The TCL has a much better contrast ratio, but ignoring that, overall picture quality is worse. Depending on your room setup, if you are far enough away from the TV you might find that 40" looks better, but the picture quality will not be better. The M5300 has good picture quality out of the box, but once it was calibrated the picture quality was excellent. If you haven't yet you might want to take a look at the settings we used for our review.