TCL Q77K  TV Review

The TCL Q77 has bad peak brightness in HDR. Although it's brighter than competing models like the Samsung U7900F, it's simply not bright enough to deliver an impactful HDR experience. Bright specular highlights don't stand out at all, and high APL scenes are dim and flat.

When you switch to the low-latency Game Mode, there's a slight difference in the way the TV processes some HDR scenes, but overall, there's no noticeable difference in brightness. Games are dull and flat, and bright highlights don't stand out at all.

The TCL Q77K has disappointing peak brightness in SDR. It's bright enough to use in a moderately lit, light-controlled room, but it can't overcome glare from bright lights or open windows.

This TV has poor contrast. While it's better than similar models like the Hisense QD7N or the LG UA77, which use ADS panels, it's still not very good. There's no local dimming feature, so even though the native contrast is decent, blacks are raised and appear washed out. The TCL QM5K delivers much better black levels thanks to its Mini LED local dimming feature.

This TV doesn't have a local dimming feature, so there's no haloing around bright objects or subtitles in dark scenes. However, as the TV 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 doesn't adjust the backlight of individual areas to brighten up highlights without impacting the rest of the image. This means that there are no distracting flickers or brightness changes as bright highlights move across the screen.

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

The black uniformity on this TV is decent. It's a bit patchy throughout, with a few warm spots, but it's not too bad.

The TCL Q77K has okay color volume in SDR. It has good coverage of the DCI-P3 color space, but it can't display the full range of green and red. It struggles with highly saturated colors, though, and it has sub-par coverage of the BT.2020 color space.

The HDR color volume on this TV is disappointing. It struggles to display dark saturated colors in HDR due to its low contrast ratio and lack of a local dimming feature. Bright colors are a bit better, but it's limited by its low peak brightness.

Unfortunately, the TCL Q77 Series has mediocre accuracy in SDR before calibration. The biggest issue is the white balance, which has noticeable issues in midtones and bright shades of gray. Blues are overrepresented, giving the TV a noticeably cool color temperature. Gamma is a bit too high across the board, but it's especially high with near-blacks, resulting in significantly crushed shadow details. Overall, color dE is decent, with a few noticeable issues in lighter shades of any color and in saturated blues.

This TV is easy to calibrate, and it delivers fantastic results after calibration. Gamma, white balance, and color temperature are nearly perfect. Saturated blues are still a bit off, but other than that, most colors are displayed well.

See our full calibration settings.

This TV has okay accuracy in HDR before calibration. The white balance is okay, with midtones and shadow details showing the biggest issues, and the color temperature is very cool. The color accuracy is poor, though, with significant mapping errors across all colors.

This TV delivers surprisingly accurate results after calibration in HDR. There are still a few noticeable mapping issues with some colors, and the white balance is still a bit off in brighter shades, but it's not too bad.

The TCL Q77 has excellent PQ EOTF tracking, and most moderately bright scenes in HDR are displayed close to the intended brightness level. Very dark shadow details are boosted a bit, but this is mainly caused by the TV's low contrast ratio and lack of local dimming. There's a gradual roll-off near its peak brightness, which helps preserve brightness gradients but limits the peak brightness of highlight details. This roll-off is slightly more gradual, with content mastered at 4,000 nits.

This TV has decent low-quality content smoothing. It's able to smooth out some macro blocking and pixelization when watching streaming content, but there's also some loss of fine details.

The TV does an okay job upscaling low-resolution content like DVDs or lower-resolution streams. Most details are clear, but fine text can be hard to make out.

This TV has good gradient handling. There's some banding especially in darker shades, but it's not too bad.

The TCL Q77 has incredibly low input lag with all supported formats.

Additional measurements:

• 1080p @ 240Hz: 3.2 ms
• 1080p @ 144Hz: 4.7 ms

The TV supports all common resolutions up to 4k @ 144Hz or 1080p @ 288Hz on two of its four HDMI ports. The two other ports are limited to 4k @ 60Hz.

This TV works with all three VRR formats. HDMI ports 1 and 2 support VRR up to 288Hz with 1080p formats, or 144Hz with a 4k signal. This wide range means that unlike TVs locked at 60Hz like the Samsung U7900F, your games will be nearly tear-free even in the most difficult scenes when the frame rate can't keep up.

Ports 3 and 4 are limited to HDMI 2.0 bandwidth, so they only support a maximum refresh rate of 60Hz. This means that they don't have a wide enough refresh rate range to work with Low Framerate Compensation, and you'll see tearing if the frame rate drops below 48 fps.

The TCL Q77 has a mediocre response time at the maximum refresh rate of 144Hz with a 4k resolution. It struggles more with near-blacks, resulting in more noticeable motion blur in shadow details. It's a lot better in brighter shades, and motion is clearer overall than the Hisense QD7N and the LG UA77.

With VRR enabled, the TV adjusts its overdrive behavior automatically based on the incoming frame rate. There's a shift in overdrive behavior at around 65 fps, and between 65 and 100 fps, there's significantly more overshoot than outside that range. You can see an example of this in this 70Hz pursuit photo.

To showcase this difference, we took additional response time graphs at both 60Hz and 80Hz so you can see the difference:

• 60Hz
• 80Hz

Dropping down to 120Hz from the maximum of 144Hz results in almost no change to the CAD.

Unfortunately, the CAD at 60Hz is poor, resulting in blurry motion when gaming at a locked 60Hz refresh rate.

The TV 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.

Despite this TV's relatively slow response time, there's still noticeable stutter in 24p content. It's especially noticeable in wide, slow-panning shots.

The TCL Q77K's motion interpolation feature is great at reducing stutter. It's very effective at smoothing out slow panning shots, and it's very consistent, with almost no variation in frame timing.

The TV automatically removes judder from all sources when watching 24p movies or shows, even if they're in a 60Hz signal, like from a cable box or an older streaming device. It also removes judder from 25p sources if you're using the TV's native apps or an external device that sends a 25Hz signal, but it's not quite perfect with 25p content sent via a 60Hz signal.

This TV is free from 24p micro judder regardless of the source. There's also no micro judder when watching 25p content from the TV's native apps or from external devices sending a 25Hz signal, but there's a bit of micro judder when watching 25p signals sent from a 60Hz source.

This TV has a mediocre response time. Pixels are slow to transition from one shade to the next, resulting in blurry motion.

The TCL Q77K has poor transitions. Color transitions aren't even, as different colors change at different rates. This creates unintended intermediate colors. This affects color consistency and purity in fast scenes, as there's a noticeable red tint, especially around lighter skin tones. The TV also does a bad job keeping the edges of fast-moving objects consistent with the center, leading to excessive blurriness in movies, shows, and sports with a lot of motion.

This TV uses a combination of pulse width modulation (PWM) and direct DC dimming to adjust the backlight intensity. Between a setting of 0 and 28, it uses PWM at a low frequency, which can bother some people. It also doesn't flicker at an even multiple of 60Hz, which causes image duplication. It's flicker-free above 28.

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

Unfortunately, the TCL Q77K has sub-par direct reflection handling. The glossy coating does very little to reduce the intensity of bright, mirror-like reflections. The 85-inch and 98-inch models have a matte coating, resulting in much better direct reflection handling.

Ambient lighting has no noticeable impact on black levels.

Unfortunately, the total reflected light is sub-par on this TV. Bright reflections are distracting, as the TV can't reduce their intensity, and there are noticeable rainbow artifacts around bright lights.

The TV's perceived color volume in a bright room is decent, and ambient light has almost no impact on the total color volume.

The TCL Q77 has an okay viewing angle. It's a decent choice for a wide seating arrangement, but colors shift a bit towards blue at a moderate viewing angle.

Unfortunately, this TV has mediocre gray uniformity. There's a significant difference between the sides of the TV and the center, and there's a pinch mark on the left side of our unit. The uniformity is worse in near black scenes.

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

The TV uses a KSF phosphor coating to produce red light, with high peaks on reds and blues. This model does have good separation between colors.

This TV has HDMI 2.1 bandwidth on HDMI ports 1 and 2, with both supporting up to 4k @ 144Hz. Ports 3 and 4 are limited to HDMI 2.0 bandwidth. Unfortunately, the TV doesn't support ATSC 3.0, so over-the-air broadcasts are limited to 1080p.

This TV supports eARC, which allows it to pass uncompressed high-quality audio from a connected source to your home theater system or soundbar. It supports all major audio formats. Note that these results are only valid for connected external players; the TV's native apps don't necessarily support the same formats.

This is a fairly cheap-looking TV. It has thin bezels on all four sides, but there's a wide gap between the sides and the first pixels.

One nice touch on this TV is that the feet can be placed in two distinct positions, which is a feature usually reserved for higher-end models. In the wider position, the footprint of the 75-inch stand is 52.3" x 13.6", while it's 28.3" x 13.6" in the narrow position.

The feet lift the TV about 3.6 inches above the table, so almost any soundbar fits underneath without blocking the screen.

The back of the TV has a more premium design than most similarly priced models. The inputs all face to the right, but they're set into the TV so they can be a bit tough to reach when it's wall-mounted. There's plenty of space for the connectors, though, and you won't need any HDMI extensions or angle adapters. There's nothing to help with cable management.

The TCL Q77K has okay build quality. It's mostly made of cheap plastic, but there's no obvious issue with its overall construction. There's a noticeable pinch on the panel, though, which you can see on the gray uniformity photo.

The TCL Q77K is powered by the MediaTek Pentonic 700 chipset (mt5896) and runs Google TV version 12.

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

There's a switch on the bottom of the TV for the mic, so if you're concerned about privacy, you can fully disable it.

• Setup guide
• Remote
• 2x AAA batteries
• Power cable

The TCL Q77 has a mediocre frequency response. It can't get very loud, and there's almost no deep bass or rumble. The sound profile is well-balanced up to moderate volume levels, though, so dialogue is clear and easy to understand.