Sony's new OLED killer could be the most exciting thing to happen to TVs in a decade

At What Hi-Fi?, we are well aware that we’re spoiled when it comes to home cinema hardware.

As reviewers and reporters we get access to cutting-edge technologies that we would normally never be able to see in the flesh let alone afford.

Week on week we also regularly get access to cutting-edge OLED and premium Mini LED TVs, to the point we have in some ways become too used to playing with the best of the best when it comes to home cinema hardware.

Which is why when not one, but two of the team come back from a launch event legitimately blown away by a new technology, it’s a pretty big deal.

Most recently this happened when our TV and AV editor Tom Parsons returned from Japan with an ear-to-ear smile emblazoned on his face after seeing Sony’s latest RGB LED prototype tech.

The tech is still very much in its development stage, with Sony confirming it won’t appear on sets you can actually buy until next year at the earliest.

RGB Mini LED is a refinement on base Mini LED panel technology. It replaces the white LEDs seen on most regular backlights with red, green and blue ones.

This means that colours come directly from the backlight rather than through a separate panel sitting on top of the usual white backlight.

The goal is to help RGB Mini LED sets offer more accurate colours and higher peak-brightness levels, and to mitigate one of Mini LED’s biggest issues: blooming. This is where there is a noticeable halo around light sections of a picture surrounded by dark elements.

It's a common problem, and one I experienced recently when reviewing the Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini LED, TCL C855K and Hisense U7N. And it's a key reason many Mini LED sets earn four, not perfect five-star ratings.

Will the change work? According to Tom’s early impressions of RGB Mini LED it may well.

At the event he reported seeing a huge brightness increase comparing the prototype with the Sony A95L and Bravia 9 Mini LED. He was also impressed with how wonderfully punchy, but accurate, colour reproduction from the prototype was.

It was improvements to viewing angles and light control, though, that really caught his eye, to the point he confidently reported:

“There was little to no discernible washing out of the image as I moved around the room. We’re talking near-OLED levels of consistency in terms of viewing angles.”

That is particularly important as, despite certain companies (mainly TCL and Hisense) promising us that Mini LED will replace OLED as the top performer in TV for years, we have yet to see one deliver the goods. They tend to shine in the mid-range market.

If that wasn’t enough to get you excited, Sony is just one of many companies working on similar technology.

Prior to this our senior staff writer, Lewis Empson, got a chance to look at similar RGB Mini LED backlighting tech from TCL and Samsung at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January.

Though his behind-closed-door demos were brief compared with Tom’s, he came away similarly impressed.

So much so that he told me “it looks very impressive”, when I asked if it could match OLED – which is about as positive as he gets about these things.

With both Tom and Lewis taking the three companies' claims that RGB Mini LED will be the future of the top end TV market seriously, I find myself with a serious case of envy that I haven’t seen it yet – and I can’t help but get excited about the hardware.

That’s why I and the wider team have pegged RGB Mini LED as a key technology to watch.

If it delivers the goods when we finally get a consumer-ready TV to test with the technology on board, this could be a cataclysmic shift for home cinema fans, the likes of which we haven’t seen since OLED claimed the top spot for performance more than a decade ago.

MORE:

These are the best OLED TVs we have tested

We rate the best Mini LED TVs money can buy

Our picks of the best 65-inch TVs