Samsung Electronics has kicked off a production test run of its upcoming RGB MicroLED television, which was first announced at CES 2025.
According to a report in The Elec, Samsung is initially focusing on the largest possible size, with gargantuan 115-inch RGB MicroLED TV sets the first to roll off its production line.
At that size, we can only guesstimate what kind of price the company will be asking for. The models won’t be as expensive as the company’s genuine MicroLED TVs, which typically come with six-figure price tags, but such a model is unlikely to be priced anywhere close to the “affordable” segment.
Samsung’s RGB MicroLED TVs are not to be confused with its earlier MicroLED models. Rather, they’re essentially still just Mini-LED television, but the difference is they feature a more advanced backlight that has much smaller (micro) LEDs that can generate red, green and blue colours, instead of just a single colour.
Genuine MicroLED TVs are more like OLED in that every pixel is self-emitting, producing its own light. Mini-LED TVs don’t do this. Instead, they use a colour-filtering pixel layer that sits in front of an LED backlight. It’s this backlight that is now being changed, with the mini LEDs swapped out for micro LEDs.
The ELEC says that Samsung’s RGB MicroLED TVs are more correctly defined as RGB Mini-LED LCD TVs, and the technology is similar to what rival brands like Hisense and TCL have planned.
Still, the fact that Mini-LED backlights are moving to RGB is a big step forward. What this means is that instead of using a white backlight and colour filters, it will instead have red, green and blue LEDs. This will mean brighter and more accurate colours with less colour filtering layers – and that’s important, because those filters absorb some of the light, reducing overall brightness.
HDTV Test's Vincent Teoh got a very brief, first look at the RGB MicroLED TV during CES in January, and you can see for yourself how impressed he was in this video:
Samsung hasn’t yet said how much it will be asking for its RGB MicroLED TVs, but at the CES Show in January, the company told journalists that it won’t be much more expensive than its regular Mini-LED TVs. If you're looking for a yardstick, Hisense said in April that it will be pricing its 116-inch RGB Mini-LED TV (basically the same tech) at around 99,999 RMB in China, which works out at about £10,250 – which is about what you’d expect for a premium, big screen Mini-LED model
It’s not cheap by any means, but it’s still a hell of a lot less than true MicroLED TVs, which are well beyond the means of even comparatively wealthy, middle-class consumers. Samsung’s consumer-grade 76-inch MicroLED TV costs around £70,000, while LG’s 118-inch Magnit MicroLED starts at around £175,000. In other words, you can expect to pick up 17 of Samsung’s 115-inch RGB MicroLED TVs for the price of just a single, true MicroLED set of the same size.
Last year, it was reported that Samsung told suppliers it needs to bring down the costs of MicroLED production by around 90% in order to make the tech “consumer-ready”, but it’s unlikely to get there any time soon, with some experts saying that even a five-year timeframe for that to happen is highly optimistic.
