TCL 6 Series/R655 2022 QLED TV Review

The TCL 6 Series Roku TV has a very premium design that looks great. Instead of the simple feet found on other TCL TVs, like the TCL 5 Series/S555 2022 QLED, it has a center-mounted pedestal stand that supports the TV well. The borders of the TV are thin, but there's a noticeable dead space between the borders and the first pixels. Note that the 85" model has a slightly different design, with more traditional feet instead of the center-mounted stand.

This TV isn't part of our accelerated longevity test, but its predecessor, the TCL 6 Series/R635 2020 QLED, is.

Instead of the basic v-shaped feet found on most other TCL TVs like the TCL 5 Series/S555 2022 QLED, this TV has a center-mounted pedestal stand. It's thin, so you can still place a soundbar in front of the TV, and it supports the TV well.

Footprint of the 55" stand: 11.6" x 11". The stand lifts the screen 2.8" off the table, most soundbars fit in front of it without blocking the screen.

The back has a slightly premium design. The back of the stand has a removable cover, meaning you can use it for cable management. The inputs all face to the side, but they're cut into the back of the TV, so they're somewhat hard to access when the TV is wall-mounted.

The bottom half of the screen houses all the electronics and inputs, and it's thicker than the top half. The thicker section prevents the TV from sitting completely flush against the wall if it's wall-mounted.

The TCL 6 Series Roku TV has good build quality. Although it's pretty much all made of plastic, it seems well-built overall. The stand is pretty solid and holds the TV in place. Unfortunately, our unit gave off a bit of a burnt-plastic smell during testing, but there were no signs of melted plastic. We've heard isolated reports of this issue with other TVs, but it's unclear if this will fade over time or if it could cause other issues.

The TCL 6 Series Roku TV has fantastic contrast. Dark scenes are displayed well, with deep blacks, even when bright highlights are on the screen. The native contrast of the panel is already exceptional, but the local dimming feature is very effective at boosting it even further.

The local dimming feature performs the same in Game Mode as in the other picture modes.

This TV has amazing peak brightness in HDR. Bright highlights are bright enough to stand out well, and even large bright scenes are displayed well and deliver a visually impressive experience.

These measurements are in the 'Dark' HDR Picture Mode with the Backlight at its max, TV Brightness set to 'Brighter', Contrast at '100', Local Contrast on 'High', and the Color Temperature set to 'Warm'.

Switching to 'Game' mode doesn't result in any noticeable difference in peak brightness with HDR games.

The TV has excellent PQ EOTF tracking. Shadow details are preserved well, but near blacks are dimmed a bit. With content mastered at lower peak brightness levels, there's a sharp cutoff near the TV's peak brightness, but content mastered at 4,000 nits has a slightly smoother roll-off, so fine details are better preserved in bright scenes.

The TCL 6 Series Roku TV has remarkable peak brightness in SDR. It's bright enough to easily overcome glare even in bright rooms. There's very little variation in brightness with different scenes, but very large, bright scenes are quite a bit dimmer than smaller highlights. Very small highlights in near-black scenes are dimmed by the TV's local dimming feature, though.

These measurements are after calibration in the 'Movie' Picture Mode with the Backlight at '100' and TV Brightness set to 'Brighter'. Local Contrast was set to 'High', Contrast was set to '100', and the Color Temperature set to 'Warm'.

The TCL 6 Series Roku TV has a great HDR color gamut. It has fantastic coverage of the DCI-P3 color space, with slightly better coverage than the TCL 5 Series/S555 2022 QLED. It has just decent coverage of the wider Rec. 2020 color space, though, which is a bit disappointing. The tone mapping is good overall, which is important for content that exceeds the color space of this TV.

This TV has great color volume. Dark saturated colors are displayed well, thanks to its fantastic color volume. Colors are bright and vibrant thanks to its high peak brightness in HDR.

This TV has very good SDR accuracy before calibration. The white balance is good, with no significant issues. There are a few noticeable issues with saturated blues and cyan, but the overall color accuracy is great. The color temperature is a bit warm, but it's not too bad. Gamma follows the 2.2 target we chose for a moderately-lit room well, but most scenes are slightly too dark.

The Roku companion app makes it very easy and quick to calibrate this TV. The results after calibration are fantastic, and other than saturated blues, there are no noticeable issues.

You can see the full settings used for our calibration here.

The TCL 6 Series Roku TV has good gray uniformity. The sides of the screen are noticeably darker than the center. The center of the screen has a bit of dirty screen effect that can be distracting when watching sports. Dark scenes look much better, and there are no significant issues.

This TV has just okay black uniformity. With local dimming disabled, the screen is cloudy, and the backlight bleeds through all four corners. Enabling local dimming significantly improves black uniformity, but there's a bright halo around the cross in the center of the screen, so it's not perfect. If you'd like a similar TV with better black uniformity, check out the TCL QM8/QM850G QLED.

Unfortunately, the TCL 6 Series Roku TV has a poor viewing angle. This TV isn't a good choice for a wide seating arrangement, as colors fade and lose accuracy as you move off-center.

The reflection handling of this TV is superb. The semi-gloss finish reduces the intensity of direct reflections significantly, and indirect reflections aren't very noticeable. Direct reflections cause some smearing, though, but overall there's no issue with visibility in a bright room.

Unfortunately, like the TCL 5 Series/S555 2022 QLED, signals aren't scaled properly. Adjusting the scaling setting has no impact on this. It isn't an issue unless you have a really old DVD player that doesn't support upscaling; it's unlikely that you'll encounter this issue with modern equipment.

Like most TVs on the market, this TV uses a BGR (Blue-Green-Red) subpixel layout instead of the traditional Red-Green-Blue layout. For video content, it doesn't cause any issues, but if you're planning on using this TV as a PC monitor, this reduces text clarity a bit, although there are easy workarounds for it. You can read more about this here.

The TCL 6 Series Roku TV QLED has a very good response time, very similar to the TCL 5 Series/S555 2022 QLED. There's very little black smearing in dark scenes, and transitions are consistent with different types of content. Some motion blur is visible when playing games or watching sports.

Unfortunately, the TCL 6 Series Roku TV uses pulse width modulation (PWM) to dim the backlight, and it flickers across all picture modes with all settings. The flicker pattern is extremely unusual and appears to be a combination of multiple separate waves, but the overall frequency is very high and won't bother most people.

This TV has an optional backlight strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion. It flickers at either 60Hz or 120Hz, depending on the content. The score for this test is based on the flicker frequency and not the actual performance.

This TV has an optional motion interpolation feature to improve the appearance of motion. It can increase the frame rate of content up to 120fps, but it doesn't look very good with busy scenes. Slow scenes look good, but there are significant artifacts in busier scenes.

Unfortunately, there's a bit of stutter when watching low frame rate content like movies. It's especially noticeable in slow panning shots.

The TCL 6 Series Roku TV automatically removes judder from any source, ensuring a smooth movie-watching experience.

The TCL 6 Series Roku TV has an extremely fast refresh rate. Along with the Samsung QN95B QLED, it's one of the only TVs on the market with a 144Hz refresh rate. It also supports variable refresh rate technology, ensuring a nearly tear-free gaming experience. It works across a wide range of refresh rates, and thanks to low framerate compensation, it remains nearly tear-free even if the frame rate drops low or if you're playing a game that's locked at a low frame rate. Note that the 85" model is limited to a 120Hz refresh rate.

There are a few oddities when using this TV with an AMD graphics card. With FreeSync enabled on the TV and in the AMD control panel, everything works fine. If you enable HDR in Windows or in a game directly, the TV re-handshakes and looks like it's in HDR, but all of the TV's settings show that it's in SDR. Even though the settings show that the TV thinks it's in SDR, the brightness levels are higher, the TV is tone mapping properly, and colors are more saturated, confirming that the TV is doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing in HDR. This issue doesn't occur with an NVIDIA graphics card.

The TCL 6 Series Roku TV has superb low input lag, ensuring a very responsive gaming experience. The input lag is also low in 'PC' mode, which is great as you can enjoy clear text and a smooth desktop experience. Oddly, though, the input lag increases significantly when running at 144Hz.

The TCL 6 Series Roku TV supports most common resolutions, but there are a few issues. Unfortunately, the 4k @ 144Hz feature doesn't work well with all sources, as it didn't work on our test PC with an RTX 3060, but it worked fine on a different PC with an RX6600XT. It supports chroma 4:4:4 with 60Hz signals, which is important for clear text from a PC. Unfortunately, with 1080p and 1440p signals chroma 4:4:4 isn't displayed properly at 120Hz. Chroma is displayed properly with a 4k @ 120Hz signal, but you have to be in either the 'Game' Picture Mode or have Game Mode enabled; otherwise, it skips frames, resulting in a 60Hz refresh rate.

The TCL 6 Series Roku TV is fully compatible with the PS5. Note that the variable refresh rate feature doesn't work with a 1440p resolution, but this is a limitation of the PS5, not the TV.

This TV is nearly fully compatible with the Xbox Series S|X. It supports everything except for Dolby Vision gaming @ 120Hz, but very few TVs or games support this.

HDMI ports 1 and 2 support the full bandwidth of HDMI 2.1 (48Gbps according to CRU), and those are the only ports that support the 144Hz max refresh rate. Unfortunately, it doesn't support ATSC 3.0, so over-the-air broadcasts are limited to 1080p.

The TCL 6 Series Roku TV supports eARC, and unlike the TCL 5 Series/S555 2022 QLED, advanced audio formats work perfectly and are passed through automatically, with no downmixing.

The TCL 6 Series Roku TV has an okay frequency response. Like most TVs, there's very little bass response, with no thump or rumble in its deep bass. Dialogue is very clear, even at high volume levels, but like the TCL 5 Series/S555 2022 QLED, it can't get very loud and lacks a room correction feature, so it's not a good choice for noisy environments.

This TV has decent distortion performance at moderate and low listening levels. It increases significantly at high volume levels, especially in the high treble range.

This TV runs the Roku TV smart interface, which is very simple, with fewer animations and a simpler user interface than you'll get with more premium TVs. It's very fast, though, and easy to use.

Unfortunately, like all Roku TVs we've tested, there are large ads on the home screen and they can't be disabled.

There's a great selection of streaming apps to choose from, and most of the more popular streaming services are available.

Fortunately, this TV comes with the voice remote found with most premium Roku devices. You can access voice controls either through the remote or through the Roku companion app. There are a few quick access buttons for popular streaming services, but like most TVs, you can't change them.

The power button is on the bottom bezel of the TV below the TCL branding, and you can change inputs with it too.

• Remote (with 2x AAA batteries)
• Power cable
• Manual