TCL QM7L  TV Review

The TCL QM7L has excellent brightness in HDR. It gets bright enough for small specular highlights to stand out very well. Even though large areas of brightness aren't as bright as smaller areas, entirely bright scenes are still impactful. Overall, the TV is bright enough to provide a very impactful HDR viewing experience.

The TV is even brighter with a 5% window, where it peaks around 3,500 nits, which seems to be a sweet spot for the TV's local dimming feature.

The TV's peak brightness varies depending on the settings used. Our results above are with Dynamic Tone Mapping (DTM) disabled, but below are additional measurements showing the impact that the different DTM settings have on real scenes.

There's no difference in peak brightness when you switch to the low-latency Game Master mode.

The TV's peak brightness varies depending on the settings used. Our results above are with Dynamic Tone Mapping (DTM) disabled, but below are additional measurements showing the impact that the different DTM settings have on real scenes.

The TCL QM7L has exceptional SDR brightness, and it's bright enough to handle glare in well-lit rooms. Like most TVs, it struggles to maintain high brightness levels when more of the scene is bright at once, but even bright sports like hockey don't look dim at all.

The TCL QM7L has fantastic contrast. Its Mini LED local dimming system does an outstanding job of improving contrast in dark scenes, and the TV's native contrast ratio is high, which helps to maintain deep blacks in areas that are too small for the local dimming feature to handle.

The TV has good lighting zone precision. There's some haloing around highlights and subtitles, which can slightly bleed into dark areas of a scene, but it's not too distracting.

The TV has decent lighting zone transitions. Still, there is some visible darkening on the leading edge of bright objects, with noticeable haloing.

Switching to Game Master mode has no noticeable impact on dark details and contrast.

The black uniformity on this TV is amazing. With local dimming on, it's nearly perfect, with almost no variation in black levels across the screen. Even with local dimming off, it's still very good, with no distracting flashlighting or other visible issues.

The TCL QM7L has excellent SDR color volume. Colors are incredibly bright and vibrant even in very light scenes, and it displays most of the DCI-P3 color space. Coverage of the wider BT.2020 color is lower, but still great.

The HDR color volume on the TCL QM7L is excellent. Colors are incredibly bright and vibrant, and it covers the majority of the DCI-P3 color space used by most HDR content. It has much lower coverage of the BT.2020 color space, but it's still pretty good, and most HDR movies, shows, and games don't use this color space.

The TCL QM7L has okay SDR color accuracy before calibration. There's way too much red in most shades of gray, which contributes to the TV's overly warm color temperature. Dark areas of the image are too dark while brighter areas are a bit too bright, but outside of that, it closely follows the targeted 2.2 gamma. Colors still have very good accuracy overall, but light colors look a bit too warm.

The TCL QM7L has outstanding SDR color accuracy after calibration. The gamma and color temperature are perfect, and the white balance and overall color accuracy are incredibly close to being perfect.

See our full calibration settings.

Unfortunately, the TCL QM7L has disappointing accuracy in HDR out of the box. The RGB balance is okay, but there's too much blue in brighter grays, which contributes to a color temperature that is way too cold and gives the image a blue tint. Colors still have decent accuracy overall, but there's noticeable mapping errors throughout that make skin tones look off.

The TV has good HDR color accuracy after calibration, but it's not perfect. The RGB balance is much better now, but the TV's color temperature is still too cool. Fortunately, the overall accuracy of colors is excellent, and skin tones look much more natural than they do out of the box.

The TV has sub-par PQ EOTF tracking. Although blacks and near blacks are presented properly, midtones and highlights are severely overbrightened, so the filmmaker's intent isn't translated in HDR. There's a sharp cutoff at the TV's peak brightness, so some details are lost in super-bright HDR content since there's no roll off, but it can display most highlights in content mastered at 600 nits and 1000 nits.

With a 10% window, which is used by many other reviewers, the TV tracks much better. However, a 10% window isn't a very accurate representation of how well a TV handles brightness in HDR movies, shows, and games.

This TV has very good low-quality content smoothing. It does a great job reducing macro blocking and pixelization from streaming sources, but it wipes away some detail in the process.

The TV does a decent job at upscaling low-resolution content like DVDs or lower-resolution streams. Details are somewhat clear, but finer details are hard to make out.

The TV has decent gradient handling. There's some noticeable banding in darker shades of gray and brighter shades of green and blue, but it's not too bad.

The TCL QM7L has very low input lag once you switch to the Game Master mode. It's incredibly responsive, especially at higher refresh rates. Like other TCL and Samsung TVs, it also has a low-latency motion interpolation feature, which generates intermediate frames when gaming to improve the fluidity of motion without adding a massive amount of input lag.

The TV supports all common resolutions up to 4k @ 144Hz on all four of its HDMI ports. It also supports up to 288Hz with 1080p signals. All supported formats also support proper chroma 4:4:4, which is essential for clear text from a PC.

The TCL QM7L supports all three types of variable refresh rate (VRR) technology to reduce screen tearing. It works well with consoles and AMD GPUs, and it works with Low Framerate Compensation (LFC), ensuring your games remain nearly tear-free even when your frame rate drops very low.

Unfortunately, VRR doesn't work properly with NVIDIA GPUs when the refresh rate is locked at 60Hz. This is only an issue if you have an older GPU and can't handshake above 60Hz; it works fine if you set your PC to 4k @ 120Hz or higher.

Unfortunately, the CAD at the maximum 4k refresh rate of 144Hz is very high, which leads to very blurry motion when gaming.

The CAD at 120Hz is sub-par. There's no overshoot or inverse ghosting, but pixel transitions are very slow, leading to motion that looks blurry and lacks clarity.

The CAD at 60Hz is bad, leading to motion that looks incredibly blurry.

The TCL QM7 TV is fully compatible with everything the PS5 offers, like 1440p @ 120Hz and 4k @ 120Hz, as well as HDMI Forum VRR. It also supports Auto Low Latency Mode, so you don't have to worry about manually switching to Game Master to get the lowest input lag.

The TV is fully compatible with everything the Xbox Series X|S offers, including 1440p @ 120Hz, 4k @ 120Hz, HDMI Forum VRR, Dolby Vision, and FreeSync Premium Pro. It also supports Auto Low Latency Mode, so you don't have to manually switch to Game Master to get the lowest input lag.

Due to the TV's relatively fast response time, there's some stutter when watching movies and TV shows that's most noticeable in slower panning shots. However, not everyone will notice it.

The motion interpolation feature on this TV does a very good job of reducing stutter. Even with low levels of interpolation, the frame hold time is much lower. It's also incredibly consistent, which ensures an even frame pacing.

This TV removes judder from most sources. The TV doesn't entirely remove judder from 25p content being sent via a 60p, so motion is a bit jittery if you're watching certain European content from an older device.

The TCL QM7 only has micro-judder present in scenes with complex motion when watching 25p content via a 60p signal, like when using an older streaming device to watch some European content.

The TV has a very good response time when watching content. It's a bit slower when transitioning to and from dark shades, but motion looks pretty clear overall in movies and shows.

Transitions are a bit uneven, leading to noticeable artifacts. There are some unwanted intermediate colors, but they're extremely minor and not very noticeable. Edges are noticeably soft, and there's noticeable ghosting at the sides of moving objects.

The TCL QM7 uses pulse width modulation (PWM) to dim its backlight. Fortunately, it flickers at an incredibly fast 15,400Hz in all picture modes and at all brightness levels, so it's not noticeable.

The TV has an optional backlight strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion. This feature is meant to reduce persistence blur and improve the appearance of motion. It works at both 60Hz and 120Hz, though there is some image duplication.

The TV does a decent job reducing the intensity of mirror-like reflections, but they're still clearly visible in darker scenes.

Ambient light has barely an impact on black levels.

The total amount of reflected light is great. Although the intensity of both indirect and direct reflections are lessened, there's a rainbow smear and a distracting band of light across the screen when you have bright light sources facing the TV.

Ambient light has almost no noticeable impact on perceived color volume on this TV. High-luminance colors are noticeably washed out, but this is an impact of the way the TV boosts pure white when used at maximum brightness. It's not caused by ambient light.

Unfortunately, the TV has a mediocre viewing angle, since the picture quality really takes a hit when you're watching from the sides of the screen.

Note: The red tint on this video is an interaction between the camera sensor and the very strong red peak emitted by the TV. It's not noticeable in person.

The TV has good gray uniformity. Brightness is quite even across the screen, but there's still some noticeable dirty screen effect towards the center.

The TCL QM7L uses a combination of new panel technologies, including an improved color filter, a new WHVA 2.0 panel structure, and improved quantum dots, which TCL calls Super Quantum Dots.

The TCL QM7 has HDMI 2.1 bandwidth on HDMI ports 1 and 2, with both supporting up to 4k @ 144Hz. If you're using a soundbar and you plug your devices into the TV, it's good that you don't lose a high-bandwidth port, but it's a downside for owners of A/V receivers who need an eARC port that also supports HDMI 2.1 bandwidth.

The TV supports eARC, which lets you pass high-quality, uncompressed audio to a compatible receiver or soundbar through an HDMI cable. It supports all major audio formats, so you don't have to worry about compatibility with external sources.

This model will also support Dolby Vision 2 with a future firmware update. TCL hasn't confirmed if it'll support HDR10+ Advanced, though.

The TCL QM7L has a nice overall design, even if it's mostly made of plastic.

The TV comes with a height-adjustable stand that doesn't require a large table to set it on. At its lowest position, the stand lifts the TV about 2.3 inches above the table, and at its highest, about 3.5 inches, which is high enough for almost any soundbar.

Footprint of the 65-inch stand: 15.31" x 14.57".

The back of the TV is made of plastic, with a grid-like pattern. All inputs except the power connector are on the right side, and they're fairly easy to access if you have the TV wall-mounted. The TV has clips on the back for cable management.

The TCL QM7L has good build quality. It's mostly made of plastic, but it feels solid.

The TCL QM7L ships with Google TV version 14 and includes support for the Google Gemini smart assistant.

Unfortunately, like almost all TVs on the market, the smart interface contains ads, and you can't disable them.

When you first start up the TV you can choose to run it in a Basic TV mode. This gives you an ad-free experience, but also disables most smart features.

The remote has quick-access buttons for the most popular streaming services and a built-in microphone for voice commands. It's also backlit.

• Setup guide
• Remote
• 2x AAA batteries
• Power cable
• Cable ties
• Spacers

The TCL QM7 has an okay frequency response. Dialogue is clear enough to understand at moderate volume levels, but the speakers can sound a bit bright and there's some thumping at maximum volume. Unfortunately, the speakers don't get very loud and there's no meaningful bass.