Vizio M6 Series Quantum 2021 TV Review

The Vizio MQ6 looks nearly identical to the Vizio M7 Series Quantum 2021, except it has a different stand. It features the same thin borders with a thicker bottom bezel. It has a pretty simple design and should look good in any setup.

After 22 months, the top portion of the backlight has started to fail. The rest of the backlight is also fading, with a total brightness loss of about 25% since the start of the test.

The feet are basic and are set wide apart. They raise the screen about three inches off the table, so you can place a soundbar in front without blocking the screen. Unlike the Vizio M7 Series Quantum 2021, the height of the stand can't be adjusted.

Footprint of the 65 inch TV: 44.9" x 11.8".

The back of the Vizio MQ6 has a pretty basic design besides the Vizio logo in the center. The back panel is metal, while the bottom part where the inputs are is made of plastic. Unfortunately, there's no cable management.

The Vizio M65Q6 has decent build quality. It's very similar to the Vizio M7 Series Quantum 2021 in terms of style and materials used. It's well-put-together, and the stand supports the monitor well with minimal wobble. The metal on the back feels nice, and even though there's some flex on the plastic near the VESA holes, it feels solid.

The Vizio MQ6 has outstanding contrast, so blacks are truly black when you're looking at it in a dark room. Unfortunately, there's no local dimming feature to improve it.

Once again, there's no local dimming feature. The videos are for reference only, so you can see how backlight on this display performs and compare it to a similar product with local dimming.

The Vizio M6 has disappointing HDR brightness. It's bright enough for most HDR content, but bright highlights in some scenes don't pop out the way they should, and very bright scenes are dull and muted.

These measurements are with the calibrated white point in the 'Calibrated Dark' HDR Picture Mode with Tone Mapping set to '100', Gamma to '2.2', and Color Temperature to 'Warm'.

The HDR brightness in Game Mode is the same as outside of it because you don't need to change the Picture Mode. You only need to enable Game Low Latency to be in Game Mode.

Overall, the brightness of the TV respects the content creator's intent in HDR, but there are a few issues. Near blacks are raised a bit, and midtones are too bright. The TV also doesn't appear to be doing any tone mapping, as there's an extremely sharp cut off at the TV's peak brightness.

The SDR brightness is okay. It's bright enough to overcome glare in a moderately-lit room, but not if you have a lot of windows or overhead lights. On the other hand, there's no fluctuation in brightness with different content.

These measurements are after calibration in the 'Calibrated Dark' Picture Mode with the Backlight at its max, Gamma set to '2.2', and the Color Temperature set to 'Warm'.

Thanks to the quantum dot layer, the Vizio MQ6 displays an excellent color gamut. It has fantastic coverage of the commonly-used DCI P3 color space and decent coverage of the wider Rec. 2020 color space, so HDR content looks vivid and lifelike. Tone mapping is a bit worse than the Vizio M7 Series Quantum 2021, making colors look less accurate.

The Vizio MQ6 has decent color volume. It's helped by the wide color gamut, but it struggles to display really bright and really dark colors.

The TV's accuracy before calibration is great. Except for saturated reds and blues, most colors are displayed properly and there are no significant issues. The white balance is a bit off, but it's not too bad, and the color temperature is close to the 6500K target. Gamma doesn't follow the 2.2 target all that well because dark scenes are too dark and bright scenes are over-brightened.

The accuracy after calibration is nearly-perfect. Any remaining inaccuracies to the color, white balance, and gamma are almost impossible to spot with the human eye. It's easy to calibrate the white balance, but the colors are more difficult to adjust without an aggressive calibration.

You can see our full calibration settings here.

The Vizio M6 Series has mediocre gray uniformity. There are a few dark vertical bands across the screen, and they're noticeable when watching sports or any content with large areas of bright colors. It looks a bit better in near-black scenes, but the vertical bars are still noticeable.

This TV has fantastic black uniformity. However, because it lacks a local dimming feature, it can't produce those deep black levels needed for a proper dark room viewing experience.

The Vizio MQ6 has a bad viewing angle, so it's not ideal for a wide seating arrangement as anyone sitting off-center will see a degraded image. There's an Enhanced Viewing Angle feature that's advertised to improve the viewing angle, but it doesn't make a noticeable difference:

• Color Washout Graph
• Color Washout: 20°
• Color Shift Graph
• Color Shift: 18°
• Lightness Graph
• Brightness Loss: 27°
• Black Level Raise: 13°
• Gamma Shift: 16°

The reflection handling is good. It looks more like the Vizio V Series 2020 than the Vizio M7 Series Quantum 2021 because it absorbs more light. This should help if you want to place the TV in a room with a couple of lights around, like small lamps.

Like other Vizio TVs, the Vizio MQ6 doesn't properly upscale 480p content. On this model, you can even see the individual pixels with real content, creating a moire-like effect. You can see them in all the upscaling photos, but they're harder to spot in person.

This TV uses a BGR sub-pixel structure. For video content, it doesn't cause any issues, but if you're planning on using this TV as a PC monitor, it impacts text clarity, and some text will look blurry. You can read more about it here.

The Vizio M65Q6 has a slow response time, creating a long blur trail behind fast-moving objects. The response time is even slower in the 0-100% transition, which is typical of VA panels, but this is because there's more overshoot. This results in more distracting black smear behind darker areas of the screen. If you care about response time, check out this TV's successor, the Vizio M6 Series Quantum 2022.

This TV uses pulse-width modulation (PWM) to dim its backlight at any setting below its max. It's a high enough frequency that it doesn't cause any image duplication, but it can cause headaches and eye strain if you're sensitive to flicker.

The Vizio MQ6 doesn't have an optional backlight strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion. The backlight always flickers at 480Hz unless it's at its max.

There's no motion interpolation feature.

Due to the slow response time, there's very little stutter with lower-frame rate content like movies and most TV shows.

The Vizio M65Q6 can remove judder from native 24p sources like Blu-rays or native apps. This helps with the appearance of motion in movies.

Like the Vizio M7 Series Quantum 2021, the Vizio MQ6 features support for FreeSync and HDMI Forum variable refresh rate technologies.

The Vizio M65Q6-J09 has incredible low input lag as long as you enable Game Low Latency. The input lag doesn't change with VRR enabled or when gaming with 4k or 1080p content, which is great.

This TV supports all common resolutions at 60Hz, like 1080p, 1440p, and 4k. It also displays chroma 4:4:4 properly with all of its supported resolutions, which helps with text clarity when using it as a PC monitor. You need to create a custom resolution from your PC for 1440p signals, but that doesn't affect the picture quality. It also accepts 1080p and 1440p signals at 120Hz, but it skips frames, as the panel can only refresh at 60Hz.

As it's limited to a 60Hz panel, it doesn't support any 120Hz signals from the PS5. There's an Auto Low Latency Mode that switches the TV into Game Mode when you launch a game from a compatible device.

As it's limited to a 60Hz panel, it doesn't support any 120Hz signals from the Xbox Series S|X. There's an Auto Low Latency Mode that switches the TV into Game Mode when you launch a game from a compatible device.

Vizio advertises the TV as having three HDMI 2.1 inputs, but it's actually limited to HDMI 2.0 bandwidth. It doesn't support any signal above the limits of HDMI 2.0 bandwidth, like 4k @ 60Hz with chroma 4:4:4 and 10-bit color depth, confirming that the ports don't support HDMI 2.1 bandwidth.

The Vizio MQ6 doesn't have an audio analog output like the Vizio M7 Series Quantum 2021, but it has composite inputs which is great if you have a DVD player or old gaming consoles.

The Vizio M6 Series Quantum has eARC support, allowing you to send high-quality audio to a compatible receiver using a single HDMI connection.

The Vizio M65Q6-J09 has a mediocre frequency response. It has a fairly well-balanced sound profile for dialogue, but it doesn't get very loud. It also doesn't produce much bass, if at all.

The distortion performance is okay. There isn't much distortion at moderate listening levels, but it increases a lot at its max volume. However, not everyone may hear it and it depends on the content.

The Vizio SmartCast is user-friendly, but it's not as advanced as some other smart systems. Menu navigation also feels a bit choppy, and even though we didn't experience any bugs during testing, Vizio TVs are known to be buggy.

There are ads in the home screen, which isn't something we noticed with the Vizio M7 Series Quantum 2021. Sadly, there's no way to disable them.

The SmartCast system comes with a great selection of pre-installed, web-based apps, but there's no app store so you can't download any extra apps. You can cast almost anything you want from your phone using the Google Chromecast and Apple AirPlay 2 support.

The Vizio M65Q6-J09 comes with the new Vizio remote that features a basic design with shortcut buttons to popular streaming devices. It also has a mic for voice control, and you can ask it to change inputs and open apps, but it can't search for specific content in apps or change certain settings.

There's a single button on the bottom left side to turn the TV On/Off and change inputs.

• Remote control (with 2x AAA batteries)
• User guides