subpixels

One of the challenges for television manufacturers is to evolve their technologies to improve their ability to represent color, without implying an excessive increase in production costs. Hisense seems to have found the key for its 2026 televisions to improve their image quality: add one more color subpixel to its matrix of Mini LED and Micro LED panels. The brand presented at CES 2026, which is being held in Las Vegas, two advances that seek to make colors more natural and precise: Mini LED evowhich adds a fourth cyan subpixel, and the evolution of its MicroLED panels with the RGBY Micro LEDwhich incorporates a yellow subpixel to its RGB matrix. Both changes allow televisions to better reproduce the most difficult-to-achieve color nuances. RGB MiniLED evo: cyan is the new white The televisions Current Hisense MiniLEDs They are based on thousands of small LED light diodes that illuminate the screen from behind, achieving better lighting control. This improves the contrast without sacrificing the brightness of the screen, being able to turn off more areas of the screen to achieve deeper blacks. In 2025, Hisense put on the table an evolution of that technology with RGB MiniLED, in which the white or blue mini LEDs were replaced by three RGB diodes (red, green and blue) to directly generate colorsinstead of using color filters as traditional LCD screens did. The MiniLED evo that Hisense has just presented goes one step further in this development and adds a fourth cyan subpixel to that RGB matrix. This intermediate color between blue and green helps reproduce complex tones that were previously only approximated by combining the three subpixels. Hisense’s solution is an adaptation to LED of what LG had been doing in its WRGB OLED panelsin which a white subpixel was added to improve brightness, although in this version the aim is to increase the color volume. Clear skies, water or certain skin tones look more natural and with softer gradients. In addition, local light management (local dimming) becomes more precise, reducing halos and poorly lit areas in scenes with high contrast. The introduction of this fourth subpixel increases the effective color gamut, achieving 110% coverage of the BT.2020 color space used as the professional cinema standard. Since, in essence it is an evolution (not a revolution) of the MiniLED RGB system that it already implemented last year in its top model, this new technology will be deployed to models ranging from 55 to 100 inches in a new UR9 and UR8 family, while the new MiniLED RGB evo panels will be limited to the 116UXS (which, as its name indicates, has a diagonal of 116 inches) as an evolution to the MiniLED RGB model of 2025. MicroLED RGB: three colors are no longer enough Along the same lines, Hisense has also presented improvements to the Micro LED RGB panels that it already presented in 2025 for its most premium range. As was the case with the Mini LEDs, the brand is committed to separating the color from the point of emission, replacing the blue or white diodes with three diodes that directly emit the RGB matrix. This is something that Samsung also has launched in its plans for 2026. However, in the variant presented by Hisense for 2026, a fourth yellow subpixel has been added along with red, green and blue, leaving an RGBY configuration. The yellow subpixel fills a critical gap in the spectrum that the three traditional colors cannot accurately cover. This addition improves the reproduction of warm tones and complex light transitions, such as those presented by skin, golden lights or sunsets, with softer and more natural gradients. For the moment, the new RGBY Micro LED is reserved for the 163MX RGBY model of no less than 163 incheswhich integrates millions of subpixels managed by a new processor and algorithms that balance brightness and color. The combination of greater precision in the backlighting provided by much smaller diodes and the incorporation of the yellow subpixel allows 100% of the BT.2020 color space to be achieved, bringing the quality of giant screens closer to those used in professional production. It’s a new era for LED The evolution that Hisense has presented is nothing more than confirmation that, although OLED represents an “affordable” way to obtain the best image quality, LED still has a lot to say in terms of quality and color volume. In the MiniLED evo, the addition of the fourth cyan subpixel allows intermediate colors between blue and green to look more natural, while in the RGBY microLED, the yellow subpixel improves the fidelity of warm and complex tones. In practice, these improvements translate into more consistent, natural and detailed images, without depending only on brightness or resolution. Hisense’s proposal for 2026 is presented more as an evolution in qualitative terms than as a revolution. It is a sign that the future of Mini LEDs and Micro LED involves optimizing the way colors are generated, using additional subpixels and controlling light emission with better processors and more refined algorithms. In Xataka | China is devouring the television market. So much so that Panasonic is considering abandoning it Image | Hisense