The TCL QM7K is a compelling midrange mini-LED TV that offers a much brighter picture than the more affordable QM6K, with deep blacks and little light bloom. Its colors are very wide, even if they aren’t perfect, and it’s packed with features, including hands-free Google Assistant, a 144Hz refresh rate, and AMD FreeSync Premium Pro. At $1,499.99 for the 65-inch model we tested, it’s reasonably priced, and you can often find it for much less at retail. It’s a strong option if you want a better picture than a budget-priced TV can provide, though the Hisense U8N ($1,499.99 for 65 inches) remains our Editors’ Choice winner for its ability to get even brighter and offer more accurate colors out of the box. 

Design: Slim and Nearly Bezel-Free

If you’ve seen a midrange to high-end TV in the last few years, you already have a good idea of what the QM7K looks like. It’s nearly bezel-free, with a thin strip of metal running along the sides and top of the screen and a single narrow metallic bezel bordering the bottom edge. A shallow bump below the bezel holds a status LED, a multifunction button, a far-field microphone array, and a switch to mute the mics. The TV sits on a flat, square base with a black brushed metal finish.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

The power cable plugs into a port on the left side of the back of the screen. All other connections sit on the right side, facing right, and include four HDMI ports (two 144Hz, one eARC), two USB ports, an Ethernet port, an optical audio output, and an RF antenna/cable connector.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

The remote is a rectangular plastic wand with the same brushed black metal finish as the stand. A circular navigation pad sits near the top, with a pinhole microphone above it. Volume and channel rockers reside at the center of the remote, with dedicated service buttons for Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Disney+, Netflix, TCL TV+, and YouTube below. Most of the buttons on the remote are backlit, a nice touch we don't see often.

Software: Google TV With All the Fixings

Like TCL’s other QM-series TVs, the QM7K runs on the Google TV smart TV platform. It’s a robust, feature-filled interface that covers all major streaming services, including Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Disney+, Netflix, Twitch, and YouTube. It also supports Apple AirPlay and Google Cast, so you can locally stream media from your Android phone, iPhone, iPad, Mac, or a Chrome tab on your PC.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

Google Assistant is built into the platform, and you can use it without hands thanks to the QM7K’s far-field microphone array. The voice assistant is helpful for controlling the TV and compatible smart home devices, searching for content, getting general information like weather forecasts and sports scores, and performing other tasks. If you don’t want the microphones on the TV always listening for your commands, you can disable them and use Google Assistant by holding the microphone button on the remote and speaking into it.

Picture: Great Contrast and Slightly Quirky Color

The TCL QM7K is a 4K QLED TV with a mini-LED backlight system and a 144Hz refresh rate. It supports high dynamic range (HDR) content in Dolby Vision, HDR10, HDR10+, and hybrid log gamma (HLG). It has an ATSC 1.0 tuner for over-the-air broadcasts, but not ATSC 3.0.

I test TVs with a Klein K-10A colorimeter, a Murideo SIX-G signal generator, and Portrait Displays’ Calman software. TCL’s latest QM7K Series TV gets a fair bit brighter than its already bright predecessor, the QM7, though it doesn’t reach the unnecessarily eye-searing levels of the QM8 or the Hisense U8N. With an SDR signal in movie mode, the TV shows a peak brightness of 212 nits with a full-screen white field and 165 nits with an 18% white field, by default. Manually putting the backlight to maximum increases those numbers considerably, to 582 nits and 452 nits, respectively.

Switching to an HDR signal blows that light output away, remaining at a reasonable 578 nits with a full-screen white field but shooting up to 2,092 nits with an 18% white field. For comparison, the QM7 “only” reached 1,817 nits, and the QM8 maintains the current record for measured peak brightness at 3,308 nits with an 18% white field. In all modes, blacks are perfectly dark on the QM7K thanks to its mini-LED backlight, and I observed little light bloom.

(Credit: PCMag)

The above charts show the QM7K’s color levels in Movie mode with an SDR signal compared against Rec.709 broadcast standards and with an HDR signal compared against DCI-P3 digital cinema standards. Out of the box, whites lean a bit yellow with both signals, which is unusual. If whites are off in a TV’s movie mode, they typically err more in the opposite direction, toward blue. On the QM7K, cyans also veer slightly green and magentas slightly red. These effects are increased when switching to HDR. However, when I went into the white balance settings and changed it from the warmest setting and the default for Movie mode, Warm 5, to a slightly cooler Warm 3, whites became almost perfect, and the tinting of secondary colors became less pronounced. I saw similar behavior in both the QM7 and the QM8 last year, though oddly, the budget-priced QM6K avoids it. If the picture looks slightly off in Movie mode, tweak the white balance just a bit cooler. Accuracy aside, the QM7K covers a wide range of the digital cinema color space.

The “Islands” episode of BBC’s Planet Earth II looks bright and vivid on the QM7K. The greens of leaves and blues of water and sky are varied and saturated. Fine details of fur and bark are clearly visible both in sunlight and under shade, with the mini-LED backlight keeping the sunny parts of the frame bright and the shadowy parts dark.

White shirts and lights stand out brightly in the party scenes of The Great Gatsby, and black suits look properly dark in the same frame while preserving the details of contours and textures. Skin tones appear natural, and splashes of orange and blue pop out.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

Demonstration footage from the Spears & Munsil Ultra HD benchmark disc looks very good on the QM7K. Wide daytime landscape shots are bright and lifelike, with a time-lapse scene of a mountain range from before dawn to midday showing the peaks transitioning smoothly from very dark to almost blazing. Snowy scenes where almost the entire screen is white look satisfyingly bright, even if they don’t show nearly as much light as scenes where more of the frame is dark, letting the mini-LEDs put more power into fewer individual lights. Highlight details are easily seen in these shots, with white clouds and snowflakes standing out even against equally white skies and ground. Individual trees can be seen in the darker parts of landscapes captured at sunset.

Brightly lit, colorful objects against black backgrounds reveal just how much light bloom an LED TV shows, something that isn't an issue with OLED TVs due to their per-pixel light adjustments. The QM7K impressed me with these test clips, showing almost no discernible haze creeping into the extremely dark backgrounds. Light bloom is kept to a minimum when viewing the screen straight-on, whereas slight auras from the edges of objects can be seen when watching these shots off-angle. Color also slightly desaturates from the sides, though not significantly, and the TV is still comfortable to watch from most angles.

Gaming: 144Hz Native Refresh Rate

With a 144Hz native refresh rate, VRR, and AMD FreeSync Premium Pro, the QM7K is well-equipped for gamers. It’s also quite responsive; using a Leo Bodnar 4K Video Signal Lag Tester, I measured an input lag of 13.4 milliseconds with a 4K60 signal, 4.8ms with the standard 1080p120 signal we use to test higher frame rates (since that’s the typical native refresh rate of most high-end TVs, with VRR boosting past that rate in certain conditions), and 4.1ms with a 1080p144 signal. I consider a TV good for gaming if it lags less than one frame, which is 16.6ms at 60Hz or 8.3ms at 120Hz. The QM7K falls well under these parameters.