Micro RGB, not microLED, um-kay?
You know the whole LED TV or PC monitor thing and how misleading it is on account of the « LED » bit being just a big, dumb backlight for an LCD panel? Well, it’s kinda happening again with Samsung’s new Micro RGB tech, except it’s a bit better and a bit worse than you might expect, all at the same time.
So, Samsung has announced its first Micro RGB TV, a 115-inch model. The company first mooted this technology at CES in prototype form, but now we’re getting an actual TV, though Samsung hasn’t named the precise model number as yet.
Anyway, what the super-sized Korean conglomerate is doing here is both old and new. The old bit is that this panel is still an LCD with a backlight. It’s not an OLED panel and nor, importantly, is it like microLED. The latter uses individual and very small—hence « micro »—LEDs to create each pixel on the display. And it’s super expensive and only available for very large displays right now.
For Micro RGB, the pixels are still in a conventional LCD panel and the « Micro RGB » bit is in the backlight. Compared to existing LCD gaming monitors with, say, mini-LED local dimming like the BenQ MOBIUZ EX321UX, the new stuff is twofold. First, instead of using white LEDs to light up an LCD panel which in turn has RGB subpixels, this Micro RGB backlight has lots of RGB LEDs, each of which can be controlled separately.
