TCL QM9K  TV Review

The TCL QM9K is one of the brightest TVs on the market in 2025. Even the brightest HDR content stands out incredibly well with both small specular highlights and large bright areas. It doesn't sustain that brightness for very long, but this isn't an issue with most real content, as specular highlights aren't normally visible for more than a few seconds anyway.

It's nearly as bright as the higher-end TCL X11L with medium and high-APL scenes. Small specular highlight details over 5,000 nits can technically get brighter on the X11L, but content that's mastered at those levels is incredibly rare. In practice, there's no noticeable difference in brightness between the X11L and this TV with most real content.

The posted results are with Dynamic Tone Mapping (DTM) disabled. Here are additional measurements with it set to each of its three settings, all in the 'Movie' HDR Picture Mode:

Results with DTM set to Detail Priority:

• Hallway Lights: 875 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 670 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 495 cd/m²

Results with DTM set to Balance:

• Hallway Lights: 790 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 675 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 529 cd/m²

Results with DTM set to Brightness Priority:

• Hallway Lights: 972 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 580 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 681 cd/m²

Overall, switching to Game Master doesn't change the peak brightness of the TV. There are a few minor differences, but it's not noticeable.

Here are measurements with Dynamic Tone Mapping (DTM) set to each of its three settings, all in Game Master:

Results with DTM set to Detail Priority:

• Hallway Lights: 1060 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 749 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 525 cd/m²

Results with DTM set to Balance:

• Hallway Lights: 1112 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 723 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 562 cd/m²

Results with DTM set to Brightness Priority:

• Hallway Lights: 1104 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 720 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 600 cd/m²

This TV is incredibly bright in SDR and easily overcomes glare in a bright room. There's a noticeable drop in peak brightness over time, but it maintains them for long enough that this won't be an issue with the vast majority of real content. As with most TVs, large bright scenes aren't quite as bright as more moderately lit ones, but they're still bright enough.

The contrast on this TV is superb. The Mini LED backlight delivers incredibly deep blacks, even in complex scenes with very bright highlight details.

The zone precision on the TCL QM9K is excellent. There's some noticeable haloing around really bright parts of otherwise dark scenes. With real content, it's especially distracting if you have subtitles turned on.

Zone transitions are excellent on this TV. It does a good job keeping up with quick-moving highlights, so the brightness is even, with no trailing halo or dark leading edge. There's noticeable flicker as objects move between zones, though.

There's no noticeable difference in dark scene performance when the TV is set to Game Master.

This TV has excellent black uniformity. There's some cloudiness to the screen when local dimming is off, but it's not too bad.

This TV has great color volume. It has nearly perfect coverage of the DCI-P3 color space, but it can't quite display the most saturated reds and greens. It also has decent coverage of the widest BT.2020 color space. There's a slight decrease in coverage in lighter scenes, but it's not significant.

The TCL QM9K has fantastic color volume in HDR. Colors are incredibly bright and vibrant, and whites don't overpower bright, saturated colors. It also displays deep saturated colors well, thanks to its high contrast ratio.

The color accuracy out of the box is good. The most noticeable issue is the color temperature, which is warm out of the box, and the RGB balance is noticeably off across the board. Gamma tracking is mixed; dark scenes are crushed a bit, but bright highlights are overblown. Color dE is very low, with no noticeable mapping errors.

This TV is easy to calibrate, and it delivers an incredibly accurate image after calibration. The only remaining issue is with pure blue, and it's a low enough dE that it's not noticeable at all.

See our full calibration settings.

The TCL QM9K has just okay accuracy in HDR out of the box. There are noticeable color mapping errors, the white balance is way off, and the overall color temperature is a bit cool.

Calibrating this TV in HDR improves the overall accuracy a bit, but it's far from perfect. There are still noticeable mapping errors in both colors and the white balance. The color temperature is much better after calibration, though.

Unfortunately, the PQ EOTF tracking on this TV is just okay, and it's a bit all over the place. Shadow details are significantly crushed in all content. Midtones are a bit better overall, but they're still either slightly raised or a bit too dim. Bright highlights are significantly overblown, and the TV exceeds the mastering level for content mastered at 600 and 1,000 nits.

This TV has great low-quality content smoothing. It smooths out pixelization and macro blocking well, but there's a slight loss of fine details.

Lower-quality streams are upscaled properly, with no noticeable issues or excessive over-sharpening. Fine details are a bit hard to make out, but the image is clear.

The gradient handling on this TV is great. There's some banding in shades of gray, both dark and light, but it's not too bad. Colors look much better, with no significant banding in any color.

The TCL QM9K has incredibly low input lag in Game Master mode, ensuring a responsive gaming experience with any supported resolution and refresh rate. Unlike older TCL TVs, it also supports low-latency motion interpolation, so you can improve the fluidity of motion without adding significant lag.

The TV supports all common resolutions up to 4k @ 144Hz on two of its four HDMI ports. It also supports up to 288Hz with 1080p and 1440p signals. All supported formats also support proper chroma 4:4:4, which is essential for clear text from a PC.

The TCL QM9K supports all three types of variable refresh rate (VRR) technology to reduce screen tearing. It works well with AMD sources, like an AMD GPU or any console across a wide refresh rate range, and it works with Low Framerate Compensation (LFC), ensuring your games remain nearly tear-free even when your frame rate drops very low.

It has the same issue with NVIDIA GPUS as the TCL QM8K, though. If you set your desktop to a locked 60Hz refresh rate, VRR doesn't work properly, and there's noticeable tearing at any frame rate. This is only an issue if you have an older GPU and can't handshake above 4k @ 60Hz; it works fine if you set your computer to 4k @ 120Hz or higher and let VRR do its thing.

The CAD at the max native resolution refresh rate of 144Hz is just okay. Transitions are slow across the board, but it's especially bad when going from very dark to very bright shades. Transitions that stay close to the same shade look a lot better, but there's still noticeable blur.

When you drop down to 120Hz, the CAD is slightly worse overall, but it's not much of a difference. Overall, it behaves almost identically to the 144Hz performance.

Dropping down to 60Hz increases the overall CAD, and there's more noticeable blur in all motion.

The 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, 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.

The TCL QM9K has a good cinematic response time, which results in some noticeable stutter when watching 24p and 25p content. It's not as bad as OLED TVs, but it's still noticeable in slow panning shots.

The TV's motion interpolation feature does a good job of mitigating stutter. Low frame rate content is smoothed out well when using the interpolation setting that's equivalent to 30fps, resulting in motion with good fluidity and consistency, even in slow panning shots. 

The TV removes judder from all sources when watching movies or shows that are in 24p. To remove 24p judder from 60p and 60i sources, like a cable box, Motion Clarity needs to be set to 'On' with sliders set to '0.' However, this setting only works with 24p content. The TV doesn't entirely remove judder from 25p content being sent via 60p, but frame times aren't too inconsistent, so motion is just a bit jittery. Fortunately, the TV removes 25p judder if you're using an external device like an Apple TV that has a 'Match Frame Rate' feature or when using the TV's native apps.

The TCL QM9K 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 that doesn't have a feature to match the outputted signal to the frame rate of the content. These micro-judders occur every 5-10 seconds, so they're pretty noticeable. Outside of that, there's no micro-judder in 24p and 25p content.

This TV has a good cinematic response time. Most transitions look good overall, with no noticeable overshoot. Transitions to very bright shades or out of near-blacks are extremely slow, though, taking almost one full 24p frame.

The TCL QM9K has passable transitions when watching movies, shows, and sports. It does a good job of keeping colors pure during RGB transitions, but it's not perfect. For example, there's still some yellow around blues in fast-paced scenes and sports, which affects color consistency.

Unfortunately, the TV does a bad job keeping the edges of fast-moving objects consistent with the center, leading to visible blurriness in movies, shows, and sports with a lot of motion.

The TCL QM9K uses a mix of pulse width modulation and direct DC dimming to adjust the backlight output. It flickers at an extremely high frequency that most people won't notice, though.

There's 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. Unlike most TVs on the market in 2025, it works at both 60Hz and 120Hz.

The glossy coating does a mediocre job of reducing the intensity of direct, mirror-like reflections. Bright lights and open windows opposite the TV can still be distracting, and you'll need to increase the brightness to overcome them.

Ambient light has no noticeable impact on the TCL QM9K's black levels.

The total reflected light is good. Mirror-like reflections are very noticeable when the TV is off, and there are diffraction artifacts like the rainbow smear around the light.

Ambient light has almost no noticeable impact on the color saturation of this TV.

The viewing angle on this TV is okay. Colors wash out quickly as you move off-center, and there's a more noticeable color shift than there is on the TCL QM8K. It's not too bad, though, and this WHVA panel is better overall than most VA-type panels on the market, making it a better choice for a wide seating arrangement.

The gray uniformity on this TV is just decent. There's noticeable vignetting on the sides and some color issues near the center. There's relatively little dirty screen effect, though, so it's fine for watching sports.

Like the TCL QM8K, the TCL QM9K uses TCL CSOT's newest panel technology, known as WHVA. This new panel is designed to combine the strengths of VA and IPS, delivering wider viewing angles than traditional VA panels but with the same deep blacks. Unlike traditional VA panels, the subpixels are laid out in an R-G-B layout, which helps with text clarity when used with a PC.

The TV uses quantum dots for both red and green to achieve high color peaks with excellent separation between each primary color.

Only two of the inputs support HDMI 2.1 bandwidth. The eARC port is on one of the lower-bandwidth 2.0 ports. This has no impact on either the audio quality or the formats supported over eARC, but it leaves you with two high-bandwidth ports for recent game consoles or a PC.

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.

The TCL QM9K has a very premium design, with thin, uniform bezels around the entire screen, and no noticeable dead gap between the bezels and pixels. The TCL badging along the bottom bezel is very discrete.

The TV comes with a compact, height-adjustable center-mounted stand. At its lowest position, the stand lifts the TV about 2.2 inches above the table and 3.4 inches at its highest, which is high enough for almost any soundbar.

Footprint of the 65-inch stand: 15.3" x 14.6".

The back of the TV has a nice checkerboard pattern that gives it a premium look. The inputs face to the right when looking at the front of the TV, but they're inset into the back and can be difficult to access if the TV is mounted close to the wall. There are cutouts and clips to help with cable management through the stand.

This TV has excellent build quality. It's mostly made of a very high quality plastic. It feels sturdy and well-built, with no obvious issues at all.

The TCL QM9K ships with Google TV version 14, which features Google's Gemini AI assistant built in for the first time on any TV. This feature provides AI-summarized results with quick voice searches. It works well, providing relevant information quickly.

According to AIDA64 on the TV, it's powered by the MediaTek Pentonic 700 SoC, with 4GB of RAM and ~50GB of internal storage.

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

The backlit remote has quick access buttons for the most popular streaming services, and it has a built-in microphone for voice commands. The TV also supports hands-free voice controls with the "Hey, Google" wake word.

• Setup guide
• Remote
• 2x AAA batteries
• Cable management clips
• Power cable

The TCL QM9K TV has an okay frequency response. Most audio is well balanced, but like any TV, there's very little low-bass response. Even a basic external soundbar will sound better.