Who’s who and what’s what in TVs in 2026

Each TV company has its own distinct personality and direction. These change over the years, with new technological breakthroughs or at least new business deals. New aspirations shake up the natural order. This year, for example, nearly every company has decided to make and heavily promote RGB LED TVs. Some of them, like Hisense, seem like they’re doing it because they want to. LG’s making one too, but it’s clear the company’s heart still lies with OLEDs. Are RGB LED TVs the next big thing? Who knows!

2026 is only a few weeks old, but we’re already seeing those personalities and how the choices each manufacturer makes can affect the year ahead, both for themselves and for their competitors. Here’s where things stand at the beginning of 2026. Who knows where we’ll be at the end of it?

LG has long been the dominant force in OLEDs, consistently making some of the most impressive TVs in the mid-to-high end, from a $1,300 B-series TV all the way up to the $60,000 OLED T. OLED panels are emissive: each pixel creates its own light, allowing for pixel-level control of brightness and color as well as incredible contrast and zero blooming, since each pixel can be turned off individually. OLED TVs still give you the best performance you can get for a reasonable amount of money, and that’s likely to be the case for at least another few years.

The one drawback of OLED panels, historically, has been brightness, especially in well-lit rooms. But in 2025, LG implemented the four-stack OLED technology developed by LG Display in its G5 TV, delivering the brightest picture we’ve seen from an OLED. (Panasonic also implemented the four-stack panel.) This year, in addition to being in the G6, the technology trickles down into the 77- and 83-inch sizes of LG’s midrange C6 OLED. The return of the Wallpaper TV — which LG hyped hard during CES — will also utilize the technology.

LG is also a presence in Hollywood. The LG G Series TVs in particular are found throughout the film industry, used by post-production houses as client monitors as well as by some colorists as their primary monitor. There’s a comfort knowing post-production professionals are relying on the same LG OLEDs you can get in your home, and you’re seeing on your TV what they saw on theirs.

LG’s strong emphasis on OLED does cause its other product lines to fall by the wayside. It continues to develop its mini-LED line, but those TVs don’t garner the same attention as its OLEDs and don’t reach the same performance levels of mini-LED displays from TCL, Hisense, Sony, or Samsung.

Alongside its OLEDs at CES, LG also revealed its new Micro RGB evo LED TV. RGB LED technology uses clusters of red, green, and blue LEDs as backlights instead of just the blue LEDs used in traditional mini-LED TVs. This potentially allows for better color accuracy and purity with exceptional brightness. And while the TV looks beautiful in person and boasts impressive specs including 100 percent area of the BT.2020, DCI-P3, and Adobe RGB color gamuts, it almost feels as though LG is releasing an RGB LED TV because everyone else is, too.

It doesn’t help that just after LG announced the Micro RGB evo, LG Display released a series of four short YouTube videos calling out potential issues with RGB TVs and declaring that OLED is still superior. LG Display and LG Electronics are separate companies, with the latter being a major shareholder in the former. LG Display, as the manufacturer of the majority of the world’s OLED panels including all of those made by LG Electronics, would like you to buy an OLED TV. But publishing those videos right after one of your main clients announced its own RGB LED TV was an interesting move.

Still, regardless of the other TVs it makes, LG is the OLED company and will likely continue to focus on the technology for the foreseeable future. The question is: Will it miss the opportunity to pivot to whatever technology inevitably overtakes OLED?

Samsung: unobtrusively everywhere

The most obvious example of Samsung’s strategy is The Frame, a TV that’s designed not to look like a TV and spend most of its time showing art instead of movies. Its picture quality is not amazing, but it uses a matte screen that reduces distracting reflections, allowing it to blend into the decor.

But the strategy also extends to Samsung’s 2026 flagship TV, the S95H, which will include a metal frame around the bezel that is reminiscent of a picture frame and (for the first time on an OLED) access to the Samsung Art Store. The S95 Series includes a glare-free screen — first introduced on Samsung OLEDs in 2024 — that scatters reflections quite well, and the lower-tier S90 has an anti-reflective screen that does a good job of this too.

Outside of TVs that don’t look like TVs, Samsung’s thing seems to be trying to be everything to everybody. The company has sold the most TVs globally for nearly two decades, which obviously means it’s giving a vast number of people the TV they want, whatever it is — except they all include Samsung’s laggy and frustrating Tizen OS, which I doubt anyone’s asking for. It offers a wide range of panel technology, from the S95 and S90 QD-OLEDs (provided by Samsung Display and the same ones used by Sony QD-OLED TVs) to all types of LED TVs, although details on the 2026 models are sparse. QD-OLEDs add a layer of quantum dots — particles that convert light from one color to another, depending on the size of the dots — which create red and green light from the blue emissive OLED layer. Quantum dots improve brightness and color accuracy, and not just in OLEDs — LED TVs can use them too (Samsung calls those QLED TVs).

In addition, Samsung has expanded its Micro RGB LED line (with the 115-inch first released in 2025 for $30,000) in sizes from 55 to 115 inches. Like LG, Samsung refers to them as Micro RGB LED because of the size of the LEDs, but there’s no official specification that makes an RGB LED TV micro or mini. I don’t think RGB LED TV prices will be low enough for even the 55-inch model to be a feasible addition to most homes this year.

With the amount of TV options (not to mention appliances), Samsung is the whole-home lifestyle brand that wants to help you stay connected — while showing you ads on your fridge.

TCL: the next major player

For years, TCL and Hisense traded blows: Which could make the brighter TV or the bigger TV? TCL released a 115-inch TV, and Hisense put out a 116-inch model. Their sights were firmly locked on one another, and both were firmly in the midrange, a level below Sony, Samsung, and LG.

But in 2025 TCL started to think bigger. Instead of aiming to be the best midrange TV manufacturer, it’s looking to be the best and biggest TV manufacturer, period. I think it started with the release of the QM9K mini-LED TV toward the end of last year, which had the price and performance to lift it into the premium market. It wasn’t so much meant to dominate the market as make a statement that TCL was ready to compete with Sony and its Bravia 9 mini-LED TV.

That plan was blown wide open two weeks ago when Sony and TCL announced plans for a joint venture. TCL doesn’t want to just compete with Sony on TVs; it wants to take over Sony TVs. Even though details of that partnership still haven’t been decided, and it might not come to pass, it’s obvious TCL is no longer only focused on Hisense.

While TCL is planning to come out with mini-RGB LED TVs too, most of its focus is on an evolution of mini-LED technology with the X11L SQD-Mini LED TV (which we’ll have a review of in the next few weeks). Instead of using red, green, and blue LEDs for its backlight, the X11L will rely on blue LEDs with reformulated quantum dots and a newly developed color filter to achieve the same level of color coverage and brightness as RGB LED TVs without the drawbacks (as pointed out by LG Display above).

It will be interesting to see if the gamble to stick mostly with blue-backlit mini-LED TVs instead of the new RGB LED technology is the right call. But if it is, TCL could be a step ahead of the competition.

Sony: the brand in transition?

My impression of Sony today isn’t what it was just a couple of weeks ago. The potential of a partnership with TCL — one which sees TCL as the majority stakeholder — brings the future into question. While I remain cautiously optimistic that it will bring even better TVs from both companies, there’s plenty of history with other storied Japanese TV manufacturers losing their identities and becoming irrelevant.

One thing that is still true about Sony in 2026 is its place at the top of the TV hierarchy. The company has long been considered the premium of the premium due to its exceptional picture processing, high-end performance, and prices that are consistently higher than its competitors.

Sony, like LG, also has a Hollywood pedigree. Its cameras are used to film the content, it makes the most notable mastering monitor (which is capable of 4,000 nits), and of course there’s Sony Pictures, which produces a ton of major movies and television shows. The tagline for its Bravia line, “Cinema Is Coming Home,” emphasizes that production pipeline. It’s flexible on how it does that, with the Bravia 8 II QD-OLED TV (using panels from Samsung Display), Bravia 8 OLED TVs (with panels from LG Display), and mini-LED TVs like the Bravia 9 and some lower-end LED models that don’t compete well against similarly priced models from Hisense and TCL (with at least some panels from TCL CSOT).

We don’t know too many details about its plans for 2026 (Sony has stepped back from making announcements at CES for the past few years) but it is for sure that it will debut its “True RGB” LED TV in the spring that reportedly blows the excellent Sony Bravia 9 out of the water. It gives Sony three flagship TVs with three different technologies.

Hisense: the midrange innovator

Hisense has also been shifting its focus away from yearly battles with TCL to becoming more of an innovator, particularly in large TV sizes. The company has been beating others to announcements the past couple years, debuting the first RGB LED TV at CES 2025 and then this year showing its updated version, the Hisense USX116X. While other companies are promoting new RGB LED TVs, Hisense moved beyond that by adding a cyan LED to the backlight. It improves transitions between blue and green, limiting color crosstalk (an issue for the new RGB LED TVs), and can be used to reduce blue light output that can adversely affect your sleep.

Hisense also showed a new 163-inch MicroLED with an added yellow subpixel — so it seems it’s all about adding color to TVs. It says it’s to help the transitions between yellows and reds, but it’s also something that we’re all years away from experiencing in our homes (unless you have a large bare wall and six figures to burn).

Like Samsung, Hisense is hoping RGB LEDs take off in 2026. It will be releasing the UR9 and UR8 Series, which both use the technology, but beyond that details are scant. It feels as though Hisense is trying to discover exactly what kind of TV company it’s going to be. Apart from the RGB LED news, there’s no information yet about new mini-LED TVs under $1,500, and there’s no indication of when or if we’ll get that info from Hisense. Where TCL looks to have a distinct strategy moving forward, I’m a bit confused with what the year will hold for Hisense. Will it hold on to its midrange, affordable identity or, like TCL, push more into the premium market?

Technology naming conventions are confusing, and I don’t think that’s always unintended. Micro-LED has been the holy grail of TV tech for a while now. It’s emissive like an OLED and uses incredibly tiny LEDs in each red, green, and blue subpixel, which allows pixel-level color and brightness control like an OLED. But micro-LED can generate higher brightness with better power efficiency, has no concern about image retention, and will last longer than the organic materials in an OLED. It’s also still incredibly expensive to produce (it’s hard to get those LEDs so tiny), and because of that micro-LED TVs are expensive. Hisense and Samsung have models available for consumers, but they start at $100,000.

Despite the similar naming to micro-RGB LED, the two should not be confused. Micro and mini-RGB LED TVs do not have pixel-level color and brightness control, instead using the RGB LEDs in zones more similar to how mini-LEDs operate. They also still use a color filter to distinguish the distinct color from one pixel to the next. Is it a fascinating technology that has the potential to change TVs for the next few years? Absolutely. But it’s still another stopgap to our path to micro-LED in the future.

Vizio: the new phoenix of budget TVs?

I’ll be honest, I haven’t thought much about Vizio TVs over the past couple years. It once dominated the budget TV (and audio) market, but in the months leading up to its acquisition by Walmart in 2024 and the transition period after, the company slowly pulled out of most retailers as it became a Walmart brand. It was still selling TVs, but there weren’t any significant hardware releases in 2025.

But it looks like Vizio is back to try and be the budget TV of choice. Just recently, new mini-LED TVs — the first ever made by the company — showed up on Walmart’s website. There hasn’t been any official announcement, but Vizio’s website now has a splashy mini-LED landing page.

The timing could be perfect for Vizio. TCL and Hisense were the major budget brands, but their prices have slowly crept higher over the years. And with TCL now looking up toward the premium market and Hisense firmly standing as a midrange choice, the entry-level TV market is wide open. The new mini-LED TVs likely won’t be on the same level as TCL or Hisense, but they’ll almost certainly be way ahead of direct-lit or edge-lit LED TVs from Insignia, Westinghouse, or Toshiba that currently populate the sub-$500 price range. These Vizio TVs might end up being the best way to get a mini-LED TV in your home and could force other manufacturers to include the tech in budget TVs to compete.

It’s still early in the year, and there’s a lot we don’t know about all the TV lineups coming. And as evidenced by the Sony / TCL news, our perception of the TV world can change quickly. But each company still has its trajectory, whether it’s fully apparent to us or not. Part of the excitement of the industry is seeing if it goes where we expect it to, or veers off into unknown territory.