TCL - 65” Class 6-Series 4K UHD Mini-LED QLED Dolby Vision HDR Roku Smart TV - 65R635

[This review was collected as part of a promotion.] I was having trouble getting my television to do color a correction on my TCL 65R635. Mona was able to walk me through a system restart and set up so that those options would become available to me. I appreciate her taking the time and necessary steps to make this work. She was invaluable to solving this problem.

TV picture is sharp and clear and bright. Football action is great; sharp and clear movement. This TV is a major upgrade from an 8 year old Samsung TV.

Terrible TV. After a year it shuts off by itself sometimes. The corner LEDs are bright white and very noticeable. I've try all the “custom” settings, Still no good. I'll never try to save a few bucks and buy the brand again.

The TCL 65R635 color and brightness lived up to the professional reviews I read before making the purchase. I'd go so far as to state that many of the colors are over-saturated but it could just be because I'd never seen the same content on a display with such a wide color gamut. As one reviewer stated, you may have to use one of the limited brightness settings to decrease the intensity from the defaulted maximum (only good for really bright rooms). Unfortunately my unit had what I guess is a backlight flaw that I could not live with (possibly a panel defect I suppose) . In brighter and uniform scenes my unit had 4, 1/4" diameter dark splotches spaced about 7" apart, horizontally across the bottom of the screen. Attached picture is a Roku theme page which most certainly should not have the 4 visible dark spots below the text and above the ground/horizon boundary. Brighter and uniform scenes made the dots more pronounced. The splotches were not visible with all colors and just a little randomness to the scene made them difficult to detect. Next issue is the image up-scaler. With low res or low frame rate youtube content, the scaler engine appears to drop in-motion scene content completely. Example was some cartoon characters from an old PBS series, my old/cheap blue ray box up-scales them to HD with no issues. The 65R635 scaler caused the character's moving feet to completely disappear for visible moments/frames at a time, only able to produce outlines and shadows of the dynamic content until it reached a semi-stationary point again or hit a key frame in the compressed video. Higher/res source content seemed to be fine. Even other live-action youtube content which was fairly pixelated to begin with scaled acceptably. Also in-line with several professional reviews, the sound is just so-so. After this TV replaced a 55" main brand name TV with well above average sound, the in-TV sound of the 65R635 was less than exciting. Not terrible but definitely a down-grade from my last TV (which was returned after developing a warranty defect of it's own). Plan on getting a middle of the road sound bar if you want to use this TV without a more advanced sound system. Lastly, I will say that, yes I like the Roku interface much better than my brand-name TV's proprietary interface which was over-burdened with trying to scavenge the internet for available streaming content. The Roku has a little lag when loading different app interfaces but once loaded, Roku is so much quicker to respond than others I have used on mid-range 4k TV's. I also give the Roku remote high marks for not clustering buttons around the navigation arrows and for placing them under where your thumb comfortably rests when holding the remote in a well balanced position in a hand. Too many remotes cram in more buttons which get unintentionally clicked on a frequent basis and place the navigation buttons too low on the remote's keypad.

Extremely disappointed with this TV. Will be returning. Everything I read raved about how great this TV was, but it's picture quality is blurry. YouTube TV is particularly bad and streams better when plugging in a firestick. I'm so disappointed. My LG TV from 10 years ago had better picture quality than this TV.