When a striker scores a goal, our brain distinguishes the green of the grass, the white of the lines, the blue of the sky, the red of a shirt and the thousands of skin tones of the players. It seems like the television is reproducing millions of different colors. But, if we could get close enough to the screen, reality is very different and it is only using three: red, green and blue. Everything else is an extraordinarily sophisticated “illusion.” These three colors form one of the best-known acronyms in technology: RGB (red, green, blue). And also one of the most important in evolutionary biology.
In our retina, humans do not have sensors capable of detecting all imaginable colors. We only have three types of cones, cells sensitive to long, medium and short wavelengths, which we usually identify as red, green and blue. Our brain continually combines information from these three receptors to build the entire color palette we experience.
That’s why a screen doesn’t need to emit a million different colors. All you have to do is carefully control the intensity of three small light points: one red, one green and one blue. When all three shine with the same intensity we perceive white. If only red is illuminated, this is the only color we see and if they are mixed in different proportions, millions of different shades appear.
This idea, which has been the basis of practically all screens in the world for decades, is precisely the protagonist of one of Samsung’s main novelties for its premium range of televisions in 2026: Micro RGB technology, a system that aims to take advantage of those three fundamental colors with a precision never seen before to achieve brighter, more realistic images and with a much wider color range. The key is, again, evolution.
In many current televisions, the light initially comes from a white backlight that subsequently passes through color filters. It is a very efficient system, but part of that light is lost along the way and the colors never become completely pure. Micro RGB technology changes that approach. Instead of starting from a single white light source, it uses a backlight made up of independent red, green and blue light emitters.
In nature, objects are visible because light hits them and some bounce off (the ones we see) and others are “swallowed” by the object. These televisions do exactly that: they directly emit the color corresponding to our eyes. That is, each of the three fundamental colors is born directly from the light source itself. The result is a wider color gamut, a higher level of brightness and potentially much more accurate color reproduction. In a way, It is the difference between painting by mixing already diluted watercolors or having pure pigments from the beginning.
Why does it matter so much during a match? Football is one of the most difficult contents for any television. Not only because the ball moves at high speed. Also because huge green surfaces, brightly lit areas, intense shadows, saturated colored t-shirts and close-ups with very delicate skin tones appear simultaneously. When the range of colors is limited, some greens end up looking too similar to each other, t-shirts lose intensity or very bright areas end up “washing out” part of the image.
With Micro RGB Precision Color 100 technology, Samsung has managed to ensure that each of the three colors in this initial palette emits light in its full capacity, expanding the available color space and improving chromatic fidelity even with respect to the original content. Added to this is Micro RGB HDR Pro, responsible for increasing the contrast between the darkest and brightest areas to preserve details that would normally be lost.
But there is another much more everyday problem: reflections. It doesn’t matter how good a television is if a window turns the stadium grass into a mirror. That is why Samsung maintains its Glare Free technology, a surface designed to disperse ambient light and reduce reflections without reducing color intensity. This is made possible through the use of specialized films or chemical coatings that create microscopic textures on the screen. When light hits this texture, it disperses at multiple angles instead of bouncing off as a concentrated glow. The objective is simple: that the image depends on the television and not on where the lamp in the living room is located.
Finally comes the ubiquitous novelty in software, AI. The new Micro RGB AI Engine Pro continuously analyzes on-screen content to adjust brightness, contrast, color and sound. In the case of football, AI Football Mode Pro attempts to automatically identify plays to optimize the clarity of the ball, improve the feeling of fluidity during quick movements and adapt the sound depending on whether the user prefers to hear the commentators or the stadium atmosphere more clearly. It basically works the same way as many smartphone cameras that take 10 images and combine them to create one “perfect” photo. Only in this case you have to add sound and movement.
Human beings have three types of cones, but many animals, such as birds, have four, they are tetrachromatic beings and not only see the RGB set, they also switch to violet or ultraviolet. Maybe the next World Cup will present us with RGBUV technology and we will not only be able to see the usual colorsbut also the heat that comes off of the players, the trail they leave when they launch themselves across the grass and even the “chromatic sigh” left by a ball heading towards the net. It’s not impossible: there are teams that are already in the round of 16 and it seems like a miracle.