Sony's New "TrueRGB" TVs
Today Sony has finally revealed some information about its new TV technology called TrueRGB. It's a new version of mini LED that uses a color-based backlight. They are so confident in this technology that they flew a number of news outlets and media organizations to their Tokyo headquarters to run demonstrations using real world content (including Avatar and Black Widow) on the new TVs alongside a Sony BVM-HX3110 professional mastering monitor. The HX3100 is $20,000+ display used for color work on professional movies.
Previous RGB TVs have used a solid white backlight that gets passed through a color filter, producing the intended light that you see. This has worked pretty well; however, when it's a solid white backlight, you often get washed-out colors, so your blacks look more like a gray.
This has been combated by using a technology called mini LED, which can control sections of the backlight, called zones, to reduce that. These can be individually turned on and off to create really consistent lighting effects, so you get near-perfect blacks in dark scenes and you get really good brightness in areas where there's a lot of action or bright objects. This has one notable downside: blooming, which is where you get a halo effect around bright objects on a black screen.
There is one other problem, though, which is that any time you have a solid white backlight, regardless of brightness you are always going to have a little bit of leakage and color inaccuracy issues. TrueRGB uses a color-based mini LED backlight so that red, green, and blue objects on screen get boosted by a red, green, and blue backlight, respectively. This allows these new Sony TVs to get way brighter and retain really good color quality.
We don't have all of the specs and details on these TVs yet. Sony hasn't even given us a max brightness yet, though there are rumors that it could be as high as 4000 nits. More is likely coming, and when it does; I will be here to report it.
Sources and Additional Reading: