New TV Technology Coming in 2025

In typical fashion, in 2025 companies will be touting tech advances to improve both picture and sound in TVs. Most though, will be iterative improvements, such as LG’s G5 OLED TVs, which use a new brightness booster technology that replaces the Micro Lens Array (MLA) tech used in previous flagship models. Samsung’s top sets get a new anti-glare technology that can greatly reduce reflections.

We’ll also see more TVs with faster than 120-hertz refresh rates. At CES there were a good number of mainstream TVs with 144-Hz refresh rates, and Samsung said its flagship OLED and Neo QLED sets this year will be 165-Hz models. Faster refresh rates are beneficial when playing fast-paced content such as gaming and quick-moving sports because it can produce significantly smoother motion with less blur and ghosting.

More sets this year will include Mini LED backlights, which can help LCD-based sets improve blacks and contrast. That’s because in an LCD set, the backlights are always on, and the pixels in front of them open and close to let through the right amount of light for each scene. But in very dark scenes, some light always manages to leak through. This can make black tones look gray, and it can create halos around light objects that appear against a dark background.

OLEDs don’t have that problem because there’s no backlight. Individual pixels emit their own light and can be turned off completely, so dark areas of the picture can be truly black.

One way to improve this is by using full-array LED backlights, where LEDs are arranged across the entire back of the panel rather than just on the edges as in many TVs. That’s combined with a feature called local dimming, where the LEDs are divided into zones that can be separately illuminated or darkened. The result is that dark areas look darker, and you’re less likely to see halos.

Mini LEDs take that technology a step further by shrinking the size of the LEDs, so you can pack thousands of them behind the LCD panel. They are also divided into dimmable zones, but because the LEDs are smaller, there can be a much greater number of zones.

This year we’ll see improvements in that technology. For example, TCL, which had the first Mini LED TV we ever tested, is touting a new type of Mini LED backlight that uses a new, smaller lens setup that offers more precise light control. It’s also able to be placed much closer to the panel’s light diffuser—which spreads light across the panel—to reduce halos around objects. And it’s using a new, more efficient LED chip that TCL says can significantly boost brightness.