TCL Q550G  TV Review

The TCL 65Q550G looks pretty good for a budget TV. It's a simple design, with thin bezels on all three sides and a slightly thicker bezel at the bottom.

The V-shaped feet are very basic. They're set near the ends of the TV, so if you're not planning on wall-mounting the TV, you'll need a large cabinet for the larger sizes. Sadly, the feet have no alternative position to accommodate a smaller table. The feet only lift the TV about 2.8 inches, so most soundbars can't fit in front of it without blocking a portion of the screen.

Footprint of the 65-inch stand: 50.2" x 12.1"

The back of the TV is very plain and looks cheap. The inputs are housed in a larger section on the back, near the center of the TV, so they're difficult to access if it's wall-mounted. There are clips on both sides to help with cable management.

The TV has okay build quality. It wobbles a bit on its feet, but it's nothing to worry about. There's a bit of flex in the metallic upper section of the back, with more noticeable flex in the middle section of the back around the VESA mounts, but this is common and won't cause any issues.

Our unit has a minor pinch in the bottom middle of the screen, which is noticeable in dark scenes.

The TV has okay contrast. Its native contrast is great, but it lacks a local dimming feature, so blacks are deep in dim and dark scenes, but they become raised and washed out when bright highlights are also on the screen. The newer TCL QM6K has much better contrast.

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

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

Switching to Game Mode doesn't result in any noticeable difference in dark scene performance.

The TCL Q5 has decent HDR peak brightness. It gets just bright enough for simple scenes in HDR to stand out, but since the TV lacks a local dimming feature and doesn't get as bright as it needs to for most HDR content, bright specular highlights don't pop.

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

• HDR Picture Mode: Movie
• Brightness: 100
• Contrast: 100
• Color Temperature: Warm -5
• Gamma: 2.2

The HDR brightness in Game Mode is decent, and there is no noticeable difference in brightness between Movie Mode and Game Mode.

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

• HDR Picture Mode: Game
• Brightness: 100
• Contrast: 100
• Color Temperature: Warm -5
• Gamma: 2.2

The PQ EOTF tracking on the TV is fantastic. Midtones are a little dimmer than they should be, and blacks are raised, but aside from that, the TV's brightness closely follows the curve and tracks the content creator's intent well. There's a sharp cutoff with content mastered at 600 and 1,000 nits, leading to a loss of bright detail. There is a smoother roll-off with content mastered at 4,000 nits, which preserves more fine details in really bright content.

The TV's SDR peak brightness is very good. It gets bright enough to fight glare in a well-lit room, and there's no variation in brightness across different scenes.

These measurements are after calibration with the following settings:

• Picture Mode: Movie
• Brightness: 100
• Contrast: 100
• Black Level: 50
• Dynamic Contrast: Off
• Black Stretch: Off
• Dynamic Brightness: Off
• Micro Contrast: Off
• Gamma: 2.2

The TV has a very good color gamut. It has fantastic coverage of the commonly used DCI-P3 color space, although its greens and yellows are undersaturated. The TV adequately covers the wider Rec. 2020 color space, but heavily saturated colors are inaccurate.

The TV has decent color volume in HDR. Unfortunately, it struggles to represent darker colors due to its lack of local dimming. It also doesn't display most colors at very high luminance levels. 

The TV has poor SDR pre-calibration accuracy. Its white balance is terrible, with significant accuracy errors throughout every range of gray except blacks. The TV's gamma is over-brightened compared to the reference target of 2.2. The TV's color accuracy is decent; saturated colors are mostly accurate, but undersaturated colors show a fair amount of inaccuracy. Thankfully, its color temperature is very close to the 6500K target, so it has neither a warm nor cool tint.

If you want a similar option with much better pre-calibration SDR accuracy, check out the 2024 TCL Q6/Q651G QLED.

The TV's accuracy after calibration is outstanding. It wasn't too hard to calibrate, but adjustments between 85 and 100 were stubborn and would barely do anything to affect the picture compared to adjustments between 1 and 84.

See our full calibration settings.

The TCL Q550G has decent gray uniformity. On a very dark or near-black screen, its uniformity is great. On brighter uniform colors, there's significant vignetting, banding, and dirty screen effect near the center of the screen. This is noticeable in content like hockey with its all-white rink, as the sides and corners of the scene are noticeably darker than the rest.

The TV's black uniformity is incredible, although there's some noticeable backlight bleed near the TV's bottom edge. Since there's no local dimming feature, blacks are a bit blueish and cloudy when highlights are on the screen. 

The TV's viewing angle is sub-par and isn't a good choice for wide seating arrangements. There's significant color shifting and brightness loss as you move off-center, and the image looks increasingly washed out as you move further away to the sides.

The TV's reflection handling is decent. It does an excellent job with indirect reflections, like when you have glare from a source that isn't directly facing the screen. With more direct light sources hitting the screen, like a window opposite the screen, reflections are very noticeable.

The TV has alright HDR gradient handling. There's noticeable banding in dark reds, dark greens, and dark blues, with especially noticeable banding in dark grays. Other color gradients fare better and have minimal banding.

The TV has inadequate low-quality content smoothing. While its detail preservation is good, there's significant macro-blocking in dark scenes.

The TCL Q5 has mediocre upscaling capabilities. It manages to preserve some details, and text is clear enough, but upscaled content looks a bit muddy overall.

Sharpness processing was calibrated with no over-sharpening for low-resolution or low-bitrate content, with the following setting:

• Sharpness: 15

The TV uses a BGR (Blue-Green-Red) subpixel layout instead of the traditional RGB layout. It doesn't cause any issues for video content, but if you plan to use it as a PC monitor, non-RGB subpixel layouts impact text clarity, and text looks slightly blurry. 

The TCL Q5 has a good response time. It does struggle a bit more when coming out of dark states, so there's some black smearing in dark transitions.

The TCL Q5 uses pulse width modulation (PWM) to dim its backlight. It flickers at 150Hz, which is low enough to be noticeable by users who are sensitive to it, especially as it doesn't flicker in time with the TV's refresh rate. Fortunately, the TV is flicker-free at these brightness levels and picture modes:

• Movie, Sports, Vivid, PC, Game, with brightness levels 29-100
• Low Power, with brightness levels 37-100
• Smart HDR, always flicker-free

This TV doesn't have an optional backlight strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion (BFI).

The TCL Q5 has a motion interpolation feature to interpolate 30 fps content up to 60 fps. As typical of this feature, it looks fine with slow scenes, but there are noticeable artifacts with fast-moving objects.

Due to this TV's relatively slow response time, it does an alright job with stutter in 24 fps content like movies, but there is still noticeable stutter with slower camera movements.

The TCL Q5 gives a judder-free experience with 24p sources like a Blu-ray player and from native apps. Unfortunately, it can't remove judder from 60Hz sources like most cable TV boxes and older streaming devices that lack a Match Frame Rate feature.

This TV supports all VRR technologies for a nearly tear-free gaming experience. Its VRR range is limited to 60Hz in 4k, but can handle up to 1440p @ 120Hz, which is great for competitive gamers who prefer a higher refresh rate over a higher resolution.

It has superbly low input lag in Game Mode. It's equally as good in its 'PC' Picture Mode, which you need to set the TV at to get chroma 4:4:4 support for clear text when using it as a PC monitor.

The TCL Q5 supports all common resolutions up to 4k @ 60Hz. Even though the TV has a 60Hz panel, it can do 1080p @ 120Hz natively, and 1440p @ 120Hz with resolution halving through TCL's Game Accelerator 120 feature, but this feature is only supported on the 55 and 65-inch models. It's a great option for competitive gamers who prefer having a higher refresh rate and lower input lag over a higher resolution. Despite 1440p @ 120Hz working without issues, 1440p @ 60Hz isn't supported on AMD GPUs.

The TCL Q5 can't take full advantage of the PS5, as it doesn't have the HDMI 2.1 bandwidth required for 4k @ 120Hz. However, it can do 1440p @ 120Hz with resolution halving on the 55 and 65-inch models. Unlike on the Xbox consoles, the TV has no issues playing HDR games in 120Hz on the PS5.

It also supports VRR and Auto Low Latency Mode (ALLM), so the TV automatically switches to Game Mode when it detects the console.

The TCL Q5 Series can't take full advantage of the Xbox Series X|S, as it can't do 4k @ 120Hz. However, it can do 1080p @ 120Hz natively and 1440p @ 120Hz with resolution halving on the 55-inch and 65-inch models. Unfortunately, the Xbox consoles only support HDR gaming with 4k content, so you can't play games in HDR if you choose to play in 1080p @ 120Hz or 1440p @ 120Hz. If you want to play in 1440p @ 60Hz, you can go into the console's settings and enable it in the display override section, as applying it directly in the display resolution menu defaults back to 4k @ 60Hz.

The TV also supports VRR and Auto Low Latency Mode (ALLM), so it automatically switches to Game Mode when it detects the console. It also supports Dolby Vision gaming up to 4k @ 60Hz.

This TV is limited to HDMI 2.0 bandwidth on its three HDMI ports and supports HDR10+ and Dolby Vision. Unfortunately, the tuner is limited to ATSC 1.0, so you can't stream 4k content over the air.

The TCL Q550G supports eARC, allowing you to pass high-quality, uncompressed audio to a compatible receiver. While the TV can pass DTS 5.1 through ARC and Optical connections, it can't pass the full 7.1 DTS:X or DTS-HD formats through eARC, which is disappointing as many UHD Blu-ray discs use these as their main audio track. However, it can pass Dolby advanced audio formats through eARC.

The TCL Q5 has a disappointing frequency response. TV speakers tend to lack bass, and this TV is no different, as there's no thump and rumble at all. It also can't get very loud, so it's unsuitable for noisy environments. The TV has little pumping or compression artifacts at max volume, but other than that, it doesn't sound great, with unbalanced sound across the board.

This TV's handling of sound distortion is good. Sound is distorted at max volume, which sounds unpleasant, especially if you're sensitive to it. However, it sounds good at lower volumes, and it's hard to notice any harsh or unexpected frequencies when listening at moderate volume levels.

The TCL Q5 uses version 11 of Google's popular Google TV OS. It's relatively easy to use and runs well, with a large selection of apps.

Like most TVs on the market, it has ads throughout the interface, and you can't disable them.

The TCL Q5 Series has a great selection of streaming apps, with every popular streaming app being present. The interface is very smooth and pleasant to use.

The TV's remote is medium-sized and has a simple layout. It has a series of dedicated buttons for the most popular streaming apps. The remote has an integrated microphone for voice commands, so you can change inputs, search within apps, and ask for the weather and time. Unfortunately, you can't use your voice to adjust settings like brightness. 

The power button is on the bottom bezel of the TV below the TCL branding. Outside of turning it on or off, you can also use it to change channels, adjust the volume, or change the inputs.

• Remote (with 2x batteries)
• Power cable
• Manuals
• 2x cable management clips