CES is always a major event for TV tech, and CES 2025 didn't disappoint on that front. 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.
So 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.
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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.
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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'll 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.
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4. On-device AI that's actually useful
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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 offering 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 mid-range 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.
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You might also like…
- Big-screen TVs are everywhere at CES 2025, but I doubt they'll replace projectors anytime soon
- I tried Panasonic’s new Z95B OLED TV, and it takes OLED picture quality to an even higher level
- I witnessed Hisense's giant 163-inch micro-LED TV in person, and this thing is staggering
TechRadar will be covering all of the latest CES news from the show as it happens. Stick with us for the big stories on everything from 8K TVs and foldable displays to new phones, laptops, smart home gadgets, and the latest in AI.
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