Today Sony is announcing the development of a new type of TV display that uses individual RGB LEDs for its backlighting. While Sony currently sells high-end Mini LED TVs alongside OLED models, this new system could combine many of the best qualities of both, and I recently got to see it in action at the company’s Tokyo headquarters.

I’m not yet convinced that this tech, which for now Sony has given the somewhat unwieldy name of “General RGB LED Backlight Technology,” will be the best panel solution for everyone. But TVs are always going to come with tradeoffs, and this approach does represent a meaningfully different solution to what’s currently on the market. It looks like it’ll be a huge upgrade on existing Mini LED sets.

Mini LED TVs work by deploying an array of tiny blue LEDs behind the panel. These LEDs are larger than the actual pixels on the display, but they’re small enough that the TV can brighten or darken multiple areas of the screen with a high degree of precision. OLED TVs, meanwhile, are capable of even better contrast because they light up and switch off each pixel individually, but they generally can’t get as large or as bright as Mini LED displays.

With Sony’s new RGB LED method, each Mini LED backlight zone is made up of a red, green, and blue LED. The core advantage here is that Sony is able to achieve finer control over color without compromising on brightness, achieving a level of 4000 cd/m² — on par with the company’s professional reference monitors and resulting in a higher “color volume” than any commercial TV it’s released to date. The increased gradation control can also help deliver much wider viewing angles than Mini LED TVs, and Sony says the panels can be built at larger sizes than existing OLED sets.

So, how does it look in person? Unfortunately Sony didn’t allow its prototypes to be photographed, but I’ll do my best to describe them.

The first unit was designed to show off the backlight array itself. Behind the set was a wild combination of exposed silicon and cable spaghetti. Only half of the screen was covered by an actual LCD panel; the rest of the image was purely handled by the backlighting. Imagine watching a movie where the right half of the picture was run through a 16-bit pixel art filter, and you’re pretty much there, except this screen had much better color reproduction than a Super Nintendo. 

This isn’t much use in practice, of course, but it does show exactly how precise Sony is able to get with the lighting. One scene showed a bus driving down a street on a sunny day, and it was possible to discern several distinct shades of red in its paint from the backlight alone. Sony says this translates to wider and more accurate color reproduction.

To demonstrate actual video content, Sony set up a full-screen version of the RGB backlight prototype flanked by two of its best TVs you can buy: last year’s extravagant Mini LED-powered Bravia 9, and the QD-OLED A95L that won the prestigious “King of TV” award at the most recent Value Electronics TV Shootout, where Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel served on the judging panel.

Conscious of the unflattering comparison, a Sony engineer conducting the demo repeatedly went out of his way to make the point that the Bravia 9 on the left really was a very good TV. Despite this, the RGB LED prototype clearly smoked it. 

A scene from Frozen where blue crystals flew through the air looked almost monochrome in comparison, with the prototype revealing deep shades of purple that simply weren’t there on the Bravia. It was clear how the backlighting worked in tandem with the color grading to deliver a more vivid picture. Viewing angles were hugely improved, with near-non-existent color shift. Another sequence with bright red lights against a dark background exhibited the tell-tale blueish Mini LED blooming on the Bravia, whereas the RGB LED prototype lit up those areas solely in red. 

That’s not to say the blooming wasn’t there. If you covered up only the red portion of the screen with a piece of paper, you’d still see hazy redness around it, unlike on an OLED panel. But watching the footage normally, the effect wasn’t all that different. While OLED screens don’t strictly leak color data into adjacent pixels, the effect of retinal straylight in your eyes means you do still perceive haziness around bright points. RGB LED’s ability to limit its blooming to scene-accurate colors makes for a major improvement on Mini LED in this regard, even if it’s still going to lose out to OLED when it comes to displaying starfields.

RGB LED backlighting isn’t a wholly new idea, even from Sony. The company launched a ridiculously expensive Qualia TV with an RGB backlight in 2004, and more recently showed off a “Crystal LED” prototype TV at CES 2012. Competitors are also on the case; Hisense showed off a “TriChroma RGB Backlight” Mini LED TV at CES this year, while TCL and Samsung had prototypes with their own spin on the idea.

“These developments were within our expectations,” says Daisuke Nezu, head of Sony’s home audio and video division. Sony remains confident that its experience in backlight technology and image signal processing gives it an edge over anything on the horizon.

“We believe that we can ensure not only good image quality, but also reliability and stability,” Sony representative Mara Redican tells The Verge, emphasizing the company’s expertise in signal processing. “The knowledge and experience gained over the years cannot be easily replicated.”

If Sony is right about this, its strongest competition could be coming from inside the house; the advantages were much less clear next to its own “King of TV.” The RGB LED prototype could definitely hang with the A95L, and quite literally outshone it in terms of brightness. But I would say the difference in color reproduction and viewing angles were a wash at best. I generally preferred the picture from the OLED in the most challenging comparisons, and I think a lot of OLED TV owners would probably agree.

But that’s fine by Sony, which isn’t giving any indication that it’s planning to exit the OLED TV market any time soon — no wonder, given the glowing reception to the A95L. I might be happy with my own OLED TVs right now, but the tech plainly isn’t right for every customer, whether they’re concerned about brightness, size, or longevity. If you’ve been waiting to put a 100-inch-plus panel in a large room with a lot of natural light, this could be your answer.

We’ll have to see how this all shakes out once RGB LED panels come to actual consumer TVs, of course. But Sony’s take on the concept does look to be a big step up over what we’ve come to expect from Mini LED, at least, and it could well be the best alternative to OLED if and when it’s commercialized.