The TV Brightness War Peaked in 2025
▼ Summary
– The TV industry is experiencing a “brightness war,” driven by HDR technology, with 2025 marking a new peak as brands push for higher light output.
– A key 2025 advancement was LG Display’s Primary RGB Tandem OLED technology, which uses a new four-stack design to significantly improve brightness and color purity.
– Mini-LED technology also advanced, with TCL and Hisense achieving 5,000-nit brightness and improving black levels through better local dimming and reduced optical distance.
– New RGB mini-LED (or micro-RGB) technology debuted, using individual colored LEDs for stunning brightness and color, but current models are prohibitively expensive.
– The article questions the need for ever-increasing brightness, arguing that the focus should shift to better picture processing and balanced image quality rather than peak brightness alone.
The television industry’s relentless pursuit of higher brightness, often called the “brightness war,” reached a new peak in 2025. This surge, driven by the demands of HDR content, saw manufacturers unveil displays with previously unimaginable light output. The year marked a significant escalation, introducing the first consumer TVs capable of hitting 5,000 nits and witnessing a major leap in OLED technology. It feels like a pivotal moment, echoing past industry battles where pushing a single spec to its limit risked compromising the overall experience.
A standout achievement was the arrival of Primary RGB Tandem OLED panels from LG Display. This wasn’t a minor tweak but a fundamental redesign of the panel structure. By shifting from a three-stack to a four-stack configuration with dedicated red, blue, green, and blue layers, the technology unlocked dramatically higher potential brightness and superior color purity. This innovation powered flagship models from LG, Panasonic, and Philips, bringing OLED much closer to the luminance levels of high-end LED sets.
Meanwhile, mini-LED technology continued its aggressive advance. Following Sony’s lead from the previous year, companies like TCL and Hisense pushed their displays to staggering brightness levels. More importantly, they made crucial improvements in backlight control, a critical area for LED performance. By expanding local dimming zones and reducing the optical distance between the backlight and the screen, these brands significantly minimized light blooming, allowing their TVs to produce black levels that rival OLED.
Perhaps the most intriguing development was the commercial introduction of RGB mini-LED technology. Unlike standard mini-LEDs that use white or blue lights with filters, this new approach employs individual, minuscule red, green, and blue LEDs as the backlight source. Hisense, TCL, and Samsung each showcased their versions, with Samsung branding its even smaller lights as “micro-RGB.” The visual result is stunning, offering incredible brightness and vibrant color. However, the complex manufacturing and processing required make these sets prohibitively expensive, with prices starting around $12,000. While currently a niche product, this technology points toward a very bright, if costly, future for LED displays.
With TVs now achieving such extreme brightness, a critical question emerges: when is enough truly enough? Higher luminance is excellent for fighting glare in bright rooms, but excessive light in a dark setting can be uncomfortable. If current mini-LED TVs can already exceed the highest HDR mastering standards, the push for more raw brightness risks becoming a marketing gimmick rather than a meaningful improvement. A smarter use of engineering resources might focus on refining picture processing and further enhancing contrast performance.
This situation mirrors the audio industry’s loudness war, where over-compression sacrificed dynamic range and musical nuance for sheer volume. An image that is bright merely for the sake of being bright can be as harsh and fatiguing as a distorted, overly loud song. The true measure of a television’s quality is not its maximum nit rating, but how intelligently it uses its capabilities. The best TV will harness its power to deliver dazzling highlights and deep shadows, creating a captivating and natural picture that feels engaging, not assaultive. The industry’s challenge now is to master the art of light, not just the science of generating it.
(Source: The Verge)
