TCL QM8 Mini LED (2023) Review

Nothing else in 2023 got this bright for this money. The QM8 stacked roughly 1,080 zones behind the 65-inch panel and more than 2,300 on the larger sets, cleared 2,000 nits on a 10 percent window, and shipped a 120Hz panel with 144Hz variable refresh, inputs that handle 4K120, and Dolby Vision, all at $1,699 before the discounts that dragged it under $1,200. On a sports broadcast in a bright room it is genuinely thrilling. Sit slightly off-centre and it falls apart.

The VA panel washes out by twenty degrees, so a family of four means two people watching a different television. The dimming is aggressive rather than precise, crushing shadow detail on the default settings and throwing a visible halo around subtitles and credits, and it hunts noticeably through hard scene changes. Google TV runs slower than this hardware deserves, and the picture presets need real work before they resemble anything accurate. Buy it for the price and the brightness, which are both extraordinary, and accept that the picture is not so much being controlled as pushed.