2025 Was the Beginning of the End of the TV Brightness War

The television industry's brightness war may have hit its inflection point in 2025, the year TCL and Hisense released the first consumer TVs capable of 5,000 nits under specific settings -- a figure that would have seemed absurd not long ago when manufacturers struggled to reach 2,000 nits. LG introduced Primary RGB Tandem OLED technology, moving from a three-stack panel design to a four-stack red-blue-green-blue configuration that the company claims can achieve 4,000 nits. The technology appears in the LG G5, Panasonic Z95B and Philips OLED950 and OLED910. RGB mini-LED also emerged as a new category. The technology uses individual small red, green and blue LED backlights instead of white or blue LEDs paired with quantum dots. Hisense demonstrated it at CES 2025, TCL announced its Q10M for China, and Samsung unveiled its own version called micro-RGB. These sets range from $12,000 to $30,000. Sony has confirmed it will debut RGB TV technology in spring 2026. HDR content is currently mastered at a maximum of 4,000 nits. The situation echoes the audio industry's loudness war, The Verge points out, which peaked with Metallica's heavily compressed Death Magnetic in 2008.

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