Many display companies have tried to establish displays that can render more than red, green and blue primaries, but so far, without long-term commercial success. CES 2026 showed a revival of this trend. Specific examples included Hisense adding a cyan LED to its RGB backlight for LCD TVs; Hisense adding a yellow LED to its direct view LED video modules; Skyworth adding a second deep-red quantum dot as a potential health benefit; and 6P Color offering a complete ecosystem solution.

The motivation for multi-primary displays – i.e. ones that go beyond RGB, is that current standards like DCI-P3 and BT.2020 only cover part of what the human eye can see. What’s missing are some yellows, magentas and a lot of cyan colors. While creating displays that can offer a wider color gamut may be a necessary first step, commercialization will require a complete ecosystem to change – from content creation, to mastering, to encoding and distribution – a big ask. And it is unclear if creatives see a huge need for a bigger color palette.

Nevertheless, companies are forging ahead. When Sharp introduced their Quattron LCD many years ago with a yellow color filter, the idea was to get more luminance out of the LCD while enabling better rendition of gold, yellow and brass content. However, the TV was driven with white LEDs so the yellow pixel was driven with a mixture of red and green signal, which many think added no real value to the image. The product was later discontinued.

Now Hisense has added a cyan LED to the RGB backlight, but it is unclear if they plan to use an RGB color filter of RGBC color filter. If only RGB, then the benefit of the cyan emitter may be limited as blue and cyan light would need to pass through the blue filter, which often has cross talk into the green color filter. If there is a true RGBC color filter and a dedicated cyan emitter, a wider color gamut is possible, but processing will still be needed to create a cyan primary from an RGB signal.

For the direct-view microLED product, adding yellow will help increase the luminance of the display and should also help with rendering yellow, gold and brass colors. Maybe it can create more natural sunlight for virtual production applications too. In this case, there is no color filter to be concerned with, but additional processing is also needed here too, so will the picture be accurate?

Nanosys revealed they are supplying a deep-red (650 nm) quantum dot to Skyworth for a TV launched in China. Some research has suggested that exposure to such deep red light is absorbed by cell mitochondria to stimulate energy production along with a reduction in skin wrinkles and retina benefits. However, it seems the research in this area is still evolving so it is unclear what radiance levels, wavelengths and exposure times are best. Can watching TV at 6 to 10 feet offer any benefits? We don’t know yet.

Another company, 6P Color is one I have been following since 2018, and as the name implies, they have been working to develop an entire ecosystem around multi-primary color systems. They were at CES this year, and given the other multi-primary developments, their timing could not have been better.

At CES, 6P Color showed a projector demo using 6 primaries (red, green, blue, cyan, yellow and amber) along with a RGBC direct-view LED display each showing content that originated as RGB primary video and had been processed to take advantage of the wider color gamut the two displays could offer.

In a wide-ranging conversation following CES, 6P Color highlighted the key elements of their proposed solution, as summarized in the slide below.

Under new management, 6P Color has evolved over the past two years, with Chief Scientist Blake Birmingham explaining the importance of encoding data against the human visual system rather than RGB primaries, which is realized in their new file format, Full Color Range (.FCR).

6P Color’s .FCR format uses colorimetric encoding grounded in LMS cone fundamentals and an advanced model of the human visual system. This provides an absolute reference for color, one tied to human physiology rather than arbitrary device primaries. Traditional formats like YUV and YCbCr, while separating luminance from chroma, remain mathematically referenced to specific RGB primaries and encode positions within a defined gamut rather than the full human visual volume.

.FCR format decouples color from both acquisition and display devices; on the capture side, camera data maps into .FCR’s absolute color space without being constrained to a target gamut, deferring gamut decisions until later in the pipeline. On the display side, .FCR carries no assumptions about what primaries will render the image, so mapping to a specific display (whether 3P, 4P, 5P, or beyond) happens only at the endpoint. Color exists as an absolute quantity throughout the chain, with device-specific conversions occurring only at the boundaries.

Birmingham outlined two application scenarios. In one, content creators can use the new tools 6P Color has developed to master and encode content using .FCR to preserve color without specifying rendering primaries (or maybe even a white point). The .FCR metadata sits in a sidecar, just like HDR 10+ and Dolby Vision metadata is carried today. Once decoded at the display device, 6P utilizes a Neural Render Engine to evaluate the capabilities of the display hardware and performance capabilities to deliver a device-optimized color production. The Neural Render Engine can support RGB-only displays or ones with any combination of multi-primary capabilities. This engine can be embedded in hardware or software to do AI-based color, not image-based upscaling.

This is the ideal long-term goal of the team as this offers the best way to deliver creative intent all the way to the final display device. “We want to take the open EXR file format, the full raw content data, and keep it true all the way through from record to edit to distribution to display,” explained Birmingham. But to realize this vision requires a critical mass of multi-primary displays, adoption of mastering tools, and desire from creatives to invest in this added capability.

Alternatively, 6P Color offers a path for already-rendered RGB content to be intelligently mapped to RGB-only or multi-primary displays, again, using their Neural Render Engine. Display makers already try to optimize RGB content to the capabilities of a particular display, so the challenge is mapping RGB content to a multi-primary display. Here, there are many ways to potentially do this mapping, so the question becomes: who should control this: the content creator, the TV maker, or the viewer?

Letting the viewer decide is an interesting option. According to 6P Color, they could implement a calibration procedure where the viewer looks at image to express their preferences, which then drives the color rendering optimization decisions, potentially optimized for different types of content like movies or sports, for example. They call this concept “personal color range.”

So, will we see a new phase of interest in color beyond RGB? Only time will tell, but there is certainly activity on the display side, but questions remain about the interest of the creative community and the cost of implementing an upgraded color infrastructure.