CES is always a major event for TV tech, and last month’s event in Las Vegas didn’t disappoint. Even though Sony didn’t show off its next TVs, we were still overwhelmed with new models and innovative tech demos from Samsung, LG, Hisense and TCL.

These are all makers of the best TVs around, and all like to push the envelope with cutting-edge TV tech at CES. Some of this tech will appear in models available this year, while some will just be shown as proof of concept, hopefully to be used in future sets.

What we see at CES shapes not only the TVs that arrive in 2025, but those that will come in 2026 and beyond, as the companies battle to outdo each other and as high-end tech trickles down into more affordable models.

Below, here’s the tech I saw at CES 2025 that I think will have the biggest effect on the best OLED TVs and best mini-LED TVs in the future.

1. RGB Backlighting
This tech is probably the TV takeaway from CES 2025, and was shown off by Samsung, Hisense and TCL, all at slightly different stages. It’s a new way of doing LCD TVs and it works the same as current tech: a backlight of LEDs shines through a grid of color-filtering pixels. Except in current versions of the tech, the backlight is a single color of LED (usually blue), so the color-filtering layer has to do a lot of work. This saps energy from the light, limiting brightness.

In RGB backlights, each LED has red, green and blue elements, meaning it can shine in the right color for what’s on-screen before it goes through the color-filtering layer. This means the color filter can be much less aggressive—TCL even confirmed that it’s dropping quantum dots from its version of the tech—and the light can shine through more efficiently.

The result is even brighter TVs, or TVs at the same level of brightness that use less power. And at the same time, the color gamut is wider, meaning more vibrant and rich images in just about every way.

Samsung said its version of the tech (which it’s calling RGB Micro LED Backlight) shouldn’t really cost more than its mini-LED TV. Samsung’s version is likely to come in a 4K TV later this year, though the version Samsung showed us at CES was an 8K TV. TCL said its version of the tech will arrive in 2026, but there was a prototype at the show.

Hisense has the edge here—it unveiled a 116-inch TV that uses the tech, which it’s calling “TriChroma RGB Backlight.” We were very impressed by the Hisense 116UX upon seeing it in person.

2. Four-Stack OLED
There’s a new type of OLED panel in town, and it’s all fours. The latest OLED TV panel from LG Display, which makes OLED screens used by every TV manu­facturer that offers them, is a leap forward for the tech. It adds an extra layer of OLED pixels into the panel, on top of the three layers used in previous generations.

This adds a load of extra brightness and aids color reproduction, with the screen being up to 40% brighter than the previous highest-end OLED panel from LG—and that’s without the micro lens array (MLA) tech that has been used to boost the brightness of the screens previously.

This panel is used in the LG G5 and Panasonic Z95B, and appears to be the panel used in the 83-inch version of the Samsung S95F.

This four-layer panel will likely become the norm that future panels are built on, and hopefully it’ll be possible for it to trickle down to the mid-range panels—something that never happened with MLA.

3. Wireless Connection Boxes
LG has offered a TV with a wireless connection box for a couple of years now, but it’s been its highest-end OLED TV—inherently very niche. This year, LG has expanded it to its mini-LED QNED range as well.

Meanwhile, Samsung has introduced a wireless connections box for its highest-end 8K TV, and for The Frame Pro art TV, as well for its 8K Premiere projector. And Samsung’s box is much smaller than the big beast of LG’s unit, making it feel much more like tech a normal person might have in their home one day.

So suddenly, the wireless TV connection arms race is on. The idea of these boxes is that your TV can sit on the wall or on a stand with just a single power cable running to it, and the direction of that cable doesn’t have to be determined by the positioning of your consoles and set-up boxes. You’ll be able to hide all your gadgets away and have a clean TV area—total aesthetic and tech freedom.

Samsung has said that if the wireless boxes are well-received, it will roll them out to more TVs—it said this about its OLED Glare Free tech last year, and it proved to be true, with the tech being added to mini-LED TVs in 2025. So we’ll have to see if this year’s wireless boxes work well and if people are happy paying a premium for them—and, if so, we’ll see whether other TV companies follow suit, and whether LG starts offering it in more of its own OLED range.

4. On-Device AI That’s Actually Useful
TV companies have been talking about AI features for several years now, and it’s been largely meaningless—it basically meant that machine-learning-based image processing had been applied.

But now that people tend to mean generative AI when we talk about AI, that’s being added to TVs too—and in some actually smart ways. On its TVs last year, LG introduced the idea of a chatbot that you could speak to naturally, and the TV could find the setting to help you. So if you said to it, “The picture is too dark,” it would bring up the brightness options for you. That proved to be a bit of a false start, but this year it’s looking better. The updated version will be combined with AI-based voice recognition so that whenever you use the voice control of the TV, you get personalized responses, and even personalized picture settings.

Samsung, meanwhile, is putting an AI button on its remotes, to act as a kind of voice control button. One of the best features it showed off is the ability for the TV to live translate from a show’s native audio language into subtitles for another language. It supports Korean, English, Spanish, French and Italian so far, and appears to work really well—a great boost for accessibility, and again, something I expect to see lots of brands picking up.

5. Ultra-Precise Backlight Lenses
Last year, Sony showed off a new backlighting tech for its mini-LED TVs. It used really smart lens designs to provide strong brightness levels that don’t leak from bright areas into dark areas, and offered amazing nuance in the picture contrast. This year, we’re seeing a backlight from TCL that looks like an even better version of this—and this will be the future of the more midrange mini-LED TVs if RGB backlighting will be the new high-end tech.

TCL’s backlight is kind of incredible to see—the company had a demo where you could see just the backlights in motion, so you could compare the new 2025 backlight to the previous year’s backlight and a more basic one.

You can basically just watch TV on the new backlight; it has so many LEDs, and such strong control of contrast and tones, that it’s actually detailed. TCL showed this tech off the best, but it’s something other makers are absolutely working on too—expect to hear a focus on well this year’s mini-LED handle blooming and contrast.

This article initially appeared on TechRadar, sister website to TV Tech.

From the mid-1970s to today, the television and video technical community have wrestled with how to best increase the overall quality of moving pictures. This work moved slowly over the extended era of analog video, sped up with digital “standard definition” video (SDTV) and made a significant leap with todays’ digital “high definition” video (HDTV). More recently, the upstart HDR technology nudged aside the preoccupation with advancing resolution and has slowly garnered the attention of both the theatrical motion picture industry and the multi-service television industry.     

Achieving High Dynamic Range lies in the understanding of how three key elements—displays at one extreme and camera sensors, lenses at the other—cooperate to create what is ultimately delivered to screens and audiences. Control and mastery of these elements are imperative in capturing and maintaining the full dynamic range of your content, helping unlock the full beauty and potency of HDR. 

DRIVEN BY DISPLAYS

The initial impetus for HDR was driven from the display end of the system. A decade ago, it was the striking advances in diverse display technologies that triggered worldwide interest in flanking the march to 4K and 8K standards for television production with considerations of wider color gamuts and higher dynamic range. LCD, plasma and OLED technologies were all expanding these imaging capabilities beyond that of the long-established CRT. 

The first footprint in HDR image capture is the glass. Optics are not always understood as the gateway to HDR, but it all starts with lens art and science. Optical designers are researching and iterating on lens science now that HDR is fully embraced and here to stay. They are working on inherent challenges that lenses bring to the format, such as achieving the desired deep, rich blacks while simultaneously doing justice to scene speculars. 

Adding to the complexity, but offering many opportunities, is the fact that filmmakers now have more lens options to choose from than ever before. And this choice should be deeply considered if achieving true HDR is the goal. At Canon, we realized that we needed to double down on our efforts to help ensure that our lenses were on the same trajectory as our cameras in terms of capture. Now that international standards for HDR have been established by the ITU, we will continue to innovate. 

The sensor is perhaps the first thought and highest area of focus when shooting HDR. Significant technological advances in recent years continue to drive the prevalence of HDR. Canon recently introduced the Dual-Gain Output sensor in the EOS C300 Mark III and EOS C70 cameras, offering more than 16+ stops of dynamic range. The dual gain nature reflects the bi-directional nature of HDR. One gain prioritizes saturation—protecting detail in highlight areas—while the other exposes important detail in the shadows while also suppressing noise.

AGILITY AND FLEXIBILITY

With HDR TV units expected to top 12.8 million by 2021, momentum for HDR among consumers will continue. But what about for cinematographers? 

While HDR standards for production are firmly in place, the challenge for cinematographers and colorists is that HDR standards for home displays are disparate, so agility and flexibility need to be baked directly into the tools. 

That brings us to displays. In the past, LCD displays have not been preferred by colorists because they lacked the deep rich black reproduction of other display technologies. However, recent technological developments in LCD displays have been nothing short of remarkable. In Canon’s 4K reference displays, we have incorporated multiple electronic tools to aid the optimum exposure settings in the cameras. Modern panels come equipped with engineering toolsets and functions designed specifically for HDR image review and user flexibility such as waveform and vector scopes, as well as legacy camera functions such as focus peaking, zooming, timecode, audio metering and histogram display. Recent features that have made their debut on modern reference displays include scalable false color monitoring, SDR/HDR compare view, pixel-level value checking, screen capture directly to USB and remote display operation via LAN or Wi-Fi.

Lastly, the elephant in the room is the current state of the world. It has made us all into remote workers, and we can expect continued delays in getting everyone back into studios and professional spaces where HDR workflows are possible. We anticipate that this will accelerate the introduction of even more tools to help make HDR content easier, cheaper and faster to produce from home in the near future.

Larry Thorpe is Senior Fellow, Imaging Technologies and Communications Group, Professional Engineering and Solutions Division for Canon USA.

To get a more in-depth perspective on HDR, click here to read Larry’s white paper on the subject.

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LONDON—HDR TV sets will be making their way to people around the world in droves over the next few years according to a new report from IHS Markit.

In its “TV Design and Features Tracker – Q3 2017” report, IHS Markit forecasts a total of 12.2 million HDR TV sets will be shipped by the end of 2017, but in 2021 that number will jump to 47.9 million. In addition, 88.6 million HDR-ready sets, which feature HDR decoding but no display capabilities, are also expected to be shipped in 2021.

There are still obstacles to people being able to view full HDR programming. “We expect that only 23 percent of the ultra-high-definition televisions that ship in 2017 will offer the full HDR experience,” said Paul Gray, associate director for consumer devices at IHS Markit. “The remainder will be able to decode a signal, but lack the high contrast capability to display HDR content to an advantage.” One of those obstacles is the cost of backlights for LCDs.

The report does suggest that there will be HDR capabilities available in HD TV sets. While congested airways won’t allow broadcasters to transmit the extra data needed for 4K UHD, HD with HDR will be available to provide improved quality with a low data overhead, per IHS.

North America is expected to lead the pack with HDR TV shipments by 2021 with 14.6 million. China is projected as the second largest shipper at 11.8 million.

Read the full report here.