TCL NXTFRAME QLED TV Review

The TCL NXTFRAME TV is designed to look like a framed piece of art rather than a traditional TV. It comes with a faux light wood frame that is magnetically attached to the TV's off-white borders. Overall, the TV's all-white design gives it a unique look, although the magnetic frame isn't very securely attached to the frame, as it's easy to knock parts of it off.

The TCL NXTFRAME doesn't come with a stand but with TCL's proprietary ultra-thin wall mount. You can purchase a moveable floor stand or a traditional table stand from TCL separately.

The back of the TV is made entirely of plastic, and while there's nothing special about it when it comes to materials, its all-white design gives it a striking look. The inputs are recessed into the back, and this lets the TV sit completely flush with the wall when installed with TCL's proprietary wall mount. There are also channels on the back to help with cable management. Just keep in mind that this TV lacks any VESA mounting options, so using third-party wall mounts is more complicated than on other TVs. 

The TV comes with a faux light wood magnetic frame that attaches to its all-white borders.

The TV's build is solid overall, as there isn't much flex anywhere on its back plastic covering. However, the biggest issue lies with its magnetic frames; they just don't hold well enough. If you bump into the TV or if there's a stiff breeze coming through the room on a windy day, the bottom frame bezel can pop right off. If you poke it downwards, it also comes off. The frames are also hard to install flush with each other, requiring some finagling to get a seamless result. 

The TCL NXTFRAME has mediocre contrast. Its native contrast is good, but it lacks a local dimming feature. This causes blacks to be deep in dim and dark scenes, but they become raised and washed out when bright highlights are on the screen. 

This TV doesn't have a local dimming feature, so there's no blooming around bright objects or subtitles in dark scenes. However, as it can't brighten highlights without impacting the rest of the image, dark scenes look washed out.

This TV doesn't have a local dimming feature, so it can't adjust the backlight of individual zones to brighten up highlights without impacting the rest of the image. But this means that there are no distracting flicker or brightness changes as bright highlights move between zones, as it doesn't have any.

Switching to Game Mode doesn't result in any noticeable difference in dark scene performance.

The TCL NXTFRAME has sub-par HDR brightness. The TV's HDR brightness isn't good enough to display brighter highlights with impact.

These measurements are after calibrating the HDR white point with the following settings:

• HDR Picture Mode: Movie
• Brightness: 100
• Contrast: 100
• Gamma: 2.2
• Micro Contrast: Off
• Color Temperature: Warm -5
• Dynamic Tone Mapping: Off

Results with Dynamic Tone Mapping set to 'Detail Priority':

• Hallway Lights: 247 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 228 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 111 cd/m²

Results with Dynamic Tone Mapping set to 'Balance':

• Hallway Lights: 260 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 245 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 126 cd/m²

Results with Dynamic Tone Mapping set to 'Brightness Priority':

• Hallway Lights: 264 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 262 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 135 cd/m²

There's no noticeable difference in HDR brightness when the TCL NXTFRAME is set to Game Mode.

These measurements are after calibrating the HDR white point with the following settings:

• HDR Picture Mode: Game
• Game Master: On
• Brightness: 100
• Contrast: 100
• Gamma: 2.2
• Micro Contrast: Off
• Color Temperature: Warm -5
• Dynamic Tone Mapping: Off

Results with Dynamic Tone Mapping set to 'Detail Priority':

• Hallway Lights: 249 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 234 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 115 cd/m²

Results with Dynamic Tone Mapping set to 'Balance':

• Hallway Lights: 258 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 253 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 125 cd/m²

Results with Dynamic Tone Mapping set to 'Brightness Priority':

• Hallway Lights: 263 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 267 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 138 cd/m²

The TCL NXTFRAME has good PQ EOTF tracking. Still, like on most LED TVs blacks and near blacks are raised, but everything else is displayed dimmer than intended. There's a gradual roll-off near its peak brightness to maintain detail in highlights that are brighter than what the TV is capable of.

The TV's SDR brightness is okay, but it's not bright enough to overcome glare in bright rooms. It's better suited for dimmer rooms.

These measurements are after calibration with the following settings:

• Picture Mode: Movie
• Brightness: 100
• Contrast: 100
• Black Level: 50
• Dynamic Contrast: Off
• Black Stretch: Off
• Dynamic Brightness: Off
• Micro Contrast: Off
• Gamma: 2.2

The TCL NXTFRAME has a very good HDR color gamut. It has outstanding coverage of the commonly used DCI-P3 color space, but most colors are undersaturated, with some minor color mapping issues. The TV has okay coverage of the wider Rec. 2020 color space, but vibrant colors are inaccurate and undersaturated.

The TV has satisfactory color volume, but it doesn't do a very good job of displaying dark saturated colors due to its lack of local dimming, even with its good native contrast. It's also not bright enough to display vibrant colors.

The TV has disappointing pre-calibration accuracy. Its white balance is very poor, with significant accuracy errors throughout every range of gray except blacks, with more errors in brighter grays. Reds, in particular, are significantly overrepresented in most grays, and so are blues, but to a lesser extent. This does make its color temperature too warm overall. The TV's color accuracy is alright, but undersaturated colors show a lot of accuracy errors, although the errors go down as the colors get more saturated.

The TV has fantastic SDR accuracy after calibration, and it's easy to calibrate. Any issues with white balance are gone, and the color temperature and gamma are essentially perfect. Color accuracy is also now outstanding.

You can see our full calibration settings here.

The TV's gray uniformity is just alright. The sides of the screen are darker than the rest, and there's some noticeable dirty screen effect throughout. On a very dark or near-black screen, its uniformity is great, with only the edges being slightly lighter than the rest of the screen, but it's hard to see unless you're looking for it.

The TV's black uniformity is okay, but there's very noticeable clouding when bright highlights are on screen.

The TCL NXTFRAME has an inadequate viewing angle, so it's not suitable for a wide seating arrangement. As you move off-center, there's significant gamma shifting, black level raise, brightness loss, and colors look increasingly washed out.

This TV's overall reflection handling is good, especially when it's dealing with glare from direct sources of light, like lights or windows placed directly opposite of it. However, its matte coating diffuses glare from ambient lighting to the point where the resulting smudges reduce the TV's perceived contrast, impacting its picture quality in the process.

The TV has good HDR gradient handling. There's noticeable banding in dark grays, reds and greens, but other color gradients have minimal banding.

The TCL NXTFRAME has very good low-quality content smoothing. It does an excellent job at smoothing out artifacts in low bitrate content, but there is some loss of detail.

The TV does a good job with upscaling low-resolution content like DVDs, standard definition cable channels, and lower-resolution streams. Details are clear enough, but finer details and small hard-coded text are hard to make out.

Sharpness processing was calibrated with no over-sharpening for low-resolution content with the following settings:

• Sharpness: 20

The TV uses a BGR (Blue-Green-Red) subpixel layout instead of the traditional RGB layout. This doesn't cause any issues for video or gaming content, but it can be a problem for PC monitor use as it impacts the text clarity, although not everyone will notice this.

The TV uses a KSF phosphor coating to produce red light and a quantum dot color converter to produce green light, as confirmed by the TV's spectral power distribution (SPD).

The TV has a great response time for minimal blur behind fast-moving objects, but it's slower when coming out of dark states, so there's some black smearing in dark scene transitions.

The TCL NXTFRAME uses pulse width modulation (PWM) to dim its backlight, and it flickers at 150Hz, which is low enough to be noticeable by users who are sensitive to it. Fortunately, the TV is flicker-free in all modes just as long as the brightness is set to 29 or higher.

The TV doesn't have an optional backlight strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion (BFI), to help reduce persistence blur.

The TV has an optional motion interpolation feature to improve the clarity of motion, but it doesn't work very well in faster scenes. It does a better job in slower scenes, as it smoothes out motion without introducing too many artifacts.

Due to the TV's response time, there's some minor stutter when watching movies or TV shows, and it's most noticeable during slow panning shots.

The TV automatically removes judder from all sources when watching movies or shows that are in 24p, even if they're in a 60Hz signal, like from a cable box.

The TV supports all three types of variable refresh rate (VRR) technology to reduce screen tearing. Its VRR range caps out at 144Hz, 120Hz, or 240Hz, depending on the resolution. Unfortunately, it uses different overdrive settings under and above 65Hz, and also 144Hz if you're gaming at 1080p @ 240Hz. At 144Hz, the TV also seemingly uses different gamma settings, causing the entire screen to flash.

This TV has incredibly low input lag when set to PC Mode or Game Mode, which ensures a very responsive gaming experience with very little delay between your actions with your controller or mouse and the action on-screen. In 1080p @ 240Hz, the input lag is 4.6 ms.

The TCL NXTFRAME supports all common resolutions up to 4k @ 144Hz, as well as 1080p @ 240Hz. For 144Hz and 240Hz to work, you must enable 'High Frame Rate Mode.' Unfortunately, it doesn't support chroma 4:4:4 when set in Game Mode and needs to be set to PC to display chroma 4:4:4. VRR also only works properly in Game Mode, which means that you need to choose between displaying 4:4:4 or VRR when gaming.

The TCL NXTFRAME is fully compatible with everything the PS5 offers, like 1440p @ 120Hz and 4k @ 120Hz, as well as HDMI Forum VRR. It also supports Auto Low Latency Mode, so you don't have to worry about manually switching to Game Mode to get the lowest input lag.

The TV is fully compatible with everything the Xbox Series X|S offers, including 1440p @ 120Hz, 4k @ 120Hz, HDMI Forum VRR, FreeSync Premium Pro, and Dolby Vision gaming. It also supports Auto Low Latency Mode, so you don't have to worry about manually switching to Game Mode to get the lowest input lag.

The TCL NXTFRAME has HDMI 2.1 bandwidth on HDMI ports 1 and 2, with both supporting up to 4k @ 144Hz. Unfortunately, unlike some of TCL's other 2024 TVs, the HDMI 1 port is the eARC port, so you lose one of your high-speed ports if you have a connected soundbar. It supports all HDR formats.

The TCL NXTFRAME supports eARC, which lets you pass high-quality, uncompressed audio to a compatible receiver or soundbar through an HDMI cable. It supports all major audio formats, so you don't have to worry about compatibility with external sources.

The TV has a sub-par frequency response, especially when it comes to its bass response, which is non-existent. Still, outside of the complete lack of bass, the TV's sound profile is very clear at almost all listening levels, although it's mediocre at max volume. Overall, it's a solid TV for dialogue, but inadequate for listening to most music or for watching booming action movies.

The TV's distortion performance is poor. Distortion is audible at all volumes and even more so near and at max volume. Not everyone notices distortion, but try to keep the volume at a moderate level to minimize it.

The TCL NXTFRAME uses version 12 of the Google TV operating system. The interface is very smooth and easy to use.

Unfortunately, like almost all TVs on the market, the smart interface contains ads, and you can't disable them.

The TCL NXTFRAME has a fantastic selection of apps, so it's easy to find your favorite content. You can also cast content from your phone onto the TV or play videos directly from a USB stick.

The TCL NXTFRAME comes with a similar remote to some of TCL's other 2024 TVs, although it isn't as long, and comes in white to match the TV's color scheme. It has an art mode button, as well as buttons for popular streaming services, and you can use the built-in microphone to switch inputs, change apps, search within apps, and ask for the weather and time. Unfortunately, you can't change the settings on the TV using the voice controls.

There's a single button on the bottom left of the TV that can be used to switch inputs, adjust the volume, change channels, and power the TV on/off.

• Manuals
• Remote
• 2x AAA batteries
• Power cable
• Wall-mount equipment (brackets, screws, and anchors)
• Frame segments

In its 'Art Mode,' using the 'Starry Night' picture, the TV consumes about 39 watts of power at minimum brightness and up to 140 watts at max brightness.