I’ve already written at length how impressive TCL’s research and development has been over the last four years when I praised the entry-level QM6K earlier this year. But given that television’s low price, there were, of course, some things TCL couldn’t add to the experience.
Looking at the $1,500 TCL QM7K (and it’s often discounted well below that), you can see what a little bit more budget can get: it’s significantly brighter, halo control is even better, off angle viewing is superb for this type of panel, and the overall experience – from navigating the menu and watching your favorite shows to playing high-level competitive video games – looks and feels spectacular.
If you were to tell me the QM7K was to be TCL’s flagship LED offering of 2025, I would have believed you.
Note: all specifications mentioned are for the 65-inch version of this television, which is the unit IGN reviewed.
TCL QM7K – Design and Build
Just as was the case with the QM6K, the QM7K doesn’t stand out at first glance when it comes to design. Oddly, and I can’t figure out why television companies keep doing this, TCL did choose a different foot design for the QM7K versus the QM6K, and it’s one I think is worse. Instead of a dual-foot design that keeps the area directly below the panel clear and available for a sound bar, the QM7K instead uses a single large center-aligned foot.
While I appreciate the improved cable management that comes with this choice, TCL made that foot slightly slanted down from back to front, meaning even if you do balance a soundbar on it, it slopes, changing the angle of the bar and making it look like it’s going to slide off. As a result, I opted not to use my soundbar with this TV, which (as I’ll get to in the audio section) was to my detriment.
If you’re using a wireless sound system or an audio solution that is not the traditional sound bar (like bookshelf-style speakers such as the Klipsch The Fives), then there are only advantages to TCL’s design. The two thin side-mounted feet of the QM6K were not conducive to hiding cables, so you could easily see them dangling down. The QM7K hides them adroitly and can hide multiple thanks to a hidden panel in the back of the stand. It’s a sleeker, nicer overall look.
The rest of the television looks basically identical to the QM6K. The border of the LED and the panel are very thin, and TCL doesn’t put its logo too much in your face. There are also no annoying LEDs anywhere, so the whole panel just kind of disappears into your wall when you’re watching streaming content or playing video games. It’s relatively thin, pretty easy to set up, and looks great either wall-mounted or on a media console.
TCL QM7K – The Remote
Also unchanged is TCL’s remote, which is the exact same design found on the QM6K, so I’ll make the same comments I did here as I did there. The fully-plastic design doesn’t overwhelm with too many options and features a “hamburger” for quick access to the most important TV settings (and holding it down in Game Mode activates the Game Bar) as well as the traditional gear icon for full settings access. It otherwise features the familiar suspects: volume, channels, voice control, input, etc.
It’s simple, perfectly sized (in my opinion), and offers just the right amount of buttons to make navigating and operating the television easy. Again, it comes with six preset shortcut buttons and in this case, my unit had Netflix, Prime Video, YouTube, Apple TV, Disney+, and TCL TV
TCL QM7K – Software and UI
TCL uses Google TV as the operating system, and it’s a stock system with just a few changes to the OS that Hisense makes to customize the experience for its users. If you’re coming from Google TV (or Android TV), you’ll have no issues finding the settings you need.
I complained about the processing speed of the QM6K and that is one area that the extra budget for the QM7K shows itself: this TV is much snappier. It turns on quickly and responds to control commands without unnecessary lag. Over the course of my testing period, I didn’t feel like the experience was getting any slower, which does happen sometimes, as I believe Google TV is very resource-heavy. Over years of use, expect the experience to slow down very slightly, but given how fast the processor handles Google TV out of the box, my long-term experience with the OS tells me that you shouldn’t expect it to turn into a slog at any point during this display’s lifetime.
While they are hard to avoid these days, there are ads built into the operating system. Google TV (and other television operating systems) usually call these “suggestions,” and while they might sometimes be a good fit for you, you can turn a majority of them off by activating the “apps only mode” in the user settings. That doesn’t get rid of the big, main banner on the home page, which is the biggest ad, but it does de-clutter the interface a lot and makes Google TV easily the least ad-filled of all the operating systems available.
TCL QM7K – Picture Quality
TCL juiced-up the panel of the QM7K significantly over its entry-level brother the QM6K by way of a substantially brighter panel, better halo control, and great off-angle viewing. I can’t say for sure, but I’m willing to bet the price of more than tripling the peak brightness (from 900 to 3,000 nits) is why color accuracy took a hit.
While the QM6K showed outstanding color accuracy, especially for an entry-level panel, the QM7K is only what I would describe as “adequate.” For most content, it will do just fine thanks to its 95% coverage of the sRGB color gamut. sRGB is the easiest for panels like this to hit and it’s in DCI P3 and Adobe RGB where we can see a panel start to break down, and that’s what happens here. The QM7K drops to a poor 65.5% Adobe RGB gamut coverage and 67.3% DCI P3 gamut coverage, which is some of the worst performance I’ve seen on a panel in some time, especially in this mid range. The average Delta E is pretty good at 2.22, but I think by pushing the backlight panel as high as TCL did, it came at the cost of great color.
Looking at the display’s raw output, the issue appears to be that out of the box, the QM7K is pushing blues way above normal while the reds and greens are both low, which sets the whole balance off. Luckily, this is all repairable with professional calibration but I don’t expect everyone who buys a new TV to do that.
The good news is that most people who are watching streaming content (TVs and movies) or playing games on either a console or a PC won’t notice.
Panel uniformity is pretty good, save for a few spots in the corners where color dips below our threshold, but this performance is not out of the ordinary for a mini LED system, and the areas where color isn’t perfect on this panel tend not to be areas where your attention is focused when watching color-critical content like movies.
Overall, the sRGB accuracy is high enough that content doesn’t appear off to the naked eye, which is great because, outside of these rather poor color results where I think it’s fair to say the QM7K struck out, the panel is mashing home runs.
It is highly unusual to see an LED television perform well when evaluating contrast, halo, and off-angle viewing. To get all three of these factors under control, you usually have to go with OLED technology. TCL packed the QM7K with 2,500 dimming zones and an advanced system of micro lenses, a better backlight controller, and a new processor with reduced optical distance to substantially reduce the appearance of halo.
Halo is the “glow” that appears around bright singular points of light set against a dark background. Because LED televisions use blocks of backlights per group of pixels, these tend to be wholly unavoidable (in contrast, OLED televisions have direct control of every pixel, which means halo doesn’t exist at all). While there is halo visible on the QM7K, it is way less noticeable than I’m used to seeing from other LED makers. You have to really be looking for it and the fact it’s this good means TCL deserves some serious praise. The only televisions that block halo better are OLEDs and the even more advanced (and way more expensive) TCL QM8K.
From that, you can gather that TCL has really good control of its backlight system and that has a secondary benefit: great contrast. While it is again short of an OLED, the QM7K has fantastic visual contrast, able to achieve really nice black levels that help scenes look more dynamic.
The extreme power of the backlight helps HDR content look great, too. 3,000 nits of peak brightness is actually too much for me (a rarity), and during general use testing, I ran the QM7K at around 90% of maximum because bright scenes were actually hurting my eyes in my testing studio. That gives me high confidence that this television will have absolutely no problem overcoming bright, window-filled living rooms. Bring on the sun, because the QM7K will overwhelm it thanks to a combination of the backlight and its anti-reflective coating.
The QM7K has support for all of the most common HDR profiles, including Dolby Vision, HDR 10 and 10+, as well as hybrid log gamma and IMAX Enhanced.
If you tweak your settings a bit, stutter and judder are both effectively eliminated on this television, but I do want to note this isn’t something that is true straight out of the box. TCL, unlike Samsung, trusts its users to be able to adjust a multitude of settings to tailor a viewing experience to their specific tastes. I like this and often praise Sony for the same thing, so I have to give credit to TCL here.
TCL QM7K – Gaming Performance
When I first fired up Marvel Rivals on the QM7K, I actually squinted and audibly uttered, “wow that’s bright.” The “wow” continued for the remainder of my time with this television, as games look truly fantastic on this TV.
I know that there are a lot of folks who don’t enjoy having their phones or computers set to max brightness, but if you’re like me, you typically do. I think that when you have a very bright source, it tends to make downsides of that panel less obvious. That is definitely the case here. If you plan to run the QM7K to at least 80% of its maximum output, you’re going to find that the downsides of an LED panel and this particular television both don’t matter as much. When highlights and shadows are rendered this well, you’re just going to enjoy the ride.
No, contrast ratio is still well below an OLED so games like Cyberpunk 2077 on PC don’t look as good as they do on a television that costs twice as much, but they still look fantastic. You won’t be disappointed. As a bonus, if you game in a brightly-lit living room, you’re going to enjoy the QM7K far more than you would something like the Bravia 8 even though the latter is an OLED. TCL’s TV is just much better at overcoming glare and bright ambient lighting, making daytime gaming a lot more enjoyable.
TCL continues to provide its Game Bar which gives you a good amount of control to customize your specific experience with gaming. There are a few profiles that adjust the shadow detail for competitive shooters versus the richer contrast you might want for a single player RPG and these can be dialed in further with a shadow detail option. If you want to make sure you don’t miss a target in the shadows when you’re playing Call of Duty or Apex Legends, then you can boost the shadows a bit to where the blacks don’t just ink out.
TCL QM7K – Audio Quality
This is a familiar refrain, but I don’t like the audio quality out of the QM7K. Sure, it’s tuned by Bang and Olufsen but even a high-end audio company can’t make something out of nothing. Because there is so little room in the chassis of the television, there just isn’t enough space to render proper mid and bass response. As a result, music sounds particularly empty and hollow, while the lack of impressive, deep bass makes certain scenes in movies like Dune just fall flat.
I will say that vocal ranges are very easy to hear on the TV, which might be the most important aspect of audio for some listeners. I just expect more out of speakers even if I’ve only been met with disappointment for the 7 years I’ve been reviewing televisions.
What makes this problem worse is the stand design I mentioned at the beginning of this review. Because most people use soundbars, I don’t know how TCL expects you to put one under this television unless you plan on wall mounting the panel. If you’re like me and hate doing that, instead preferring to use the included stand on a media console, you’re going to be fighting with a design that seems to have completely forgotten soundbars are important, despite the fact TCL has a whole line of them.
TCL QM7K – The Competition
TCL clearly has Samsung on the mind when it designs LED televisions. Samsung has been leading the way in LED panel sales despite the fact that I don’t think the company’s technology there is particularly good. Sure, Samsung’s QD-OLED panel is incredible, but it seems to be largely ignoring its standard LED panels.
The QM7K competes directly against Samsung’s QN90D and QN85D and I think it blows both out of the water. It has better backlight control which results in better halo suppression, it gets a third brighter, and gives users more options to customize the experience (Samsung’s Tizen operating system is particularly bad when it comes to fine tuning control).
TCL is also up against Hisense and its U8 series, and while the halo control isn’t quite as good as what TCL has, the rest of the package is right up there in quality. Hisense makes great TVs and they’ve gone blow-for-blow with TCL in recent years.
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