Katarzyna Petru
While OLED increasingly dominates the premium monitor segment, the Chinese manufacturer HKC is attempting to reverse this trend. The company has introduced the world's first LCD monitor with RGB LED backlighting and local dimming, which aims to offer picture quality clearly exceeding that of traditional mini-LED panels.
The new solution resembles the first LCD televisions with RGB LED from years ago, but this time the technology has been adapted for monitors. Instead of white LEDs with colour filters, the backlighting employs separate red, green, and blue diodes placed behind the LCD panel. The result? Significantly richer and clearer colours, which – according to HKC – are said to surpass not just mini-LED LCD, but even QD-OLED.
The manufacturer claims coverage of over 98% of the BT.2020 colour space and a full 100% DCI-P3, which positions the M10 Ultra among monitors intended for professional HDR work.
Almost 5000 light control zones
HKC has gone a step further than typical local dimming. The monitor offers around 1600 dimming zones, but as each zone consists of three independently controlled RGB LEDs, the company states a total of 4788 "light control zones".
Of course, this is still far from OLED, where each pixel is a separate zone – at a resolution of 4K, we're talking about over 8.3 million points. Nevertheless, HKC presents RGB LED as a distinct quality leap over mini-LED, particularly in terms of colour and precision of backlighting.
Specification of the HKC M10 Ultra
The monitor has a 32-inch screen, 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 said to reach around 1000 nits, which is intended to enable 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.
Included are:
2 × DisplayPort 2.1
2 × HDMI 2.1
USB-C with power delivery up to 98 W
The manufacturer did not disclose exactly which type of LCD panel has been used.
For now, only China
The HKC M10 Ultra will initially be launched in the Chinese market. The price has not yet been announced, but the mere fact of a commercial launch suggests that RGB LED LCD technology is ready for the consumer market. Therefore, it can be expected that in the near future more manufacturers will adopt similar solutions, trying to challenge OLEDs in the high-end segment.
