TCL Q7/Q750G QLED TV Review

The TV looks pretty good. It's made entirely of plastic, including its feet, but it has sleek metal-brushed borders that give the entire package an impressive flair.

You can set the plastic feet at two distinct positions. The first position, pictured above, sets the TV closer to the table, with less space between the table and the first row of pixels, which sits 3.1 inches from the table. It gives the TV a sleeker, low-profile look and is high enough for almost any soundbar.

Footprint of the 65-inch stand in the wide position: 55" x 13.5".

The alternate position puts the feet closer to the TV's center and lets you put the TV on smaller tables. In this position, the screen sits 3.2 inches from the table, but the protruding feet get in the way of putting a soundbar directly in front.

Footprint of the 65-inch stand in the alternate/narrow position: 36.1" x 13.5".

The back is entirely plastic but has a nice chiseled look. The power cable comes out of the right side of the TV, while the inputs are in a recessed inlet on the left side of the TV. There's a rubber grommet in the middle to help with cable management. The side-facing inputs are hard to reach without pulling the TV slightly forward when the TV is wall-mounted. Note that the back of the 85-inch model looks a bit different, with a flatter section in the TV's upper region.

The TV has good build quality even if it's entirely made of plastic, aside from its metal-brushed borders. There's a slight flex near the VESA holes, but it's to be expected. The TV doesn't wobble much on its feet, which is great.

Halfway through the testing phase, the TV developed a stuck green pixel that hasn't disappeared. This could happen on any panel, so it doesn't impact the build quality score of this particular TV.

The TCL Q7 has incredible contrast. Its native contrast is outstanding, and it's even better with Local Dimming set to 'High,' giving the TV very deep blacks when watched in a dark room, even when bright highlights are shown on screen.

The TV has good blooming performance. The local dimming zones are small enough to minimize much of the blooming around bright objects or subtitles in darker scenes. However, there is still noticeable blooming around bright objects set on a very dark background.

Overall, the TV's processing keeps up well with fast-moving objects, although there is some visible darkening on the leading edge of bright objects.

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

The TV has good HDR peak brightness. Strangely, bright highlights are dimmer when they're very small on this TV versus when they take up significant portions of the screen. This means that this TV excels in scenes that are very bright overall or that have very large highlights, more so than it does in dark scenes with scattered, small, bright highlights. It's bright enough to overcome glare in a bright room, although you might want to close the curtains for dark scenes with a few bright highlights, as they look a bit faded in well-lit rooms. If you'd prefer a brighter yet similar TV, check out this TV's successor, the TCL QM7/QM751G QLED.

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

• HDR Picture Mode: Movie
• Local Contrast: High
• Brightness: 100

The TV's HDR peak brightness is a bit higher in Game Mode than out of it. However, as a result, it's less accurate overall than in other picture modes.

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

• HDR Picture Mode: Game
• Brightness: 100
• Contrast: 100
• Local Contrast: High

The TCL Q7 has impressive PQ EOTF tracking. While its pure blacks are slightly overbrightened, very dark scenes are a bit too dim overall. Everything else is a bit brighter than intended, but it's still pretty accurate overall. The TV hard clips when it reaches its peak brightness, leading to a loss of bright detail.

In Game Mode, however, the TV is overbrightened throughout, as you can see below:

• 600 nit mastering.
• 1000 nit mastering.
• 4000 nit mastering.

The TCL Q7's SDR brightness is very impressive. As with HDR brightness, the TV's small bright highlights are dimmer than bigger highlights are. Still, the TV is bright enough in SDR to handle rooms with lots of glare.

These measurements are after calibration with the following settings:

• Picture Mode: Movie
• Brightness: 100
• Contrast: 96
• Local Contrast: High
• Micro Contrast: Off
• Gamma: 2.2
• Black Level: 50
• Dynamic Contrast: Off
• Black Stretch: Off
• Dynamic Brightness: Off

The TV has a great HDR color gamut. It has fantastic coverage of the widely used DCI-P3 color space, although its overall color profile leans towards being under-saturated in greens, yellows, reds, and cyan. Unfortunately, it has barely satisfactory coverage of the wider Rec. 2020 color space.

The TV has decent color volume in HDR. It does a good job of representing dark colors but struggles with bright saturated colors throughout.

The TCL Q7 has poor pre-calibration accuracy. Its white balance is terrible, with significant accuracy errors throughout every range of gray except blacks. The TV's gamma is overbrightened in relation to the reference target of 2.2 for a moderately lit room. The TV's color accuracy is just okay; undersaturated colors show a lot of accuracy errors, but the errors go down as the colors get more saturated. Thankfully, the TV's color temperature is spot on our 6500K target, so it's neither too warm nor too cold.

The TV's accuracy after calibration is fantastic. The calibration interface is easy to use and doesn't require hiring a professional calibrator, and the end result is a massive improvement over its pre-calibration state in virtually all areas.

See our full calibration settings.

The TV has good gray uniformity, especially on a very dark or near-black screen, where its uniformity is excellent. On brighter scenes of uniform color, there are obvious uniformity issues, with significant vignetting making the corners and sides of the screen darker than the center. This is distracting when watching some bright content, like hockey, as the sides and corners of the scene are noticeably darker than the rest.

The TCL Q7's black uniformity is incredible. It's fantastic even with local dimming set to off, with noticeable but minor blue clouding throughout. With local dimming enabled, the TV's black uniformity is outstanding, as you need to squint to see the blooming around the bright cross.

The TV's viewing angle is poor and isn't a good choice for wide seating arrangements. There's significant color and hue shifting as you move off-center, and the image looks increasingly washed out as you move further away to the sides. If you have a wide seating arrangement in a bright room, a TV with an IPS panel, like the LG QNED80 2023, is a better choice.

The TV's reflection handling is decent, but it won't win any awards. It does a good job with indirect reflections, like when you have a light to the side or glare that isn't directly facing the screen. However, with direct reflections, like from lights or windows placed directly in front of the screen, the reflections are noticeable enough to be annoying when watching content, even more so with the resulting rainbow effect. If you want a TV with better reflection handling that doesn't suffer from the rainbow effect, check out the Hisense U7N.

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

This TV has very good low-quality content smoothing. It does a fantastic job of smoothing out macro-blocking and pixelization in dark scenes, but unfortunately, it comes at the expense of losing a lot of fine detail.

The TCL Q7 has good upscaling capabilities. Details in low-resolution content are upscaled well without excessive blur, and text is easy to read.

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

• Sharpness: 15

The TCL Q7 uses a BGR (Blue-Green-Red) subpixel layout. For most content, this doesn't cause any issues, but it causes text clarity issues when you use this TV as a PC monitor. There are easy workarounds for these issues, however, that you can read about here.

Like with the TCL QM8/QM850G QLED, this TV exhibits weird response time performance when variable refresh rate (VRR) is enabled. The TV's overdrive tuning is done in brackets, so its response time varies dramatically as the refresh rate goes up or down. This means that your game might exhibit little ghosting or blurring when it's running at 60 fps, but as your refresh rate goes up, you suddenly get significant overshoot seemingly out of nowhere until it settles down again as the frame rate either goes up or down a bracket. You can read more about this behavior in our review of the QM8. However, this is mainly a problem for gamers who prefer to use VRR, as when the refresh rate is locked to specific intervals, like 60Hz, its response time is great.

Unfortunately, the TCL Q7 QLED's backlight isn't flicker-free, as TCL uses pulse width modulation (PWM) to dim the backlight. However, it flickers at 960Hz in all picture modes, which is extremely fast and isn't noticeable in practice.

The TCL Q7 has an optional backlight strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion. It flickers at either 60Hz or 120Hz, depending on the content. This feature is meant to reduce blur caused by the TV's fast response time, but it doesn't work very well on the TV, as it significantly reduces the panel's brightness and actually causes blur.

The TV has an optional motion interpolation feature to interpolate content up to 120 fps. Like most motion interpolation features, it works well with slower content, like slow panning shots, but struggles with fast action, leading to artifacting.

Unfortunately, there's stutter when watching low frame rate content like movies. It's especially noticeable in slow panning shots. However, the TV's stutter performance is fantastic with 60 fps content.

The TCL Q7 automatically removes 24p judder from any source, ensuring a smooth movie-watching experience.

The TCL Q7 supports all three variable refresh rate (VRR) technologies, and its VRR range caps out at 240Hz, 144Hz, or 120Hz, depending on the resolution. It performs well overall, although it exhibits the same issues with NVIDIA cards that the TCL QM8/QM850G QLED has; namely, NVIDIA cards are incapable of doing VRR with refresh rates higher than 120Hz at any resolution when connected to this TV, although AMD Radeon cards exhibit no issues. You can read more about these quirks in the VRR section of that review. The Q7 doesn't exhibit any resolution halving at 1080p @ 240Hz, unlike the QM8.

The TCL Q7 has superbly low input lag when running at 1080p @ 120Hz, 1440p @ 120Hz and 4k @ 120Hz. The input lag is lowest when running at 120Hz, and is substantially higher when running at 144Hz at any of these resolutions, although it's still low enough for a good gaming experience. At 1080p @ 240Hz, the input lag delay is 12.4 ms.

All results were done with an AMD Radeon graphics card, as the TV struggles with refresh rates above 120Hz when connected to an NVIDIA card. However, we've double-checked the results at 120Hz and below with an NVIDIA card, and they're similar.

The TCL Q7 supports up to 4k @ 144Hz, 1440p @ 144Hz or 1080p @ 240Hz on HDMI 1, and up to 4k @ 120Hz on HDMI 2. Note that HDMI 2 doesn't support any resolution with a refresh rate higher than 120Hz and that you need to enable Game Master to reach higher refresh rates than 120Hz on HDMI 1. Unfortunately, the TV has issues displaying anything above 120Hz on PCs equipped with an NVIDIA graphics card.

The TV supports chroma 4:4:4, but only when the picture mode is set to 'PC' mode. As enabling Game Master locks you out of picture mode settings and forces Game Mode on, you can't have both 4:4:4 and the low input lag from Game Mode simultaneously. Furthermore, the TV doesn't output 4:4:4 at 4k @ 120Hz properly, and this is true with both VRR enabled and disabled. Thus, to get chroma 4:4:4, you need to be in 'PC' mode and at a maximum resolution of 4k @ 60Hz.

The TV can take full advantage of the PS5, with 4k @ 120Hz support on HDMI ports 1 and 2, as well as variable refresh rate (VRR) support. If the Game Master setting is set to 'Auto', the TV automatically switches to Game Mode when it detects the console.

The TCL Q750G can take full advantage of the Xbox Series X|S consoles, with 4k @ 120Hz support on HDMI ports 1 and 2, as well as Dolby Vision and variable refresh rate (VRR) support with both AMD FreeSync and HDMI Forum VRR. If the Game Master setting is set to 'Auto,' the TV automatically switches to Game Mode when it detects the console.

The TCL Q7 has HDMI 2.1 bandwidth on HDMI ports 1 and 2, although HDMI 1 supports up to 4k @ 144Hz, 1440p @ 144Hz, or 1080p @ 240Hz, while HDMI 2 is limited to a maximum of 120Hz at any resolution. HDMI 4 has eARC but is limited to HDMI 2.0 bandwidth, which is nice as you're not losing on an HDMI 2.1 port when you connect a soundbar to the TV. Unfortunately, the TV doesn't support ATSC 3.0, so over-the-air broadcasts are limited to 1080p.

The TCL Q7 supports eARC and can pass both advanced DTS and Dolby formats from a connected source to your soundbar or sound system without reducing audio quality.

The TCL Q7 has an okay frequency response. Bass is lacking, which is typical of TV speakers, and there are compression artifacts when running the volume at or close to maximum. Considering this TV doesn't get loud, this isn't a good TV to listen to in noisy rooms. However, when listened to at low to moderate volumes, the TV sounds good, and dialogue is clear.

Unfortunately, there's significant distortion at maximum volume, which sounds harsh and unpleasant, reaffirming that this TV isn't for noisy rooms. At moderate listening volumes, however, the TV's distortion performance is decent, as it has no excessive distortion.

The TV uses version 11 of Google's popular Google TV OS. It's relatively easy to use, especially fast and smooth, and it has a large selection of apps.

Like most TVs on the market, the TV's interface has ads throughout, and you can't disable them.

The TV has a great selection of streaming apps, with every popular streaming app being present. The interface is very smooth and pleasant to use.

The TV's remote is medium-sized and comes with motion-activated backlighting. It has a series of dedicated buttons for the most popular streaming apps. Both the remote and TV have integrated microphones for voice commands, and these work pretty well; you can't change inputs, but you can ask it to open apps, search within them, and ask for the time or the weather.

The power button is on the bottom bezel of the TV below the TCL branding. Outside of turning the TV on or off, you can also use it to change channels, the volume, or the inputs. There's a switch next to the power button to turn the TV's internal microphone on/off if you're worried about privacy.

• Remote (with 2x batteries)
• Power cable
• Manuals