If you’re looking for sizzle at CES 2026, you can never go wrong with the televisions. The annual consumer electronics expo always includes massive walls full of TVs with cutting-edge features such as transparent screens or ultra-high brightness.
In previous years at CES, we’ve seen everything from battery-powered TVs that stick to a wall to OLEDs that roll up like a treasure map. I’m not a TV designer, so I could never anticipate the bizarre things companies are cooking up right now. While these cutting-edge devices may grab headlines, our focus will remain on the products that actually matter to you.
We know that people don’t buy TVs for gimmicks. Picture quality is the most important aspect of any TV, and I expect we’ll see advancements in that area, especially at the affordable end of the market.
Like computers and phones, TVs have a 12-month shelf life and are updated annually, usually with picture and feature improvements. Here’s what this year’s CES promises.
The mini-LED trickle-down
Two televisions from 2025 point the way forward — the Hisense QD7 and the TCL QM9. Both models have mini-LED technology, but they’re at either extreme of the market — the Hisense is a budget TV, and the TCL is a flagship. Both were significant for their improvements to picture quality, especially the QD7. The Hisense’s mini-LED backlight was a cut above the budget TV competition this year, and I hope it’s the start of a new trend. Local dimming has a positive effect on LCD picture quality, and the ability to do it at an affordable price is better for everyone.
Mini-LED is an evolution of traditional LCD TV backlight tech, using thousands of tiny light-emitting diodes to improve picture quality. One of the first mini-LED TVs to become available was the 2019 TCL 8-Series, and it’s a technology which has become more widely available with each passing year.
The Samsung R95H is a forthcoming Micro RBG television.
The brightest TVs I saw in 2025 were the most impractical to test in a lab environment. That’s mostly because they were huge — over 100 inches diagonal — and they included the Hisense 116UX TV and the Samsung Micro RGB TV.
The key to their success was a micro-RGB backlight, which is distinct from the micro-LED display type. These backlights are made of red, green and blue micro-LEDs, and they have two main benefits: They don’t need a color filter, whether quantum dot or otherwise, and they can create brighter screens. At CES, we’ll see a whole bunch of TVs based on this — led by both Samsung the LG. What we’ll see is TVs of all sizes — from 55 inches and up — and at prices that are considerably less than a car.
