The Hisense UR9 is a great first shot against OLED’s bow

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

Hisense released the very first RGB LED TV last year, the $30,000 116-inch Hisense 116UX, so it’s not too surprising that its top-end models, the UR9 and UR8, are RGB LED TVs and not traditional mini LED (you need to step down to the U7SG for that). It’s also the first company to release a more affordable 2026 model, but it’s still more expensive than the flagship mini-LED TVs of last year, like the TCL QM9K.

The Hisense UR9 is available in four sizes: 65 inches ($3,500), 75 inches ($5,000), 85 inches ($6,000), and 100 inches ($9,000). This puts it in direct competition with flagship OLED displays from LG and Samsung, and is a high bar for the UR9 and any other RGB LED TV. I got a look at the 65-inch variety.

The 65-inch UR9 is 1.8 inches thick across the whole chassis and uses a pedestal stand. Like the U8QG last year, the Hisense UR9 has only three HDMI 2.1 inputs. Its fourth input is a USB-C DisplayPort connection, which is situated along the left edge of the TV instead of with the other connections on the back. I’m not a fan of this placement because if you want to have your computer continually connected to the TV, the cable is 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’re not going to see any Dolby Vision 2 content available for a while.

One of the touted benefits of RGB LED TVs is their ability to achieve 100 percent of the BT.2020 color space. That’s talking about chromaticity, which is based on saturation and hue and is independent of brightness (or luminance). You might have seen color space triangles on a CIE 1931 diagram. But what this chart doesn’t show us is how colors perform across different brightness levels, or in our living rooms. (For a deep dive on this, Caleb Denison released an excellent video a couple 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 capable of extending beyond P3 and into BT.2020 colors (which the UR9 absolutely is), with most movies and TV shows it doesn’t matter. It’s also a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg situation — we need TVs that can accurately display BT.2020 before the color space is fully adopted by TV and movie creators, but if there’s no content, why get a BT.2020 TV?

Now, while it’s comparatively not a lot, there is some great video out there that extends beyond the P3 color space and into BT.2020 colors. One example is the BBC documentary series Planet Earth II, which I watched with a Kaleidescape Strato E player. Episode 3 looks at the jungles of the world, and the greens of the trees in particular looked incredibly vibrant on the Hisense UR9. There’s also a segment about hummingbirds in Ecuador that shows off the dazzling colors of the tiny creatures, which the UR9 handled very well. It’s on par with what I saw on the $7,000 TCL X11L, and a more colorful picture than I’ve seen from OLEDs like the LG G5 or Sony Bravia 8 II. Without any motion compensation, there was some judder as the camera panned through the jungle. Changing the motion setting to Film helped to smooth that out without giving it an unnatural effect.

One of the potential issues with RGB LED TVs is color crosstalk, something that LG Display — notably a maker of OLED panels — made a video about back in December. An example could be when someone is walking past a colorful mural and the red from the artwork causes the person’s face to look a little red, which then changes to be slightly blue when they pass the blue part of the mural. I didn’t see this happen on the UR9 with any of the material I watched.

The reason behind this could be one of two possibilities: excellent processing and color filter performance capable of deftly delineating side-by-side colors, or the backlight instead using white light and relying solely on the color filter when the onscreen color information gets too complicated. The second option basically negates the benefit of having individual red, green, and blue diodes, with the TV functioning as a blue or white backlit mini-LED TV, but the only way to know for sure is to take the TV apart and look just at what the backlight is doing. When it comes down to it, though, what matters is how the picture looks, and the UR9 looks really good in HDR.

OLED still has a big advantage over RGB LED with one of the most important specs: 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 shape, and has been vital to our existence as a species — and to our enjoyment of movies, TV, and art. RGB LED TVs still use LCD panels, only the backlight system has been improved, and with that comes the inherent LCD drawbacks of light blooming and more limited viewing angles. The UR9 handles both of these issues well (although I think TCL still has a slight advantage with blooming control), but OLED still wins. And because of its pixel-level control, OLED still delivers better overall picture quality.

Then there’s price. With the 65-inch UR9 starting at $3,500, Hisense has positioned its flagship directly against top-end OLEDs from Samsung and LG — both of which are priced at $3,400 for the same 65-inch size.

Hisense has historically been less expensive than Samsung, LG, and Sony for like technologies, so that could mean that prices on comparable RGB LEDs from those companies will come in above the UR9, but I don’t think so — apart from Sony, which almost certainly will be the most expensive of the bunch, and have the best processing to support the price. If the flagship RGB LED TVs from LG and Samsung are equal to or more expensive than the Hisense UR9, it means those companies are putting RGB above their own OLED TVs. Especially with LG, the leader in OLED sales for more than a decade, it would be a surprising move.

And there’s still the step-down models from Hisense and Samsung, the Hisense UR8 and Samsung R85H, which will likely be in the $2,000-or-under range for the 55-inch size. But that again puts them up directly against midrange OLED models like the LG C6, which won’t get as bright as the RGB LED TVs, but still has pixel-level control and excellent contrast.

The world of TVs in 2026 is pretty exciting. The accuracy of displays across price ranges and manufactures is closer than it’s ever been, and we’re continuing to get new innovations like RGB LED. That crowded market means it’s hard to fit RGB LED TVs somewhere that makes sense. They perform better than regular mini-LED TVs and will absolutely overtake them (OLED is still out of reach), but it won’t be until 2027 at the earliest.

For now, I’d still just buy an OLED. But the future of RGB LED TVs is looking bright.

Photography by John Higgins / The Verge