The Hisense UR9 is a great first shot against the OLED bracket

RGB LED TVs have been the talk of the TV world this year, with models coming from all manufacturers, and the first one in 2026 is here – the Hisense UR9. It’s the first look at the feasibility of the new backlight technology outside of demo rooms, and it’s a step up from the traditional mini-LED TVs of years past. HDR is colorful and accurate, has great brightness, and is capable of displaying colors beyond the P3 color space for movies and TV shows with wider colors. But at $3,500, the 65-inch model I reviewed is priced similarly to high-end OLED displays from LG and Samsung, which is tough competition.

Hisense released its first RGB LED TV last year $30,000 116-inch Hisense 116UXso it’s not too surprising that its high-end models, the UR9 and UR8, are RGB LED TVs and not traditional mini LED (you need to step down to U7SG Therefore). It’s also the first company to launch an affordable 2026 model, but it’s still more expensive than last year’s flagship mini LED TVs, such as TCL QM9K.

The Hisense UR9 is available in four sizes: 65-inch ($3,500), 75-inch ($5,000), 85-inch ($6,000), and 100-inch ($9,000). This puts it in direct competition with leading OLED displays from LG and Samsung, and presents a major challenge to the UR9 and any other RGB LED TV. I took a look at the 65 inch set.

The 65-inch UR9 is 1.8 inches thick across the entire chassis and uses a pedestal base. like U8QG Last year, the Hisense UR9 only had three HDMI 2.1 inputs. Its fourth input is a USB-C DisplayPort connection, which is located along the left edge of the TV instead of other connections on the back. I’m not a fan of this placement because if you want to constantly connect your computer to the TV, the cable will be clearly visible. The TV supports 180Hz native refresh rate, AMD Freesync Premium Pro, HDR 10+, and Dolby Vision. A future update will enable Dolby Vision 2, but we won’t see any Dolby Vision 2 content available for a while.

One of the stated advantages of RGB LED TVs is their ability to achieve 100 percent of the BT color space.2020. This speaks of chromaticity, which depends on saturation and hue and is independent of brightness (or luminance). You may have seen color space triangles on… CIA chart 1931. But what this chart doesn’t show us is how colors perform across different brightness levels, or in our living rooms. (For a more in-depth look at this, Caleb Dennison Excellent video A few weeks ago.)

Also, the vast majority of HDR content uses the P3 color space, which is smaller than BT.2020. So, even if a TV is able to scale beyond P3 and into BT.2020 colors (which is exactly UR9), that doesn’t matter with most movies and TV shows. It’s also a chicken-or-egg situation – we need TVs that can accurately display BT.2020 before the color space is fully adopted by TV and film creators, but if there’s no content, why get a BT.2020 TV?

Now, although this is relatively not a lot, there are some great videos that extend beyond the P3 color space into BT.2020 colors. One example of this is the BBC documentary series Planet Earth IIWhich I watched with the Kaleidescape Strato E player. Episode 3 looks at the world’s forests, and the greens of the trees in particular looked incredibly vibrant on the Hisense UR9. There’s also a clip about hummingbirds in Ecuador that shows off the tiny creatures’ dazzling colors, which the UR9 handled well. It’s on par with what I’ve seen for $7,000 TCL X11Land a more colorful picture than I’ve seen from such OLED displays LG G5 or Sony Bravia 8 II. Without any motion compensation, there was some shake as the camera moved through the forest. Changing the Motion setting to Film helped make this easier without giving it an unnatural effect.

One potential issue with RGB LED TVs is color fringing, something LG Display – especially OLED panel maker – is prone to. I made a video about Back in December. For example, it could be when someone walks past a colorful mural and the red color of the artwork causes the person’s face to appear slightly red, which then changes to slightly blue when they pass the blue portion of the mural. I haven’t seen this happen on UR9 with any of the material I’ve watched.

The reason for this could be one of two possibilities: excellent processing and color filter performance capable of brilliantly identifying colors side by side, or instead backlighting with white light and relying only on the color filter when the on-screen color information becomes too complex. The second option essentially negates the benefit of having individual red, green, and blue diodes, as the TV acts as a mini LED TV with a blue or white backlight, but the only way to know for sure is to take the TV apart and look at what the backlight is doing. When it comes down to it, what matters is how the image looks, and the UR9 looks really good in HDR.

OLED still has a huge advantage over RGB LED with one of the most important specifications: contrast. Contrast is more important to our eyes than color (it’s one of the first things you learn during calibration training). It allows us to perceive depth, movement and form, and has been vital to our existence as a species, and to our enjoyment of films, television and art. RGB LED TVs still use LCD panels, and the backlight system has only been improved, and with that comes LCD’s inherent drawbacks of light bloom and limited viewing angles. The UR9 handles both of these issues well (although I think TCL still has a slight advantage in boom control), but the OLED still wins. Thanks to pixel level control, OLED technology still provides better overall image quality.

Then there is the price. With the 65-inch UR9 starting at $3,500, Hisense has pitted its flagship product directly against high-end OLED displays from Samsung and LG — both priced at $3,400 for the same 65-inch size.

Hisense has historically been less expensive than Samsung, LG and Sony for similar technology, so that could mean prices on similar RGB LEDs from those companies will come in higher than the UR9, but I don’t think so – except for Sony, which will certainly be the most expensive of the bunch, and has the best processing to back up the price. If LG and Samsung’s flagship RGB LED TVs are equal to or more expensive than the Hisense UR9, it means those companies are putting RGB above their OLED TVs. Especially with LG, the OLED sales leader for more than a decade, this would be a surprising move.

There are still tiered models from Hisense and Samsung, the Hisense UR8 and Samsung R85H, which will likely be in the $2,000 range or less for the 55-inch size. But this again puts them directly up against mid-range OLED models like the LG C6, which won’t get as bright as RGB LED TVs, but still have pixel-level control and excellent contrast.

The world of TVs in 2026 is very exciting. Accuracy of offers across price ranges and makes is Closer than ever,We are continuing to have new innovations such as RGB LED. This crowded market means it’s difficult to install RGB LED TVs in a logical location. They perform better than regular mini LED TVs and will completely outperform them (OLED is still a long way off), but that won’t be the case until 2027 at the earliest.

For now, I’m still buying the OLED. But the future of RGB LED TVs looks bright.

Photography by John Higgins/The Verge