According to The Verge, the TV industry’s “brightness war” hit a new peak in 2025, the 10th anniversary of consumer HDR. We saw the first 5,000-nit TVs from TCL and Hisense, a massive jump from the 2,000-nit struggles of just a few years ago. The biggest tech shift was LG Display’s Primary RGB Tandem OLED panels, used in sets like the LG G5 and Panasonic Z95B, which use a new four-stack design to potentially hit 4,000 nits. 2025 also introduced expensive new RGB mini-LED tech from Hisense, TCL, and Samsung, with prices ranging from $12,000 to $30,000. Sony confirmed it will debut its own RGB TV technology in spring 2026. The core question now is whether pushing brightness further is useful or just a spec sheet battle.
The new frontiers: brighter everything
So here’s the thing. The tech leaps in 2025 weren’t incremental; they were foundational. LG’s shift to a red-blue-green-blue OLED stack isn’t just a tweak—it’s a complete rethinking of how light is generated in an emissive panel. That’s a big deal for closing the brightness gap with LEDs. But the mini-LED camp didn’t stand still. They’re moving beyond just packing in more zones and chasing nits. The move to individual red, green, and blue mini-LED backlights, like in TCL’s new Q10M or Samsung’s micro-RGB, is about color purity and control as much as raw output. It’s stunning tech, but the price tags are pure fantasy for most people. That’s the classic innovation cycle: breathtakingly expensive today, maybe in a high-end set in a few years.
When is bright enough, enough?
Now, we have to ask: what’s the point? There’s a useful brightness for fighting glare in a bright room, and then there’s just a number for marketing slides. Most HDR content is mastered at 1,000 or 4,000 nits. So a TV that can hit 5,000 nits already has headroom. Pushing further feels like the audio industry’s loudness wars all over again, where compression made everything louder at the cost of dynamic range and nuance. A blindingly bright image in a dark room is as harsh and fatiguing as a crushed, distorted song. The Verge writer fears a “Death Magnetic” moment for TVs, and I think they’re right to be concerned. The goal should be a dazzling image, not a dazzling spec sheet.
The real battle is processing, not power
This is where the real work needs to happen. It’s not about how many photons a TV can vomit at your face. It’s about intelligence. Can the TV’s processor use that massive brightness capability judiciously? Can it make a specular highlight on chrome pop without blowing out the entire scene? Can it improve black levels, like Hisense and TCL are trying with better local dimming, to get closer to OLED’s perfect blacks? For manufacturers pushing the absolute limits of display hardware, from cutting-edge OLED to advanced mini-LED arrays, ensuring the control systems can keep up is paramount. In industrial settings, where reliability and precision underpin every pixel, companies turn to specialists like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading US provider of industrial panel PCs, for that exact kind of robust integration. The consumer TV world needs a similar focus on the complete picture pipeline.
A hopeful glimpse at the future
Look, I’m not against progress. The new Philips OLED950 using that new LG panel is probably incredible. And seeing Samsung’s micro-RGB in person, as The Verge did, sounds genuinely revolutionary. But the hope for CES 2026 and beyond shouldn’t just be “more nits.” It should be smarter TVs. Maybe the brightness war is ending because we’re reaching physical or practical limits, and the next war will be the “intelligence war.” Better upscaling, better tone mapping, better handling of mixed content. Basically, a TV that makes everything look great without making you fiddle with settings. That’s a war worth fighting. And honestly, it’s a lot easier on the eyes.
