TCL RM9L  TV Review

The TCL RM9L is incredibly bright in HDR. While small details aren't technically anywhere near as bright as they are on the TCL X11L, it's still bright enough to display nearly all HDR content perfectly. Small, bright details like a glint of sunlight reflecting off a car or the bright flicker of a flame are incredibly bright and stand out well, and very bright scenes are incredibly vivid.

Unfortunately, it can't sustain these bright highlights for very long. While this isn't noticeable in most real content, it results in a marked decrease in brightness in sustained bright scenes.

The posted results are with Dynamic Tone Mapping (DTM) disabled with Peak Brightness set to 'Boost'. Here are additional measurements with it set to each of its three settings.

The TV delivers excellent peak brightness when gaming in HDR. Unfortunately, most real content is significantly dimmer when you switch to Game Mode with the most accurate settings, mainly due to differences in its PQ EOTF tracking.

The posted results are with Dynamic Tone Mapping (DTM) disabled with Peak Brightness set to 'Boost'. Here are additional measurements with it set to each of its three settings.

The TV's peak brightness in SDR is fantastic. It can easily overcome glare during the day, even in a very bright room. Unfortunately, the TV can't maintain its high peak brightness for very long, and there's a noticeable drop in brightness with small highlights. This isn't as noticeable when more of the scene is bright at once, like when watching sports.

The TCL RM9L has fantastic contrast. Blacks are incredibly deep, even when bright highlights are visible in the scene. The native contrast of the panel is also decent, which helps in more difficult scenes when the local dimming can't keep up.

The zone precision is excellent. There's only minimal haloing around bright parts of the scene or with subtitles visible on a dark background.

The zone transitions on this TV are excellent. It keeps up with fast-moving objects well, so there's very little flicker as objects move between zones. Note that the zone count refers to the total number of RGB triplets, whereas TCL's advertising counts each red, green, and blue diode separately.

Switching to Game Mode has no noticeable impact on dark details or contrast.

The TV has great black uniformity. With local dimming disabled, you can see a bit of clouding across the screen, but there's no obvious flashlighting or backlight bleed. 

The TCL RM9L has excellent color volume in SDR. It displays most of the DCI-P3 color space, but it struggles slightly with lighter scenes and can't display the full range of red or green. it also has excellent coverage of the wider BT.2020 color space, but it's a bit spotty, and coverage is lower in very light scenes.

These numbers represent the best-case scenario for the TV, as they're measured in a way that allows the RGB backlight to use only one or two diodes at a time. With real content, the backlight will often have to use all three diodes at once and will perform more like a white backlight. We took additional measurements with local dimming disabled in order to measure the color volume when the backlight is white.

These additional measurements with a white backlight show the worst possible color volume that you'll notice, and it's still excellent. With real content, the actual color volume will be somewhere between the white results above and the posted results below. This change in color volume between scenes isn't noticeable at all, though.

Like the Samsung R95H and Hisense UR9SG, though, there's noticeable color cross-talk in some scenes, especially when a wide object is close to a very saturated one. This can be especially noticeable in sports, where the white lines of the playing field can take on a green tint. A custom video pattern shows this issue well, but keep in mind that this is meant to showcase it, and it doesn't usually look this bad with real content.

The HDR color volume is fantastic. It displays most of the DCI-P3 and BT.2020 color spaces well, with fantastic shadow details and bright colors. Colors aren't washed out in very bright scenes, and it's mainly limited by its incomplete color gamut in either color space.

Unfortunately, the TCL RM9L has sub-par color accuracy before calibration. Blues are overrepresented in almost all shades, and the average color temperature is very cool. The white balance is poor, with noticeable grayscale errors in almost all content, and gamma tracks closer to 2.4 in shadow details, so those appear a bit darker than they should be. Finally, most colors look okay, but blues are noticeably oversaturated.

Note that, unlike our usual process, the pre-calibration results on this TV are with local dimming enabled. This is because disabling it forces the backlight to white instead, and doesn't represent how most people will use the TV.

The TV has excellent accuracy after calibration. The white balance is nearly perfect, and the cold color temperature is gone. Color accuracy is great overall, but there are still a few noticeable issues, especially with saturated blues. Unfortunately, it's a bit tricky to calibrate, though, as the local dimming feature and menus interfere with the measurements, so you have to close out everything with every change you make.

The posted results for this TV are after calibrating it to a D65 white point with the CIE 1931 CMF for consistency with our other reviews. However, due to its narrow spectral peaks and very wide color gamut, this is likely going to cause significant metamerism. If you're calibrating this display at home, TCL recommends using the CIE 170-2:2015 CMF instead, with an alternate white point target of (0.309, 0.324) instead of D65. We didn't calibrate to that target, but took pre-calibration measurements with local dimming on 'low' and 'high'.

You can see our full calibration settings here.

The pre-calibration accuracy in HDR is okay. The white balance is very off, especially in shadow details and brighter highlights, and like with SDR, the color temperature is too cool. It has good color mapping, though, with just some minor issues with blues.

Unfortunately, this TV isn't easy to calibrate in HDR, and the results don't improve much after calibration.

Unfortunately, the TCL RM9L has poor PQ EOTF tracking. Shadow details are displayed well, just slightly crushed, but almost all midtones are significantly brighter than they should be. Bright scenes are also pushed way brighter than they should be, and the cutoff at the TV's peak brightness is very uneven.

Switching to Game Mode improves the PQ EOTF tracking a bit. It brings the whole curve down, so dark scenes and shadow details are even darker than before, but now bright scenes and midtones aren't over-brightened as much.

The TCL RM9L has very good low-quality content smoothing. It does a great job reducing macroblocking and pixelization from low-quality streams, but there's some loss of fine details that gives the image a slightly waxy look.

The TV has excellent upscaling. Fine details are easy to make out, and the image is very clear.

The TCL RM9L has excellent gradient handling. There's very minor banding in some content, but it's barely noticeable.

The TCL QM9L has good input lag. The 60Hz input lag is slightly higher than most comparable models, but still low enough for a decently responsive gaming experience. It feels much more responsive at higher refresh rates. The input lag with a 1080p signal varies depending on the refresh rate:

The TV supports all common resolutions up to 4k @ 144Hz on all of its 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 needed for clear text from a desktop PC.

The TCL RM9L supports all types of variable refresh rate (VRR) technology to reduce screen tearing. It works well with any source, and it works with Low Framerate Compensation (LFC), ensuring your games remain nearly tear-free even when your frame rate drops very low.

The TCL RM9L has an okay CAD at the max 4k refresh rate of 144Hz. There's no noticeable overshoot or inverse ghosting, but longer transitions, like from a dark to a bright shade or vice-versa, are a bit sluggish, resulting in a slight blur trail behind fast-moving objects. Transitions within midtones are significantly faster.

Dropping down to 120Hz has barely any impact on the TV's CAD. There's only a mild blur trail behind fast-moving objects, and there's no noticeable overshoot.

The TV's CAD at 60Hz is almost identical to higher refresh rates. There's a bit more blur, but it's mainly persistence blur caused by the longer frame hold time.

The TV is fully compatible with everything the PS5 and PS5 Pro have to offer, 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, FreeSync Premium Pro, and Dolby Vision gaming. It also supports Auto Low Latency Mode, so you don't have to manually switch to Game Master to get the lowest input lag.

There's some minor stutter in slow-panning shots when watching content, but it's minor.

Adding low levels of interpolation does a good job reducing stutter in slow-panning shots. The higher frame rate reduces the frame hold time, and it's very consistent, with very little variation in frame times.

The TCL RM9L is nearly judder-free with all content. The frame timing isn't quite perfect with 25p content, like many European shows and movies, but it's not too bad. It's only an issue with 60p sources like a cable box or streaming device that isn't set to match the content's frame rate.

There's no micro judder.

The TV has a good response time when watching content. Fast action is fairly clear, but it's a bit sluggish when changing from a bright shade to a dark one.

There are only minor transition artifacts in fast-moving action.

The backlight combines DC dimming with a very high-frequency flicker pattern. It's not true PWM and is far less noticeable in person.

The TCL RM9L has an optional backlight strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion. It only flickers at 120Hz, though.

The direct reflection handling on this TV is just okay. The glossy coating reduces the intensity of direct, mirror-like reflections a bit, but they're still visible.

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

The total amount of reflected light is good. Indirect reflections aren't very noticeable, and direct reflections are significantly reduced in intensity, so you don't have to worry about glare. There are noticeable diffraction artifacts, including a slight rainbow smear around bright lights, but it's not too bad.

  Ambient light has no noticeable impact on color saturation.

The TCL RM9L has a mediocre viewing angle. Colors washout gradually as you move to the sides, and there's a slightly red color shift at a wide angle. Overall, it's not a great choice for a wide seating area.

The gray uniformity is just okay. There's relatively little dirty screen effect in the center, which is great for sports fans. The sides of the screen are noticeably darker, though, which is a bit distracting in any content.

The TCL RM9L uses a new RGB Mini LED backlight with a WHVA 2.0 panel. the new backlight is mainly designed to increase color volume. Instead of a traditional blue backlight with quantum dot color converters, it uses separate red, green, and blue LEDs to produce light.

There are high peaks on reds, blues, and greens, and there's excellent separation between them, giving the TV great color purity. It uses an RGB subpixel arrangement, which helps with text clarity when used with a PC.

TVs with LCD panels, like this one, are immune to permanent burn-in.

The TCL RM9L features four full-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 ports. There's also an additional USB port on the side bezel of the TV for quick access.

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 TV is also expected to support Dolby Vision 2 with a future firmware update.

The TCL RM9L has a premium design and looks very similar to the TCL X11L. It has very thin bezels on all four sides, and the blade-style feet support the TV well and take up very little space.

The stand consists of two blade-style feet placed at opposite ends of the TV. There's no alternative position, so you'll need a wide table if you're not wall-mounting it, but they can be mounted in either a high or low position.

Footprint of the 85-inch stand: 67.6" x 15.0" x 3.7" (high position), or 2.5" (low position).

The back of the TV has a very nice textured pattern that looks premium. There are cable guides along the back of the TV and a notch in the stand to help with cable management. The speakers on the back aren't as nice as the ones on the TCL X11L, though, and they don't have a copper finish.

The TCL RM9L has great build quality. It's pretty solid for the most part, but the back panel isn't the most solid.

The remote has a few additional buttons, including a new programmable button. There's also a new button on the side of the remote to quickly change picture settings, and a separate brightness slider.

The TV runs the Google TV 14 smart interface, which has a massive selection of streaming apps and supports modern features like multiple user profiles.

Running the AIDA64 app on the TV confirms that it's powered by the new MediaTek Pentonic 800 chipset, with 2.5GB of RAM and 48GB of internal memory.

Unfortunately, like most TVs, the interface contains ads. You can opt out of personalized ads, but this doesn't change the number of ads you'll see; they just won't be personalized to match your search and viewing history.

You have the option to set up the TV using the 'Basic Google TV' option, which gets rid of ads but prevents you from using most of the TV's smart features.

• Setup guide
• Remote
• 2x AAA batteries
• Power cable

The TV was originally tested on firmware V8-0015T01-LF1V101

Unfortunately, the TCL RM9L has a sub-par frequency response. It has a very uneven frequency response, so dialogue can be a bit uneven at times, and like all TVs there's very little deep bass. It can't get very loud, either, but at least there's very little compression at max volume.