TCL 4 Series/S455 2022  TV Review

The overall design is pretty basic; it looks good but isn't very premium. It has thin bezels on three sides, but there's a bit of dead space between the side bezels and the first pixels, which is a bit distracting.

The V-shaped feet are wide-set, so they take up a lot of space, and you'll need a large cabinet for the larger sizes if you're not planning on wall-mounting it.

Footprint of the 65-inch model: 50.8" x 11.6". The feet lift the TV about 2.6" above the table, so most soundbars don't fit without blocking the IR receiver for the remote and part of the screen.

The inputs face to the side, but they're housed in a central electronics box, making them difficult to access if you wall-mount the TV. There's no cable management at all.

The build quality is just okay. It's built using basic materials and cheap plastic, so even though there are no serious issues with it, it doesn't feel very solid overall.

The TCL 4 Series Roku TV has fantastic native contrast, but it lacks a local dimming feature to improve its dynamic range. Overall, simple scenes that are fairly dim look good with deep, uniform blacks. When there are mixed scenes with bright highlights and dark areas, black levels are raised considerably, and dark areas look washed out.

This TV doesn't have a local dimming feature, so there's no blooming around bright objects or subtitles in dark scenes.

This TV doesn't have a local dimming feature, so it can't adjust the backlight of individual zones to brighten up highlights without impacting the rest of the image. But this means that there's no distracting flicker or brightness changes as bright highlights move between zones.

Switching to Game Mode makes no noticeable difference in dark scene performance.

Unfortunately, this TV has poor peak brightness in HDR. It's not bright enough to deliver an impactful HDR experience, as bright highlights don't stand out or look very realistic.

These measurements are after calibrating the HDR white point with the following settings:

• Picture Mode: Dark HDR
• TV Brightness: Brighter
• Brightness: 100
• Contrast: 100
• Color Temperature: Warm

There's no noticeable difference in brightness between the regular HDR peak brightness measurements and the peak brightness in 'Game' Mode.

These measurements are after calibrating the HDR white point with the following settings:

• Picture Mode: Dark HDR
• Game Mode: On
• TV Brightness: Brighter
• Brightness: 100
• Contrast: 100
• Color Temperature: Warm

The TCL 4 Series Roku TV tracks the PQ EOTF incredibly well. Near blacks are boosted a bit, causing a loss of fine shadow details, but midtones display properly. Bright scenes are cut off, unfortunately, as the TV clips bright highlights, causing a loss of fine details.

This TV has mediocre peak brightness in SDR. It's bright enough to overcome glare in most moderately lit rooms, but not if you have a lot of windows or bright lights. There's no variation in peak brightness with different scenes.

These measurements are after calibration with the following settings:

• Picture Mode: Movie
• Brightness: 100
• Contrast: 100
• Color Temperature: Warm
• Gamut: 2.2

The TCL 4 Series Roku TV has a fair color gamut in HDR. It has good coverage of the DCI-P3 color space used by most current HDR content, so most content is displayed properly and looks realistic. Coverage of the wider Rec. 2020 color space is disappointing, though, as it can't display a wide color gamut and tone maps more aggressively, meaning content mastered in this color space appears dull, and there's a loss of fine detail in scenes that contain highly saturated colors. If you want a budget-friendly TV that displays a wide range of colors, look into the Vizio M6 Series Quantum 2022.

This TV has mediocre color volume. It's mainly limited by its incomplete color gamut in both DCI-P3 and Rec. 2020, but due to its low peak brightness, colors aren't very bright. Despite its high contrast ratio, it can't display dark, saturated colors very well.

The TCL 4 Series Roku TV has just okay accuracy in SDR before calibration. The white balance is excellent, with no noticeable issues, and gamma is close to the 2.2 target, but most scenes are a bit too bright. Unfortunately, color accuracy is bad, with noticeable issues in every color. Colors are noticeably off, even with most real content.

This TV has excellent accuracy after calibration, but it's worse than most similar TVs. The white balance is easy to calibrate and looks fantastic after calibration. There are no noticeable issues with shades of gray, and gamma follows the 2.2 target perfectly. The color temperature is perfect. Unfortunately, colors are still noticeably off, and the TV can't display them properly. These issues make it nearly impossible to improve color accuracy on this TV.

You can see the full calibration settings for this TV here.

The gray uniformity is just okay. There's significant vignetting, as the corners are much darker than the center. There's also a disappointing amount of dirty screen effect in the center, which is distracting when watching sports or displaying anything with large areas of uniform color.

The black uniformity on this TV is incredible. There are no signs of backlight bleed, and the background around the test cross is extremely uniform, with no bright or warm spots.

Unfortunately, the TCL 4 Series Roku TV has a disappointing viewing angle, so it's not ideal for a wide seating arrangement, as anyone sitting off-center will see a washed-out image. There's also a significant color shift when looking at the screen off-center, so it's not ideal for use as a PC monitor, as the sides of the screen shift in color. If you're looking for a comparable TV with a better viewing angle, look at the LG UR9000.

The reflection handling is decent. The semi-gloss coating reduces the intensity of direct reflections a bit, but they're still noticeable, so it's not ideal for use in a bright room.

The TCL 4 Series Roku TV has good gradient handling in HDR. There's some noticeable banding in all shades, and it's worse in shades of gray, green, and blue, but it's not too bad.

Unfortunately, this TV has poor low-quality content smoothing. Even with all processing settings enabled, macro-blocking and pixelization are still very noticeable. On the other hand, fine details are still preserved well.

This TV can't upscale low-resolution content very well. Even with the best settings, the image is a bit soft overall, and hardcoded text is a bit blurry.

The optimal sharpness settings for low-resolution or low-bitrate content, with no over-sharpening, are as follows:

• Sharpness: 30

This TV uses a BGR subpixel layout, which is fine for video content and games. Unfortunately, this reduces text clarity if you plan on using the TV as a PC monitor, but there are ways to work around it, so it's not a dealbreaker. You can read more about this here.

The TCL 4 Series Roku TV has a decent response time. Transitions to and from dark shades are significantly longer than bright shades, causing a long trail behind fast-moving objects with darker shades. Brighter shades look a bit better overall, and there's no overshoot in any transition, which is great.

Unfortunately, this TV isn't always flicker-free. The exact setting depends on the picture mode you're using, but a brightness setting of 18/100 or lower with the 'Movie' Picture Mode causes it to flicker at a low frequency. This flicker causes distracting duplications in motion and can cause headaches in people sensitive to flicker. Thankfully, this is pretty dim, corresponding to a brightness of about 90 cd/m², which is too dim for most viewing environments, so it's not really an issue. If you're particularly sensitive to flicker, check out the Samsung CU7000/CU7000D, a comparable TV with much better performance in this regard.

There's no backlight-strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion, on this TV. It always flickers at a fixed frequency unless you have the backlight above about 18/100. This low-frequency flicker acts similarly to a BFI feature and helps reduce persistence blur, but it also causes a noticeable image duplication.

This TV doesn't have an optional motion interpolation feature.

Due to the relatively slow response time, there's very little stutter when watching movies or other low frame rate content. It's still a bit noticeable in slow panning shots, but it's better than most TVs.

This TV automatically removes judder from 24p sources, including Blu-ray players and streaming sticks with a Match Frame Rate feature or from the native apps. Sadly, it doesn't remove judder from devices that send a 60Hz signal, including most cable boxes.

This TV is limited to a fixed 60Hz refresh rate. It doesn't have a variable refresh rate feature, so you'll see more tearing in games.

The input lag is incredibly low, delivering a smooth, responsive gaming or desktop experience if you're using it as a PC monitor.

Most common resolutions are supported, but only at 60Hz. 1440p is supported, but you have to force it either through a custom resolution on a PC or by manually setting the resolution on some game consoles. Chroma 4:4:4 signals are displayed properly with 1080p or 4k signals but not with 1440p signals. This is essential for clear text from a PC.

This TV doesn't support everything the PS5 has to offer, as it's limited to a 60Hz refresh rate, and it doesn't support a variable refresh rate. It automatically switches to the low input lag 'Game' mode, as long as you have Auto Low Latency Mode enabled for the input you're using.

The TCL 4 Series Roku TV can't take full advantage of the Xbox Series S|X, as it's limited to a 60Hz refresh rate and doesn't support a variable refresh rate. It automatically switches to the low input lag 'Game' mode, as long as you have Auto Low Latency Mode enabled for the input you're using.

Unfortunately, the HDMI ports are limited to HDMI 2.0 bandwidth, and the tuner is limited to ATSC 1.0, so you can't stream 4k content over the air.

This TV supports eARC, allowing you to pass high-quality, uncompressed audio to a compatible receiver through an HDMI cable. Unfortunately, it doesn't support DTS audio formats, which is disappointing, as many Blu-rays use DTS for their main audio track. If you plan to watch Blu-ray movies, connecting your player directly to your audio receiver or soundbar is best.

Unfortunately, the TCL 4 Series Roku TV has a sub-par frequency response. The low-frequency extension (LFE) is very high, so there's very little thump or rumble in its bass. The frequency response isn't well balanced above the LFE, either, so dialogue is a bit muddy, and there's no room correction feature. It doesn't get very loud, either, so it's not a good choice for a noisy environment.

This TV has decent distortion performance. There's a bit of noticeable distortion in dialogue, but it doesn't increase much at max volume.

This TV runs the Roku TV smart interface, which is very simple, with fewer animations and a simpler user interface than you'll get with more premium TVs. It's very fast, though, and easy to use.

Unfortunately, like all Roku devices and most TVs on the market, there are large ads on the home page. You can opt out of suggested content and personalized ads, but this doesn't change the number of ads you see; they'll just be less personalized.

The Roku app store has a great selection of apps you can download, and they run smoothly for the most part.

This TV comes with the same basic remote as all recent Roku TVs. There's no mic for voice control on the remote itself, but you can use voice control through the Roku app on your phone. It allows you to change inputs, launch apps, and search for content. The app also features a private listening feature, which lets you transfer audio from the native apps to your phone's speaker or connected headphones. Many of the advanced picture settings are only available through the Roku companion app.

There's a single button below the TCL branding on the bottom bezel that you can use to change inputs or power the TV on/off.

• Power cable
• Remote
• 2x AAA batteries
• Manual