TCL R745 QLED TV Review

The TCL 85R745 looks similar to the TCL 6 Series/R635 2020 QLED, but it has a different stand. It's mainly made of plastic, but there's some metal on the frame around the bezels. It has a fairly premium style, but the stand takes up a lot of space if you need to use a table.

The stand is as wide as the TV itself and the feet are deep too, so you'll need a very large table to place it on. The stand raises the TV 3.9 inches off the table, and there are 4.8 inches to the bottom of the screen, so there's enough space to place a soundbar without blocking your view. You can't adjust the height of the feet.

Footprint of the 85 inch TV: 75.3" x 16.1".

The back of the TCL 85R745 is a mix of glossy plastic on top and cheap-feeling matte plastic at the bottom. The circle on the left side of the VESA mount is the subwoofer. Unfortunately, there's no cable management.

The TCL R745 is thin, but it won't sit flush against a wall because the bottom part on the back sticks out.

The TCL 85R745 has decent build quality. The metal stand holds the TV very well, and there's minimal wobble, which is great considering its size. The edges are metal but the rest of the TV is plastic. There's minimal flex on the back, but the plastic at the bottom feels cheap. Our unit came damaged on the back, and it shows how cheap the plastic is on the back, so we considered it for the overall build quality.

The TCL 85R745 has an excellent contrast ratio thanks to its VA panel. It displays deep blacks, and the local dimming feature helps improve the contrast a bit. Keep in mind that contrast can vary between units.

The TCL R745 has fantastic SDR peak brightness. It easily gets bright enough to fight glare even in the brightest of rooms. Brightness varies a bit between scenes, and it's especially noticeable with larger areas of bright colors, as seen in the dip in brightness with the 100% window. This can be an issue when watching sports, like a hockey or basketball game.

We tested the brightness after calibration in the 'Movie' Picture Mode with TV Brightness set to 'Brighter', Local Contrast to 'High', Color Temperature to 'Warm' and Backlight and Contrast at their max.

If you want an even brighter image and don't care image image accuracy, use the same settings but set the Picture Mode and Color Temperature to 'Normal'. We reached 1883 nits in the 25% peak window with these settings.

The TCL 85R745 has a mediocre local dimming full-array local dimming feature. There are 192 zones, but they're not very effective. The local dimming can get distracting as there's too much blooming around bright objects. It's similar behavior to what we saw with the Samsung QN800A 8k QLED, but the blooming isn't as strong. Because of this blooming, subtitles are distracting and can even bleed into the black bars at the bottom in some movies.

There's a ton of black crush to the point where you lose details in the background in some scenes, but then there are other scenes, like the star field in Our Planet, that the crush isn't as bad. Fast-moving objects transition between zones fairly well, but there's a small trail behind fast-moving objects, and there's also the golf ball effect visible on the circles in our local dimming video, similar to the TCL 8 Series 2019/Q825 QLED.

The local dimming feature performs the same in Game Mode as outside of it; it's mediocre.

The TCL R745 has incredible HDR brightness. Real content is brighter than in SDR, but the test windows are only a bit brighter. Even though small highlights are slightly dimmer than the rest due to the local dimming, it still makes highlights really stand out. Sadly, large areas are once again dim due to the aggressive Automatic Brightness Limiter (ABL). The EOTF follows the target fairly well, but darker scenes are slightly too dark.

We tested the HDR brightness in the 'Dark HDR' Picture Mode with Local Contrast on 'High', TV Brightness on 'Brighter', and Backlight and Contrast each at '100'. These settings result in the brightest EOTF, but we were able to reach 1921 nits in the 25% window by setting the Picture Mode to 'Normal HDR' and Color Temperature to 'Normal'. However, this results in a less accurate image.

The HDR brightness in Game Mode is incredible, and it's extremely similar to it outside of Game Mode. The test slides are slightly less bright, but it's hardly noticeable with real content. We tested it with the same settings as outside of Game Mode.

The TCL 85R745 has decent gray uniformity, but this can vary between units. The edges are darker, and there's a bit of dirty screen effect in the center, but it's not too bad. Sadly, there's noticeable backlight bleed in near-dark scenes, which could get distracting.

The black uniformity is good. Without local dimming, the screen is more uniform, but there's some clouding, and blacks look closer to gray. Uniformity scores worse with the local dimming feature enabled, but that's because there's more blooming around the center cross. The local dimming does a good job at improving the black level, though.

The TCL 85R745 has narrow viewing angles, which is expected from a VA panel. The image loses accuracy and brightness as you move off-center, so it's not ideal for wide seating arrangements. Due to the size, the edges of the screen will appear darker if you sit too close. If good viewing angles are important to you, the LG QNED90 is a much better TV for a wide seating area.

The TCL 85R745's reflection handling is decent. It has a semi-gloss finish that does a fairly good job at handling a moderate amount of light, but it's not so good if it's opposite a bright window. The reflections photos look a bit different than most 55 and 65 inch TVs we've tested because this screen is so much larger, and various objects in the testing room are visible.

The TCL R745 has great out-of-the-box accuracy. Most colors are only a bit inaccurate, but white balance is slightly off. Color temperature is extremely close to our 6500K target. Sadly, gamma doesn't follow the 2.2 target at all as all scenes are too bright. Keep in mind that accuracy can vary between units.

The TCL R745 has fantastic accuracy after calibration. White balance is significantly improved, and colors are a bit better, too. Both the color temperature and gamma are spot on with our targets, which is outstanding.

See our recommended settings here. All calibration is done through the Roku app and not directly on the TV.

The TCL 85R745 doesn't have any issues displaying 480p content, like from DVDs.

The TCL 85R745 upscales 720p content well, which is great for watching cable TV.

1080p content, like from Blu-rays, looks almost as good as native 4k content.

The TCL R745 displays native 4k content perfectly.

The TCL 85R745 is a 4k TV that doesn't display an 8k signal.

The TCL R745 uses a BGR subpixel layout, which can affect how text is displayed when using the TV as a PC monitor, but it doesn't affect the picture quality. You can read about it here.

The TCL R745 displays an excellent color gamut for HDR content. It has outstanding coverage of the DCI P3 color space used by most HDR content, and its coverage of the wider but less common, Rec. 2020 color space is also very good.

The color volume is good. Thanks to the wide color gamut, excellent contrast, and high peak brightness, it displays colors at a wide range of luminance levels.

The TCL 85R745 has good gradient handling. It's much better than the TCL 6 Series/R635 2020 QLED, but it's still worse than many 4k TVs we've tested. Banding is noticeable with most colors, especially with grays and greens. This can be distracting in scenes with different shades, like sunsets. Sadly, the Noise Reduction setting doesn't improve the gradient handling.

There are no signs of image retention on our unit of the TCL R745, but this can vary between units.

We don't expect VA panels to experience permanent image retention, as the VA panel in our long-term test appears immune.

The TCL 85R745 has an excellent response time. Motion looks smooth for the most part, but there's some blur trail behind fast-moving objects. Also, it has a slower response time with dark transitions, which is the cause of black smearing and is typical of VA panels.

The TCL 85R745 uses pulse width modulation (PWM) to dim its backlight at all brightness levels and in all picture modes. However, it flickers at such a high frequency that you likely won't notice it.

There's an optional black frame insertion feature to try to reduce persistence blur. It improves motion but also causes more ghosting. It can only flicker at 60Hz and not 120Hz, so it's not useful for 120fps games. Our BFI score is based on the available flicker frequencies and not the actual performance.

The TCL 85R745 has a motion interpolation feature to bring lower-frame rate content up to 120fps. However, it doesn't perform that well in busy scenes and creates noticeable artifacts and halos around characters' heads, which is very distracting.

Since the response time is so quick, lower-frame rate content can appear to stutter as each frame is held on longer.

The TCL R745 automatically removes 24p judder from any source. This helps with the appearance of motion in movies.

The TCL R745 supports variable refresh rate (VRR) technology to reduce screen tearing. It has native FreeSync support and is G-SYNC compatible for those with NVIDIA graphics cards. We can't confirm if it supports HDMI Forum VRR because the Xbox Series X supports both FreeSync and HDMI Forum VRR, and we don't know which one is working. Since the TV is limited to HDMI 2.0, 4k VRR only works within a narrow refresh rate range.

The input lag is very low. It's slightly higher than other 2021 TVs, but it's still low enough for gaming, and you shouldn't notice any delay. Unfortunately, you shouldn't use the motion interpolation feature in Game Mode as it dramatically increases the input lag. We couldn't properly measure the input lag with VRR enabled as it's likely an issue with our testing methodologies, and we experienced the same issue with the Samsung QN90A QLED. We'll update the review once we fix it, and that said, we don't expect the input lag to increase with VRR enabled.

The TCL R745 supports all common resolutions under the HDMI 2.0 bandwidth, up to 4k @ 60Hz. It displays 1440p @ 120Hz signals natively, but strangely you need to create a custom resolution on your PC for 1440p @ 60Hz signals. It displays proper chroma 4:4:4 on any supported resolution, which helps with text clarity when using it as a PC.

The TCL 85R745 displays any signal from the PS5 and Xbox Series X at 4k @ 60Hz or below. It has an Auto Low Latency Mode that automatically switches the TV into Game Mode when you launch a game from a compatible device, and there aren't any settings for it. You can also see that the TV supports both HDR10 and Dolby Vision from the Xbox here.

The TCL R745 is limited to HDMI 2.0, but if you want a large TV with HDMI 2.1 inputs, look into the Sony X91J.

The TCL R745 has eARC support, allowing you to pass Dolby Atmos via True HD signals to a compatible receiver through a signal HDMI connection. However, the DTS:X via DTS-HD MA audio format doesn't seem to work because our receiver didn't play the DTS:X file as it only played DTS. We don't know if this is a glitch with the TV or if it's designed this way. Let us know if you have this TV and if DTS-X works.

The frequency response is decent. Despite having a subwoofer on the back, it doesn't provide any punch to the bass. Above the low-frequency extension, it has a fairly well-balanced sound profile, so dialogue sounds good, and it gets really loud.

The TCL 85R745 has okay distortion performance. There's hardly any distortion at moderate listening levels, but it's a lot more noticeable at its max volume. However, this depends on the content, and not everyone may hear it.

The Roku TV interface is great as it's user-friendly, and menu navigation feels very smooth. It automatically had an Olympic theme at the time of testing, which is why it's different from the TCL 6/R635 2020 QLED, but you can change the theme in the settings.

Sadly, there are ads in the home page, and there's no way to disable them.

Roku's app store has a great selection of apps you can download.

The TCL R745 comes with the same Roku remote as other TCL TVs. It's small and has a few shortcut buttons to popular streaming devices. It has a built-in mic for voice control, and you can ask it to change inputs, open apps, and search for content, but you can't ask it to change specific settings.

The TCL R745 has a single button below the inputs on the right side to turn the TV On/Off and change inputs.

• Remote (with 2x AAA batteries)
• Power cable
• VESA screws
• User guide