Katarzyna Petru
While OLED increasingly dominates the premium monitor segment, the Chinese manufacturer HKC is trying to reverse this trend. The company has presented the world's first LCD monitor with RGB LED backlighting and zone dimming, which aims to offer image quality that clearly surpasses the capabilities of classic 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 color filters, the backlighting features separate red, green, and blue diodes, placed behind the LCD matrix. The result? Much richer and clearer colors, which – according to HKC – are said to outperform not only mini-LED LCD but even QD-OLED.
The manufacturer claims coverage of over 98% of the BT.2020 color space and a full 100% of DCI-P3, placing the M10 Ultra among monitors intended for professional work with HDR.
Almost 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 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 4K resolution, we are talking about over 8.3 million points. Nevertheless, HKC presents RGB LED as a clear quality leap compared to mini-LED, especially in terms of color and backlight precision.
Specification of HKC M10 Ultra
The monitor has a 32 inches, 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 fullscreen mode, the brightness is supposed 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 classic mini-LED monitors.
The following inputs are included:
2 × DisplayPort 2.1
2 × HDMI 2.1
USB-C with power delivery up to 98 W
The manufacturer did not disclose which exact type of LCD panel was used.
For now, only China
The HKC M10 Ultra will initially debut in the Chinese market. The price has not yet been announced, but the very fact of its 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.
