The 2024 TCL QM7 is the type of TV just about everyone looking to spend around $1,000 should be carefully considering. Not only do you get a true Mini LED high contrast experience with over 1,000 local dimming zones, but with HDMI 2.1, up to a 144Hz refresh rate, and incredibly bright HDR capabilities, at least on paper it's looking to bring unbeatable value, but price is just one aspect of a screen. The question is, has TCL delivered a picture that’s equally impressive… Well, let's find out.
TCL has delivered incredible value with the 2024 75” QM751G. Equipped with a mini LED backlight, fast gaming response times, acceptable motion performance, and solid contrast considering the price, many buyers may want to consider saving hundreds or even thousands of dollars over OLED to get a much larger and more immersive experience.
That said, it’s not without its faults. It does have a firmware bug tying HDR & SDR brightness, poor viewing angles, much slower response times than OLED, inferior contrast, and not enough dimming zones to match more premium Mini LED TVs.
Despite that it gives great HDR imagery at a very affordable price, and if you can find it on sale under $1,000 it's definitely worth a purchase. Buy it here!
For this review I’ll be using an X-Rite i1 Pro spectrophotometer, Color Checker Display Plus colorimeter, Calman Ultimate, Portrait Displays Video Forge Pro 8K pattern generator, a Sony RX100 VII 1000fps camera, an SM208 Screen Luminance Meter, & a Sony Cinema Line FX3 mirrorless video camera. All together at least $12,000 worth of testing equipment alone and of course years of experience testing displays.
Specs are similar to the 2024 QM8, but it has far less dimming zones.
Above is the Connectivity for this TV, and thankfully it comes with two HDMI 2.1 ports allowing for one 4K 144Hz, one 4K 120Hz, and two 4K 60Hz connections.
The TCL QM751G is a breeze to set up. It's much lighter than most mini LED TVs which makes lifting it out of the box very easy. I used the tried and true method of lowering it with the box and letting it rest on top while I connected the base and then tilted it back up in the same manner before removing the protective foam.
Overall the experience was great, but I noticed the build quality was a little lacking especially the stand which can wobble slightly when touching the TV, but if the picture is good I’m ok with that.
If you're wondering about the color I can tell you you won’t be disappointed. It looks very good in terms of colors. The QM7 can get extremely bright and vibrant and you'll be hard pressed to find many other displays that produce noticeably better color in a lot of situations.
And in terms of the accuracy, I'm happy to report that out of the box, the SDR & HDR accuracy is actually pretty good. In fact it's shocking how accurate the movie mode is considering many TVs far more expensive are far less accurate, but if you want more details click the section below.
Testing Deep Dive - sRGB Gamma 2.2 (click to expand)
Out of the Box Movie mode follows Rec.709 BT.1886 EOTF well, but has slight color inaccuracies measuring too red.
Testing Deep Dive - HDR BT.2020 (click to expand)
The default HDR movie may undertrack if brightness is not set to 100.
Thankfully this is easy to fix, but it does mean you will need to leave SDR at 100% brightness as well on current firmware unless you want to keep changing it.
Additionally below it can be seen that the QM7 has excellent HDR color volume exceeding 100% DCI-P3 meaning the vast majority of HDR content should be viewable as the creator intended.
Testing Deep Dive - Color Volume HDR (click to expand)
Great HDR Color Volume.
Color accuracy is surprisingly good with an average deltaE of just 1.
Overall the QM751G has very good SDR and HDR accuracy ensuring highlights and shadows are faithfully represented and avoiding massively crushed or overbrightened details.
But what about the brightness? One of the best reasons you would buy a mini-LED TV is because you need a bright TV for a sunlit room. I also have great news here. The 75-inch TCL QM7 is not only incredibly bright, especially for high APL scenes such as a beach where it can even outperform OLED, but in window tests its so far the third brightest TV that I've ever measured, only falling short of the 2024 Hisense U8N and of course the QM8, which is just an incredibly bright TV.
In real world content it may not always beat the brightest Mini LED or even OLED TVs, but overall it's very good and would fit well in any living room during the daytime.
Testing Deep Dive - Brightness (click to expand)
The QM7 is so far the third brightest OLED I have tested in window measurements.
Unfortunately the QM7 falls short of expectations in real HDR content even trailing some OLEDs.
While the QM7 can get incredibly bright and in very demanding scenes will beat OLED, in most content it will likely fall short of the brightest OLEDs meaning it may not be a good idea to buy over OLED based on this metric alone.
In terms of the overall contrast & shadow detail, it does a pretty good job. It crushes some shadows in HDR, but it's only a tiny bit. And as you can see here as well, it will have some blooming that can be noticeable against a really dark background if it's a really bright highlight.
So possibly something like subtitles in a movie over a dark scene could be an issue, but for the most part, it's not very noticeable. It just leads to a picture where the contrast is noticeably lacking when compared to OLED, of course, as you might expect for a far more affordable LCD-based mini-LED TV. And it does actually, in my opinion, fall considerably short of even the QM8, which is far more expensive than the QM7, but also a great TV in terms of value. If you do step up to the QM8, you'll have less blooming and better contrast overall.
The 24P judder control on this TV is excellent. You have a lot of different options to choose from. And even in the worst case scenario, if you max it out, it can get rid of the absolute worst judder without too much soap opera effect, which is really excellent.
Is this a good gaming TV? I would say overall, it's definitely good enough for console gaming and you could use it for PC gaming as well, but it won’t be as good as OLED. Now in terms of the latency, it's very good, but where it starts to get a little bit worse is in the motion performance.
Testing Deep Dive - Latency (click to expand)
30ms of total system latency makes this display very good in terms of latency.
TCL QM7 motion performance.
To give TCL credit, it’s actually pretty decent overall for a mini-LED TV. There's not a ton of dark smearing, it's just kinda blurry. But when you compare it to something like OLED, well, as you can see here, a 240 hertz OLED is absolutely dunking on this thing. And trust me, even at 120 hertz, OLED will be far, far superior than what this mini-LED is capable of.
Overall it's not bad, but gaming enthusiasts should seek out OLED for better motion performance.
Now in terms of the text clarity and the subpixel layout, overall, it's pretty good. It is blue, green, & red which is unusual, but it’s definitely better than OLED.
Green, Red, Blue TCL QM7 subpixel arrangement
And speaking of clarity, now let's talk about the finish, because TCL is using a pretty decent one here. Now it's certainly not perfectly clear, and it's not as good as LG's glossy coating, but it is what I would consider glossy and far better than something like a semi-matte or matte coating, which those can produce significant blurring to the image.
TCL QM7 Gloss: Reflection & Ambient Light Handling
But we gotta talk about Mini-LEDs greatest weakness and that's viewing angles. It's just not great here. If you go off angle, yeah, you'll lose some brightness and a lot of color and contrast. It's just not gonna look so great. So personally, I'd say if you're buying a mini-LED TV, just make sure the room you're putting it in has seating that's relatively aligned with the front of the display. It's okay to have a wider couch for sure, but if you have other seats to the left or right of the TV that you're gonna be using frequently, well, mini-LED might not be the right choice.
I also want to mention that I did have some dirty screen effect on this display, but it was actually very little compared to others I've seen, which is pretty surprising, but your results may vary.
Poor Viewing Angles
The sound on the QM7 is overall pretty good considering the price but it's certainly not perfect and you’ll want to hook this up to a higher-end system if you can afford to pick one up because it will definitely improve the sound significantly as I did find some distortion at high volume and it does lack some body. Nothing majorly bad, but it just won’t give you a super punchy sound and it will be lacking a bit of detail that you can get out of higher-end setups.
And then finally, talking about the menu and the firmware, I would say it's mostly great. Now it does have that weird bug where SDR and HDR are sharing brightness. That definitely needs to be resolved, but other than that, this OS that they're using is amazing. It's just, in my opinion, and I've done a lot of TV reviews at this point, the OS that they're using on here is so much faster, especially than Samsung's Tizen OS, but even LG's OS in my opinion, that I actually much prefer this over those two and it might even be a reason for some people to pick up this TV. Buy it here!
So there you have it. TCL definitely has a really great value TV this year with their 2024 QM751G, especially in the 75-inch size, but it's certainly not a perfect display either. I mean, is it as good as OLED? That’s certainly not true. I definitely think that OLED has the edge when it comes to speed as well as contrast, and of course, viewing angles as well. And there's also a few issues I had with the firmware and there's just simply not enough local dimming zones as well, but at a price of just $999.99 right now, this is a no-brainer buy and a huge upgrade over traditional LCD TVs, bringing a lot of great features, especially for those of you out there looking for mainly a TV for watching, well, TV, as well as movies, but also doing some gaming on the side.
Finding a good 75” Mini LED TV under $1,000 is no easy task, yet TCL is delivering just that with contrast, brightness, and speed far outclassing older TVs, and for that reason, I highly recommend it if you can find it under $1,000. And if you're interested in the 75”, 65”, or really any other size, I'll have some affiliate links below so you can pick one up on a deep discount. Buy it here!
Picture: 3/5
Accuracy: 4/5
Sound: 3/5
Value: 5/5
Total: 4/5
