LeEco Super4 TV REVIEW

The L554UCNN has the widest stand of a 55" TV we have seen. The legs support the TV well and are made of aluminum.

Footprint of the 55" TV stand: 10.6" x 47.8"

The rear of the TV is quite simple. The top half is brushed aluminum, with visible screws holding the back together firmly. At the middle-top of the TV is a USB socket for webcam support. The cables are still easy to access if mounted to a wall.

The borders are thinner than average and look very good. They feel quality with a machined aluminum edge.

The Super 4 is one of the thinnest TVs we have reviewed, and looks sleek from the side.

The bottom of the TV gets noticeably warm to the touch after it has been on a long time, however this shouldn't be a problem during normal use. The backlight appears to be edge lit from the bottom as that is where it is hottest. The bottom is lined with vents to help keep it cool.

The build quality of the X55 is great. Torx screws on the back allow easily access to the internals if required, and all the machining feels high quality.

The contrast ratio is excellent for this LeEco TV. When set to our calibration goal of 100 cd/m², blacks are very deep and will provide a good movie experience, especially when placed in a dark room.

There is no local dimming feature on the LeEco Super4 TV. The video is for reference only.

Decent SDR peak brightness. The TV remains a constant ~300 cd/m² regardless of the content shown, which is good. This is bright enough for a moderately lit room, but in a bright room the TV may appear too dim.

Mediocre HDR peak brightness. While the measurements are nearly identical to the SDR brightness, HDR content features 1000-4000 cd/m² highlights, so a brighter TV is required to get the best experience. While this TV can't come close to producing the full brightness of those highlights, most of the scene in HDR content is below 200 cd/m², so the brightness of this TV is still passable for watching HDR.

The gray uniformity of this LeEco is average. The top half of the screen is a bit darker than the bottom, and two large dark vertical bands also go from the top to the bottom. The bottom edge of the screen also seems a bit brighter than the rest of the TV.

On the 5% gray uniformity picture, you can see more easily that the bottom edge is brighter than the rest of the screen. You can also see that both right and left sides seem to be more bright, but this is due to the relatively narrow viewing angle of this TV.

The viewing angle of the Super4 is bad. Its picture quality worsens rapidly at an angle, even for a VA TV. Blacks become grayer and colors change after only a small angle, although the brightness change is not as bad.

The black uniformity of this LeEco TV is ordinary. Some clouding can be seen in the bottom of the screen where the edge backlight is situated, but this is mostly visible while displaying our black uniformity test pattern. When watching regular TV content, almost no clouding can be seen.

The TV is quite good at handling reflections. For an average room it works well, but for a very bright living room it may be an issue. It has a semi-gloss finish which works to diffuse light directly on the screen.

The pre-calibration color accuracy is good on this LeEco TV. The white balance is a bit high, though, but not as bad as seen on other budget TV. The gamma is not flat, but it still has an overall value of 2.2, which is still good. Finally, the color reproduction out of the box is not bad, and overall, for most people, this TV could be used as is, out of the box when set to the right picture mode.

The post-calibration color accuracy is excellent, and the calibration process was fast and easy to do. The TV as a 2 points and 10 points white balance calibration. Both were responsive and provided good enough control to make it a simple process. Even though it does not have a more advanced 'Color Management Systems', we ended up with a pretty accurate calibration.

You can see our recommended settings here.

The 480p upscaling of the Super4 is very aggressive with noise reduction, resulting in a very soft image. It still looks quite good though.

Upscaling of 720p content such as cable is good. Detail is preserved and few issues can be seen.

Higher quality content such as Blu-rays are very clear.

Content at the native resolution of 4k such as UHD Blu-rays looks great. No issues can be seen.

The Super4 can display a wide color gamut, so deep colors in HDR content will be shown properly. However there is a problem with the tone mapping of very bright highly saturated colors, they sometimes clip and become a totally different color. This is shown in this color gamut test done at a higher brightness, the extreme blue point turns orange. Because of this we performed the color gamut testing at a less bright stimulus value of 70 rather than our usual 75, though this should not affect the scores very much relative to other TVs.

Update 05/08/2017: The color gamut has been remeasured with the newest firmware update. The tone mapping has changed slightly (and the clipping error still exists) but the results remain about the same.

This TV has a decent DCI P3 color volume, so HDR colors will be properly represented at various brightness levels. The TV's high contrast ratio allows it to show very dark colors better than most TVs. However this TV has poor Rec 2020 color volume so HDR content that uses the Rec 2020 color space will not have accurate deep color.

Update 05/08/2017: The Super4 has been tested with the newest firmware update and the color volume remains about the same.

Overall, the Super4 TV can display our gradient test pattern pretty smoothly. There are only some imperfections in the dark greens and in the darker grayscale portion, which is not bad.

This TV does not present any image retention at all. Even right after the 10 minutes burn-in scene, no remnant of the static logo could be seen. This is in line with other VA TVs, which are usually retention-free.

We don't expect VA panels to experience permanent image retention, as the VA panel in our long-term test appears immune.

Motion blur is great. The response time is quick, resulting in only a short trail following moving objects. Transitions to the 20% level take longer than the other transitions, but this is unlikely to be an issue.

The Super4 uses PWM at 180Hz to dim the backlight, starting at 99/100 backlight setting. Lowering the setting shortens the duty cycle, while amplitude lowers slightly. Backlight PWM helps clear up motion slightly, but results in duplications following moving objects. We haven't seen any other TVs with a frequency of 180Hz, but it provides good performance at an even multiple of the 60Hz frame rate but high enough not to be noticeable for most people.

The LeEco has no options to reduce its flicker frequency, although its 180 Hz PWM backlight does help somewhat to make motion clearer.

The Super 4 has a 60Hz panel, and can interpolate lower refresh rate content.

The LeEco Super4 is great at displaying content without stutter. Although the response time is quick, it helps to blur the transition between frames to reduce stutter. It may be noticeable for movies (especially for slow panning shows) but isn't an issue for sports.

The LeEco Super4 TV is not able to display movies without judder under any of the tested frame rates, unfortunately. Movies playing from a 24p source like a Blu-rays player or a native streaming app, and from 60p sources like cable box all suffer from judder. Note that few peoples can notice judder, though, so this is more important for people that are sensitive to it.

The Super4 doesn't support variable refresh rate (FreeSync or G-Sync) and has a 60Hz panel.

When in game mode the input lag is lower than average and should be good enough for all but the most competitive gamers. All three HDMI ports have the same input lag. The input lag varies by +/- 5 ms every time the TV switches to and from the HDMI input.

Note that when the TV switches to HDR mode it retains the settings from the previous mode it was in, so when gaming in HDR be sure you are in game mode before playing HDR content as you will not be able to switch into game mode once HDR mode is activated.

Although the TV could accept 4:4:4 color as an input it did not display it properly. This test image shows how the TV was unable to show all the gaps between the lines for some color patterns. However this is only a concern when using the TV as a PC monitor while displaying text.

To play 4K @ 60 Hz the HDMI input in use needs to be set to 4K@60Hz Compatible in the TV's Input settings.

The TV also includes a PC input (VGA with 3.5mm AUX). One of the USB ports is located on the top of the TV for a webcam.

All three HDMI inputs support HDR and HDMI 2.0 at full bandwidth which is good when using multiple HDR capable devices.

Poor frequency response. The Super4 produces very little bass and doesn't get very loud either. The low-end cut-off of 180Hz and maximum volume of 85.5dB SPL are both quite poor, even for a TV. On the plus side, there doesn't seem to be much compression and pumping happening even under maximum load.

Average distortion performance. The overall amount of harmonic distortion at 70dB and 80dB SPL is quite low. There is, however, a little bit of rise in distortion under maximum load, but remaining within an acceptable range.

There's little lag when navigating through the interface, but the animations are often choppy, especially in the home screen. We also experienced some picture glitches during normal use. Most were solved by turning the TV off then back on, but one glitch with the YouTube app required the TV to be factory reset before it was fixed.

No ads appear in the interface of the TV, although the top row of the homescreen contains featured content from sources such as Google Play Movies and YouTube, some of which is not free. Apps downloaded from the Google Play Store may contain ads, but they can be prevented from showing personalized ads by changing the ads settings in the About section of the Super4's settings.

Lots of apps come preinstalled such as Netflix, YouTube and Hulu. Many more apps can be downloaded from the included Google Play Store. Also included are LeEco Ecosystem apps like LeZone and My LeEco.

The included remote has all the standard TV buttons as well as a Netflix button that switches to the app, a LeEco button that switches to the "Le" app, and a microphone button which activates voice control. The remote needs to be paired with the TV for some of its features to work, such as voice control.

Unlike most TVs, the LeEco Super4 doesn't have any easily accessible controls on the TV. There is only a power switch on the back of the TV to physically shut-off the power (the LeEco symbol in the picture is a screw hole cover).