TCL S3/S350G TV Review

The design is extremely basic and lightweight and doesn't look very premium. The bezels are rather thick, and overall, the entire package looks a bit cheap.

The V-shaped feet are set near the ends of the TV, and there's no narrow position. The screen sits about 2.6 inches above the table, so most soundbars won't fit in front of it without blocking a portion of the screen.

Footprint of the 32-inch stand: 26.8" x 7.1" x 2.6"

The back of the TV is very plain and looks cheap. The inputs are housed in a larger section of the back, near the center of the TV. There's no cable management.

The TCL 32S350G has mediocre build quality. It's mostly made of cheap plastic, and there's some flex in the plastic panels around the inputs. Fortunately, the TV barely wobbles on its stand due to being so lightweight.

The TCL S350G has mediocre contrast. It's decent enough to display dark scenes well, but there's no local dimming feature, so blacks are noticeably raised in scenes with bright highlights.

The TV doesn't have a local dimming feature, so there's no blooming around bright objects or subtitles during dark scenes. That said, it can't brighten highlights without impacting the rest of the image, so 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. That 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.

Unfortunately, the peak brightness in HDR is bad. Specular highlights are dull and flat, and bright areas of the scene don't stand out.

The brightness in Game Mode is nearly identical to the brightness in 'Movie,' so bright highlights in games still don't stand out at all.

The PQ EOTF tracking on this TV is excellent. Most HDR content is displayed close to the brightness level intended by the content creator. Near-blacks are raised, so some shadow details appear washed out, mainly due to the lack of a local dimming feature. It's also severely limited by its extremely low peak brightness, so bright scenes are too dim. The TV does roll-off when it reaches its peak brightness to try and preserve some detail in bright specular highlights.

The peak brightness of this TV in SDR is bad. It's not bright enough to handle even moderate amounts of glare, so it's not a good choice for a room with any lights or windows.

The TCL S3's color gamut is sub-par. It can't fully display the commonly used DCI-P3 color space, as most colors are undersaturated, with frequent color accuracy errors. It's even worse in the wider Rec. 2020 color space, as here colors are inaccurate and undersaturated. There are also important color mapping issues throughout, more so in saturated greens and cyans.

This TV's color volume is poor. It's limited by its low peak brightness and narrow color gamut, so bright colors don't stand out. It also struggles to display dim saturated colors due to its mediocre contrast.

Unfortunately, the overall accuracy of this TV in SDR before calibration is mediocre. The white balance is noticeably off, as blues are underrepresented in all shades of gray, even more so in brighter grays, making the TV's color temperature too warm overall. When it comes to color accuracy, most saturated colors are noticeably off, and all cyans strongly deviate from what they should be. The gamma is close to our 2.2 target, but all scenes are too dark.

This TV looks much better after calibration, although colors can't be fully calibrated. This means that while most issues regarding white balance are solved, there are still some noticeable color accuracy issues, especially in bright, saturated colors.

See our full calibration settings here.

The TV's gray uniformity is disappointing. The edges of the screen are noticeably darker, and there's noticeable dirty screen effect, leaving dark spots in the upper and lower regions of the image. There are also noticeable uniformity issues on very dark content, with the sides of the screen being noticeably brighter than the center.

The TCL 32S350G has disappointing black uniformity. The entire screen looks blue due to the low contrast ratio, and it doesn't look good in a dark room.

The TCL S3's viewing angle is sub-par. The image degrades rapidly as you move off-center, so it's a bad choice for a wide seating arrangement.

The TV has good reflection handling overall. Its semi-gloss screen does an especially good job of reducing the intensity of indirect reflections. However, direct reflections from light sources directly facing the screen are more distracting.

In HDR, gradients aren't displayed well on this TV. There's noticeable banding in almost all colors except for bright grays, reds, and blues. The banding is especially noticeable in darker shades of gray.

The TCL S3 doesn't remove any macro-blocking and pixelization in content from low-quality sources. On the flipside, this means that there's no noticeable loss of fine detail, as no smoothing is done.

The sharpness processing on this TV is mediocre. Text and fine details aren't upscaled well and look soft. Some fine details are lost, and upscaled text is hard to read.

The TV uses a BGR (Blue-Green-Red) subpixel layout instead of the traditional RGB layout, and in this case, it's rotated 90 degrees on its side. It results in obvious color fringing when looking at the TV from a close distance. This doesn't cause any issues for video or gaming content, but it can be a problem for PC monitor use as it impacts text clarity.

The TV doesn't use quantum dots, nor does it use a KSF phosphor coating to produce its colors, as confirmed by the TV's spectral power distribution (SPD). Color purity isn't very good, as there's little separation between each color.

The TCL S3's response time is downright awful. There's extremely noticeable motion blur in almost all transitions, which is excellent for watching movies but makes the TV a terrible choice for gaming or sports. Dark transitions are even worse, resulting in excessive black smearing in shadow details.

This TV uses pulse width modulation (PWM) to dim its backlight. It flickers at 150Hz, which is low enough to be noticeable by users who are sensitive to it, especially since it doesn't flicker in time with the TV's refresh rate. Unfortunately, there's flicker in every picture mode, but the TV is flicker-free when the brightness is set to 29 or above.

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

This TV doesn't have a motion interpolation feature.

Thanks to its extremely slow response time, there's no noticeable stutter when watching movies.

The TV doesn't remove 24p judder from any source.

All sizes of this TV are limited to a 60Hz refresh rate and don't support VRR.

This TV's input lag in Game Mode is low enough to provide a pleasant gaming experience, but it is still significantly higher than that of most other TVs.

The TCL 32S350G only supports 480p, 720p, and 1080p resolutions, all at 60Hz. When set to the 'PC' Picture Mode, it displays chroma 4:4:4 at 1080p properly.

Since this TV is limited to a 60Hz refresh rate, it can't take full advantage of the PS5. It also doesn't support Auto Low Latency Mode, so it doesn't automatically switch to Game Mode when it detects a console.

Since this TV is limited to a 60Hz refresh rate, it can't take full advantage of the Xbox Series S|X. It also doesn't support Auto Low Latency Mode, so it doesn't automatically switch to Game Mode when it detects a console.

While the TV does support HDR, the Xbox consoles only support HDR when running at 4k. Thus, this TV can't do HDR on Xbox Series S|X.

This TV is limited to HDMI 1.4 bandwidth on its two HDMI ports.

The TCL 32S350G only supports ARC, but it can passthrough Dolby Digital Plus 7.1, alongside Dolby Digital 5.1. It doesn't support Dolby Atmos, as it instead downsamples it to 2.0. It also doesn't support any DTS audio formats.

The TV has a poor frequency response. There's no noticeable bass response, as the low-frequency extension (LFE) is incredibly high. Above the LFE, the frequency response is mediocre at low-volume settings, and dialogue can sometimes be hard to make out.

There's some noticeable distortion on this TV at moderate volume levels, but it's satisfactory. However, the amount of distortion above 75% volume is rather extreme, rendering it nearly unusable at high volume settings.

The TV uses version 11 of Google's popular Google TV OS. It's relatively easy to use and runs well enough, with a large selection of apps.

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

It has a wide selection of apps, so it's easy to find your favorite content. You can also cast content from your phone to the TV or play videos directly from a USB stick. However, it doesn't support HDR playback through USB. 

The TV's remote is medium-sized and has a simple layout. It has motion-activated backlighting and buttons for popular streaming services. 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 using the voice controls.

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

• Setup guide
• Remote
• 2x AAA batteries