What Hi-Fi has the Samsung R95H going on the bench next week, and the panel tech in it is called Micro RGB. That is not Micro LED, the self-emissive stuff Samsung has been selling at silly money for years. Micro RGB is Samsung's take on the same idea Sony markets as True RGB and most of us have been calling RGB mini LED: throw out the white backlight and the colour filter, use dedicated red, green and blue LEDs instead. Samsung's twist is making them smaller, reportedly under 100 microns, which lets it pack more of them behind the panel.
I have no problem with the engineering. I have a problem with the fact that a shop assistant now has to explain the difference between Micro RGB and Micro LED to someone holding a credit card, and there is no chance that goes well. Two product lines, four letters apart, completely different display architectures, wildly different prices.
The more useful thing buried in that piece is that the acronym has not been guaranteeing much this year. Sony's Bravia 9 II and 7 II impressed What Hi-Fi in places and fell short in others. Hisense's UR9 got praise for local dimming and then gave a chunk of it back on viewing angles. So RGB backlights are clearly not a free win, they are a different set of trade-offs, and every implementation seems to land somewhere different. Samsung has not published contrast figures for the R95H that I can find, so the density claim is just a claim until someone measures it.
If you were standing in a shop and saw Micro RGB on the spec card, would you have known that was a backlight and not the panel itself?
I have no problem with the engineering. I have a problem with the fact that a shop assistant now has to explain the difference between Micro RGB and Micro LED to someone holding a credit card, and there is no chance that goes well. Two product lines, four letters apart, completely different display architectures, wildly different prices.
The more useful thing buried in that piece is that the acronym has not been guaranteeing much this year. Sony's Bravia 9 II and 7 II impressed What Hi-Fi in places and fell short in others. Hisense's UR9 got praise for local dimming and then gave a chunk of it back on viewing angles. So RGB backlights are clearly not a free win, they are a different set of trade-offs, and every implementation seems to land somewhere different. Samsung has not published contrast figures for the R95H that I can find, so the density claim is just a claim until someone measures it.
If you were standing in a shop and saw Micro RGB on the spec card, would you have known that was a backlight and not the panel itself?
