RGB Mini LED is the big plan for the TV industry in 2026.
That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be the best or most popular display technology – but it’s the most marketed, with some brands even touting it as OLED’s killer.
Now I’ve seen a few RGB Mini LED TVs in action, and I’m still not convinced. The advantages of the main topic – high brightness and large color volume – are fairly clear, but they clearly do not exceed the main advantage of OLED: independent pixels.
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That’s consistent with what I’ve seen so far – and Tack boils down the difference to one simple point:
“This [Philips’ MLED981 RGB Mini LED TV] it has 11,520 areas, but OLED has 8.2 million areas – because each pixel is an area. [That means] we can still have a deeper, more accurate black.
“Nevertheless [the MLED981] very beautiful, well-tuned, and abundant [dimming] parts, there will still be, here and there, the danger of a halo, and the boundary of a shrinking place.”
That is the essence of it. Even with thousands of dimming points, Mini LED still can’t match the pixel-level precision of OLED – so problems like blooming and imperfect blackness don’t disappear completely.
“You can also say about the brightness of the full screen, Mini LED is better than OLED – 800 nits compared to OLED, which now reaches 450 nits – so under bright conditions, this may be a better offer,” said Tack.
“The colors [are also] more intense, but also, at an angle, compared to OLED, less. There is a lot of good and bad.”
But in comparison, Philips’ view is clear – and it’s one I share. Currently, OLED remains the benchmark for overall image quality.