TCL is proving to be a leader in the TV space once again. After a few years lagging behind Hisense, the QM6K and QM7K proved that entry- and mid-range are once again a sweet spot for TCL, but before the company announced the QM8K in late May, it looked like it was going to leave the high-end to the competitors and OLED.
It turns out, TCL had some other tricks up its sleeve. Everything that makes the rest of the 2025 line excellent is present and enhanced here, with the same great halo control and off-angle viewing mixed with much better brightness and a frame that has basically eliminated a visible border. Making the QM8K wasn’t easy, which is why the asking price is so high, but until next year when everyone else copies what TCL does here, the QM8K can sit on a hill knowing it’s the only option on the market with every one of a long list of features.
Note: all specifications mentioned are for the 65-inch version of this television, which is the unit IGN reviewed.
TCL QM8K – Design and Build
Describing a television’s design isn’t usually a particularly interesting affair. There is a stand of some sort, a border, a bezel, and ports. You can essentially distill every television on the market to “a big rectangle with plugs.” I can’t do that with the QM8K because TCL did something different and unique here.
We’ve seen “bezelless” televisions for years as the physical frame around the display panel has shrunk to become nearly imperceptible, often just a scant couple of millimeters thick. TCL did that here, of course, but it also went one step further and almost eliminated the border, too. The border I am referring to exists on every other flatscreen television and refers to the black outline around the display pixels. Companies used to hide this under the bezel, but in the last several years have opted to show it since it’s pretty easy to ignore – a lot easier than a thick piece of silver plastic that was the bezel. They chose the lesser of two evils.
TCL has now gone one step further and shrunk that black border down to the width of about two pixels. Next to the tiny bezel, the total amount the QM8K shows to the viewer that isn’t viewable screen is insanely thin. The amount of work TCL had to do to fold that border around the sides, which houses many of the electronics that power the display, can’t be understated. There is a reason that even OLEDs have borders. It was pretty easy to ignore this black border around the display before, but once you see a QM8K, it’s hard not to see it everywhere else.
The rest of the design is very similar to the QM7K. The QM8K uses a centered foot design to its stand and it is slightly angled up from front to back, meaning if you have a sound bar, it doesn’t fit nicely directly under the television unless you wall mount it – which isn’t great. As with the QM7K, even if you do balance a soundbar on it, it slopes, changing the angle of the bar and making it look as though it’s going to slide off.
The benefit of the central foot design is that it allows for superior cable management versus two wide-set thin feet, which I appreciate. Cables are routed along the back and into a case integrated into the back of the foot, which hides them very well when viewing the TV from the front. The best way to combine that benefit without losing access to a sound bar would be to make the base of the stand flat, not sloped. I hope TCL adjusts this going forward.
TCL QM8K – The Remote
TCL got a little bit fancy with the QM8K remote. While the actual layout and options are almost unchanged versus the QM6K and the QM7K, a high-end television deserves a little bit more of a flourish (I suppose that’s what TCL thought, anyway) and instead of a black plastic face, the QM8K remote is a nice brushed aluminum. Every button is plastic, but colored identically to the aluminum plate. The sides and back of the remote are a simple black affair, however, which is fine to me. If the goal was to make the experience feel a little more luxurious, I would say TCL accomplished that goal.
I mentioned that the actual options on the remote are almost identical to the two lower-end models and that’s because there is one notable difference: fewer built-in shortcut buttons. While the QM7K and the QM6K both have six built-in shortcuts, the QM8K only has four. My review unit came with Netflix, Prime Video, YouTube, and TCL TV. Not only did we lose a full row of shortcuts to achieve this, we also lost the “i” button that is usually in line with the bottom of the channel and volume down buttons, instead replacing that with the TCL TV shortcut. I admit, I don’t use the “i” button ever, but I can’t help but feel like it was an odd sacrifice. Sure, I’ll use the TCL TV shortcut about as much as the “i” button (which is to say, never), but I think the latter is probably more useful in more cases than the former.
The rest of the remote is identical, including the need for two AAA batteries.
TCL QM8K – Software and UI
Just like the other two televisions in TCL’s 2025 line that I have repeatedly mentioned, the QM8K uses Google TV as the operating system with just a few tweaks to the settings pages to customize the experience for TCL.
The experience is pretty great. While the QM6K was a bit slow (which I blame on what is likely a lower-end processing unit to meet the low asking price of that display), the QM7K and now QM8K are snappy and responsive. The relatively resource-heavy Google TV is managed adeptly, and I don’t foresee this changing for some time. I’ve mentioned it before, but over years of use, Google TV (and previously Android TV) would slow down as updates increased the burden. 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.
TCL has streamlined its default settings so you don’t need to worry about making sure to enable full power to the HDMI ports like some televisions require, and the most egregious motion clarity settings are off out of the box. I recommend adjusting the peak luminance and performance of the backlight to “high” to get the most out of this television, but the rest of the settings are going to come down to user preference.
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 – depending on how long you’ve used it and thus how much information it’s gathered on what you like to watch – 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 QM8K – Picture Quality
Let’s start with the good stuff. Firstly, the QM8K gets insanely bright with up to HDR5000. If you’re like me and using this display in a basement, you probably don’t need to come close to using it at maximum brightness. In many cases, it feels way too bright, actually.
That’s a great problem to have, as you can always turn a bright TV down but you can’t always turn a dim TV up. In brightly lit living rooms, the QM8K is going to overcome glare and sunlight with ease. Combined with very good anti-reflective coatings, this is an ideal main-floor television.
TCL’s Halo control system found in the QM6K and QM7K is also present here in the company’s best possible way. The result is only the slightest amount of glow surrounding bright objects set against dark backgrounds, with blacks getting pretty close to actual black (which is still only achieved by OLED displays). To best describe how much halo you can expect, when you fire up an episode of Severance, the Apple TV+ logo is displayed with a glow around it on purpose. I would say the QM8K produces about half as much glow as that, which will be most obvious when you’ve got a bright white logo on a loading screen or if you’re looking at subtitles set against the black letterboxing in the lower third. It’s exceptionally well controlled and is easily the best of any non-OLED display I’ve ever tested.
Off-angle viewing is also very good. While some contrast is lost when you move away from looking at the screen directly centered, it doesn’t keep getting worse the more extreme the angle becomes. You can comfortably view this TV from all of the common living room viewing angles and not be bothered by anything close to a significantly worse viewing experience. The one area that does get slightly worse off-angle is the halo control. Looking at the panel truly straight-on, you barely see a halo. Off angle, you’ll see it start to bloom outward a bit. That said, it’s still much better than any other LED TV I’ve recently tested.
The QM8K 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.
Stutter and judder are pretty well controlled, but you do have to adjust a few settings as these aren’t enabled out of the box. TCL has some settings that reduce digital noise caused by low bitrate streams (like YouTube) but those can introduce some pixel tearing, so keep that in mind – it’s a tradeoff.
None of that is particularly unexpected, however some of the new features aren’t without downsides. TCL seems to have made some compromises in two places.
First, that new borderless design is gorgeous, but I notice a slight darkening of the screen right up near the edge of the display. The best way I can describe it is as a light vignette, which only becomes obvious if the screen is displaying very bright, light backgrounds. You don’t necessarily notice it unless you’re looking for it, but it was apparent to me while I was inspecting panel uniformity. You can usually ignore it, but it means that there is room for improvement in this borderless design.
The second compromise is with color accuracy. The QM7K gave us hints of this, but pushing the brightness as high as TCL did has the drawback of worse color gamut coverage. Out of the box and with power set to 70% brightness, the QM8K does pretty well for a living room television, with 98.9% sRGB gamut coverage with a Delta E of 2.37 (anything less than 3 is a good result for a TV). Its Adobe RGB and DCI-P3 gamut coverage is substantially worse, however, with 68.5% and 70.5% coverage, respectively. This display is going to perform its best as a general-use gaming and movie-viewing TV and would make for a fairly poor monitor, basically. Not uncommon for QD-LED displays, although the very tight gamut coverage is disappointing.
When the television is set to full power, however, the situation gets notably worse. At 100% brightness, sRGB coverage falls under 90% (regularly in the 87-89% gamut coverage area), and Adobe RGB and DCI-P3 both fall into the low 60% gamut coverage area. When TCL has to push the brightness, color suffers substantially. If you can, keep this TV in the middle-to-middle-high brightness range if you care about great color. It tends to push greens just a hair more than blues and reds, and you can correct for this if you plan to calibrate your display.
Contextually, I think that in many cases, having really good brightness is more important than great color. During the day, you want to be able to see a football game without squinting or closing all your blinds, and that’s what the QM8K allows. At night, you can turn down the brightness to watch TV and movies, where you might care more about color accuracy.
TCL QM8K – Gaming Performance
While it’s not going to unseat high-end OLEDs for pure wow-factor in games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 (the latter with ray tracing on), the QM8K looks and performs really great as a gaming TV. The brightness means HDR looks fantastic and while blacks aren’t inky and super dark like they can be on an OLED, that’s actually a good thing for competitive shooters like Apex Legends and Marvel Rivals. In both cases, shadow detail is very good, making it so I never feel like I have to squint to see targets hiding in dark areas.
The backlight adjusts very quickly, meaning there is never any lag between looking in a dark room and then into the sky. Instead, visuals are apparent immediately and without loss of detail.
Games with stunning visuals like the aforementioned Baldur’s Gate 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 look great, although I will say they’re a step below how they appear on an OLED simply because the QM8K doesn’t render blacks as dark as an OLED, so contrast ratio is not as good. Still, the QM8K gets substantially brighter than any OLED, so that tradeoff can be worth it if you primarily game in a brightly lit living room. That and the fact you don’t have to worry about OLED “burn in” means that many gamers are going to prefer the QM8K.
TCL continues to provide access to 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 an FPS, then you can boost the shadows a bit to where the blacks are much brighter.
This is a very good gaming television and will outperform even dedicated gaming monitors, short of OLED.
TCL QM8K – Audio Quality
I feel like a broken record, but audio quality is not great out of the QM8K, especially in the case of music. Vocals are well defined, but the lack of space in the television’s chassis means there isn’t physically enough room to build out the lows, so music can sound hollow and even tinny.
The other issue, and again this is not unique to the QM8K, is that the range of these drivers doesn’t cover the mids and highs distinctly, so they can muddle together. This is especially tragic for music, which can lose a lot of the nuance that brings depth to particularly emotional songs. When a lot of instruments are going at the same time as vocals, the result is a mush of sound that lacks distinctness, kind of like crushing aluminum foil in your hands.
On the bright side, the speakers can get extremely loud; however, the audio “mush” problem is exacerbated at higher volumes, so it’s a double-edged sword. If you struggle to hear vocal frequencies in modern TV and movies, the QM8K speakers are decent at that. However, don’t expect to be swept up in the moment by compelling sound. My recommendation, as always, is to get a standalone sound system. TCL’s stand choice is again worth pointing out because soundbars don’t sit well under this TV, which is an annoyance considering how badly the visuals projected by the QM8K deserve better audio than what you get with the stock system.
TCL QM8K – The Competition
TCL brought the QM8K to market at a very high asking price: $2,500. However, just two months later and it can be found for a far more approachable $1,600 and it is here that I think it is a fantastic deal. It competes directly against Samsung and its QN90D, which is probably why TCL originally priced the QM8K at $2,500. Samsung is also discounted its flagship LED television, but it’s still $2,000, meaning the case for the QM8K is strengthened.
Samsung’s LED televisions have worse brightness, worse halo, support fewer HDR profiles (the QN90D has just HDR 10+ and HLG), and come with the Tizen operating system which doesn’t give you nearly as many customization options as TCL does with Google TV. Against the juggernaut that is Samsung, the TCL QM8K is the superior choice. Samsung has been surviving in the LED space on name recognition alone for a long time, and spec-for-spec as well as price, it just doesn’t compete with TCL’s QM8K.
Hisense is another option with its U8, which is a lower-cost LED that brings similar brightness, although TCL’s halo suppression technology is going to be hard to beat.
