I saw Sony's RGB Mini-LED tech in action – it could be the biggest TV upgrade in years

TV technology never stays still for long, and after widespread teases at the CES show this year, it was only a matter of time before we started to be able to actually see RGB Mini-LED panels with our own two eyes.

Now, another show – this time IFA 2025 – has provided that moment. I went to Sony's behind-closed-doors demo of the new panel that it's working on, and finally saw the TV upgrade that we'll all be hearing about for the next few years.

The short version? This is staggering display technology, and the advantages it boasts over standard Mini-LED are manifest, before you even turn to its competition against the likes of OLED and QD-OLED TVs.

Sony didn't let me take pictures of the comparisons that I saw, but it made it seem unambiguous that RGB Mini-LED tech is all upside (aside, I'll assume, from the likely high price point).

What is RGB Mini-LED?

For those who weren't paying attention to press announcements at the turn of this year: RGB Mini-LED essentially upgrades the Mini-LED setup in an obvious but technically challenging way. Where Mini-LED displays have an array of single blue LEDs and can translate that light into the right colour gamut through a film layer, RGB Mini-LED instead has an array of tiny trios of, well, red, green and blue LEDs.

This means that each LED location can display its colours without any filter needed, by mixing the proportion of RGB gamut as required, and the benefits don't take long to see. In short, Sony's RGB Mini-LED panel was bright. Like, really bright – solving basically the one problem that had reared its head on the superb Sony Bravia 9 Mini-LED TV that it released in 2024.

I watched a series of quick scenes from a bunch of movies with bright, colourful peaks in them, including some Frozen 2, Life of Pi, and documentary footage of blacksmithing work, featuring extremely bright flames. Sony provided an array of three TVs to compare against the new panel, including one each of a Mini-LED, White OLED and QD-OLED display.

All of these were outclassed by the RGB Mini-LED panel in terms of luminosity – particularly when Sony switched on what it's calling ColourBoost. This system will basically make colours all the more vivid when in Vivid Mode, as the mode can channel the unused red, green or blue proportions and 'boost' the signal of the other colours as requires. This will seemingly be core to its RGB Mini-LED offering.

The biggest RGB Mini-LED benefits?

Vivid is the operative word, because the white heat of molten metal, the changing hues of icicles, and the bright peppering of stars all looked stellar on the new display. These cherry-picked vignettes made it obvious that the peaks of RGB Mini-LED go much brighter than what rivals can manage. Although there was a caveat that all of the displays were in the actual Vivid mode, which is not how I'd set up my TV as a matter of personal taste.

The prototype I viewed apparently had a peak brightness of 4,000 nits, but Sony wasn't willing to say whether that's representative of how consumer TVs could end up come 2026 or beyond. That goes for the tech more widely – pricing is a huge variable for this display tech, and it's pretty hard to get a sense of what price tags we might see attached to the first consumer launches down the line.

Sony was keen to underline that brightness isn't the only benefit – colour accuracy is also enhanced, with four times the gamut of QD-OLED. Those colours were spectacular, but I'm pretty certain it's the brightness that will catch more people's eyes, since very few of us would look at a top-end OLED panel and find it lacking in colour depth right now.

Another benefit came in terms of lightning bloom – even the best Mini-LED displays can have a slight problem with white light bleeding around super-bright elements on-screen, and RGB Mini-LED marks a step forward on this front. We saw a shot from Black Widow featuring a bright red light against a totally dark background; on the Mini-LED panel, there was white light bleeding out around it if you paid attention, but on the RGB Mini-LED panel this was red, which is far closer to how it would look in person if you stared at, for instance, a traffic light at night.

I was also told that one of the big upsides is that this panel tech is easier to scale up, meaning an end to the current ceiling of around 115-inches for displays. While most people can't consider buying something that size, let alone bigger, Sony told me that more widely available 130-inch TVs are now a likelihood rather than a possibility at minimum.

The elephant in the room was also addressed, after Dolby surprised everyone with the announcement of Dolby Vision 2 on Tuesday. Sony confirmed that it'll consider the new standard carefully, and that it was proud of having the first-generation Dolby Vision on many of its TVs, along with Dolby Atmos audio, so that looks very much like a "watch this space" situation.

When will Sony's RGB Mini-LED be on sale?

All of this begs the question: when will the first RGB Mini-LED TV from Sony actually be available for people to buy? I was told the answer might be surprising, but that this was part of a '2026 technology preview' – so make of that what you will.

Given that we're now basically entering into the countdown phase for CES 2026, however, I'd feel moderately confident that we'll learn something more at that show – perhaps with Sony's March announcement cycle presenting the brand's full and updated range in that month.

My first eyes-on impressions are that RGB Mini-LED is a major new option for enthusiast TV buyers, and those who value being on the cutting edge. That said, there are a lot of variables to still figure out in terms of release timings and pricing, so we'll see how things unfold in the months to come.