic content and professional use. In other words, whenever the most accurate reproduction of creative intentions is called for. This comes as no surprise, as Sony has been developing reference monitors for Hollywood film productions for years and knows exactly what creative minds need. Sony’s now incorporating this know-how into household TVs.
While Hisense’s aiming to set new standards in terms of luminosity and colour space coverage with its TriChroma LED system, Sony seems to be pursuing a different strategy. Instead of pushing specs to the limit, their aim is to refine LCD TVs so they can seriously compete with OLEDs in terms of colour accuracy, angle stability and contrast. It’s an interesting approach and a clear statement against your typical spec flexing.
One thing’s for sure, the battle between OLED and Mini LED is going into the next round. And with Sony now competing, things are about to get really get exciting.
Header image: Sony Newsroom
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Luca Fontana
Senior Editor
Luca.Fontana@digitecgalaxus.chI'm an outdoorsy guy and enjoy sports that push me to the limit – now that’s what I call comfort zone! But I'm also about curling up in an armchair with books about ugly intrigue and sinister kingkillers. Being an avid cinema-goer, I’ve been known to rave about film scores for hours on end. I’ve always wanted to say: «I am Groot.»
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