Katarzyna Petru
While OLED continues to dominate the premium monitor segment, the Chinese manufacturer HKC is attempting to reverse this trend. The company has showcased the world's first LCD monitor with RGB LED backlighting and local dimming, which aims to offer image quality that clearly exceeds the capabilities of traditional mini-LED panels.
The new solution resembles the first LCD TVs with RGB LED from years ago, but this time the technology is making its way into monitors. Instead of white LEDs with colour filters, the backlighting uses separate red, green, and blue diodes placed behind the LCD panel. The result? Significantly richer and cleaner colours that – according to HKC – are claimed to surpass not only mini-LED LCD but even QD-OLED.
The manufacturer claims over 98% coverage of the BT.2020 colour space and a full 100% of DCI-P3, which places the M10 Ultra among monitors designed for professional HDR work.
Nearly 5000 Light Control Zones
HKC has gone a step further than typical local dimming. The monitor offers around 1600 dimming zones, but since each zone consists of three independently controlled RGB LEDs, the company reports a total of 4788 "light control zones".
Of course, that's still far from OLED, where each pixel is a separate zone – at 4K resolution, we're talking about over 8.3 million points. Nevertheless, HKC presents RGB LED as a significant quality leap over mini-LED, particularly in terms of colour and precision of backlighting.
HKC M10 Ultra Specs
The monitor features a 32-inch display, a resolution of 3840 × 2160, a refresh rate of 165 Hz (or 330 Hz at 1080p), and a peak brightness of up to 1600 nits. In full-screen mode, the brightness is expected to reach around 1000 nits, enabling realistic work with HDR materials. HKC also claims that the RGB LED allows for up to 20% lower energy consumption compared to traditional mini-LED monitors.
On board, there are:
2 × DisplayPort 2.1
2 × HDMI 2.1
USB-C with power delivery up to 98 W
The manufacturer has not disclosed the exact type of LCD panel used.
For now, only China
The HKC M10 Ultra will initially be released in the Chinese market. The price has not yet been announced, but the very fact of a commercial launch suggests that RGB LED LCD technology is ready for the consumer market. So one can expect that in the near future more manufacturers will adopt similar solutions, trying to challenge OLEDs in the high-end segment.
