Sony has not yet announced its 2025 TV lineup, but it’s looking increasingly likely that the company has decided to abandon both QD-OLED and WOLED display technologies in its flagship models.
Instead, its high-end 2025 Sony TVs are much more likely to feature an enhanced, high-density RGB LED backlight system that it showcased today for the first time.
In a formal media event, Sony unveiled what it says is a “next-generation display system” that features proprietary signal processing technology to enable thousands of high-density LED backlights to be controlled independently. What this means is that its new displays will combine a powerful backlight with independently-driven RGB LEDs to enable much more precise control over the red, green and blue colours.
The result is that each RGB colour will be able to emit its light independently of the others, and that will mean much “higher colour purity” and a more vibrant, wide colour gamut, the company insisted.
A key part of the new display is Sony’s proprietary backlight control system, which is designed to ensure highly accurate reproduction of “delicate hues and subtle gradations of light”, the company added. It also supports the extreme “subtleties of colour and black representation”, ensuring images will be rendered exactly as the creator intended.
It’s likely that this backlight control system builds upon the XR Master Backlight Drive technology that features in last year’s Sony Bravia 9 Mini-LED TV. It scored some rave reviews when it was launched, showing that Mini-LED displays can still compete with the best OLED counterparts. It’ll be interesting to see how much Sony has managed to improve on this.
Sony reeled off some impressive numbers to go alongside an array of glossy graphics during the presentation, saying its new display can hit a peak brightness of 4000 cd/m², which translates to about 3,000 nits, equivalent to what some of its best professional mastering monitors are capable of. The company also claims to cover more than 99% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut and around 90% of the BT.2020 standard.
It says colour production is enhanced by a new dedicated processor unit provided by MediaTek, which boosts colour correction by 100% compared to its standard local dimming system. According to Sony, this will allow it to render bright areas with extreme vividness, while avoiding any “white clipping”, and in cases of dark areas, it will be able to detect any nuances without any signs of “black crushing”.
The company also talked about how it has developed the ability to dynamically allocate the optimum amount of power to each RGB pixel by determining what’s happening on the screen. At the event, it showcased this capability by focusing on the stars in a night sky, saying it’s able to adjust the luminance along with that of colour gradation to ensure vivid pictures in single-tone scenes.
Other capabilities include a new “high-precision” bitrate that allows for the “simultaneous expression” of brilliant whites and deep blacks, while representing many “intermediate colours” in between – all on the same image. In addition, the company also claimed to have solved one of the continuing problems found on OLED televisions, which still have trouble expressing colours of moderate brightness and saturation.
Sony’s claims suggest that its new RGB LED backlight system represents a real breakthrough that may finally help Mini-LED TVs to surpass OLED in terms of overall picture quality, but for now none of this can be confirmed. Sony didn’t allow the media to record any videos of its event, and it most certainly didn’t allow anyone there to put its claims to the test.
The company has still not announced any new TVs for 2025, and so we can’t say if any of them will even feature this new technology, which is set to go into mass production later this year. A lot depends on when, exactly, it starts manufacturing its new panels.
What the company did say is that it’s hoping to integrate the technology into “consumer televisions and displays for content creation”, so we’re hopeful that we might see it when it decides to launch its latest generation of Bravia TVs.
Sony’s rival LG Display has set an extremely high bar for the Japanese company, with its new Primary Tandem RGB OLED panel set to dramatically improve the brightness and colour quality of this year’s best new OLED televisions, and they will likely be available to buy much earlier. LG has already announced prices for most of its 2025 OLED TVs, and they’re expected to start shipping as soon as the end of this month.
Will Sony’s new display tech be able to compete with the new advances in OLED, which also include Samsung Display’s updated QD-OLED panels? Or does the company’s apparent rejection of OLED suggest that it’s more likely to go head to head with the likes of TCL and Hisense this year?
We’ll have to wait and see, but in the meantime, here’s HDTVTest’s Vincent Teoh to talk about the reasons why Sony decided to focus on its new RGB LED backlight system:
