TCL QM89 review: 115 inches of incredible television

TCL QM89

MSRP $20,000.00

Score Details

“The most exhilarating television money can buy, full stop.”

Pros

• Exhilarating and immersive
• Dazzling HDR performance
• Remarkable contrast
• Vivid color
• Great sound

Cons

• Picture accuracy issues
• Poor off-angle performance

The sheer enormity of the TCL QM89 requires its own introduction. Pictures don’t do it justice, even if you’re able to see the scale of this thing. So just soak this in for a second. And then understand that this is the most fun I’ve ever had reviewing a television.

And, yeah, that 115-inch size has everything to do with it.

OK, not everyone wants a massive TV. Or maybe they don’t think they do, until they experience one themselves. But for some folks, bringing the movie theater experience home — and maybe even besting it — is a life goal. A dream. And I’m here to tell you, this TV can make that dream a reality, if you’re willing to spend big, too. Because while this TV’s price is sure to decrease (probably quite precipitously in the months ahead), it currently retails for about $20,000. Before tax.

Let’s be honest with ourselves: not many of us are going to buy this TV. And that’s just fine — it’s OK to gawk. So go ahead, take a good look.

But for those of you in that small club who are in the market for a television that costs four-fifths of a new Honda Civic, stick around. I have some very important information for you to consider before laying down that credit card.

Video review

Big, big basics

Let’s talk about what you’re getting with the 115-inch TCL QM89. In a nutshell, you’re getting TCL’s absolute best, which probably doesn’t come as a surprise. Because it is such a huge QLED TV with an equally huge (and advanced) mini-LED backlight system, it needs a special processor. The processor is everything in a TV, so we’re going to be talking about what it does quite a bit in this review.

That processor would be the AiPQ Ultra — TCL’s best processor yet, turbo-charged to handle the monumental demands of this equally monumental TV.

It also has the most advanced audio system TCL has ever put into a TV. You can see some of it, courtesy of two Onkyo-badged subwoofers on the back. But what you can’t easily see is the array of drivers hidden behind perforated sections sprinkled along the back and top of the TV. Save the “Atmos” speakers at the top of the TV’s cabinet, this TV sports a rear-firing audio system. And while we’ve had mixed results with that kind of design in the past, the 115-inch QM8 here fared pretty well. More on that shortly.

This 115-inch TV is big, but it’s not bulky. Everyone who has visited our studio to check out this TV has commented that it’s not nearly as thick as they expected. This TV will look awesome mounted on the wall. I’d highly encourage you to hit three studs with a robust wall mount rated to handle at least 200 pounds — but, yes, it can be wall mounted. And though you’ll need to buy that wall mount yourself, many retailers will include wall-mounting with the purchase. TCL has confirmed that is included if you , for example.

If you don’t wall-mount, you have two other options. You can use the feet that are included in the box. But with a roughly 93-inch-wide stance, you will need either a very large credenza or an unusually wide media console.

And that’s part of the reason why I personally prefer the optional legs you can buy for this TV. They are rock sold, offer some cable management, and position the TV at the optimal viewing height, eliminating even the slightest amount of neck craning.

The backlight system is comprised of untold tens of thousands of mini-LEDs broken down into roughly 20,000 local dimming zones. Repeat: 20,000 zones. But impressive numbers don’t always translate into stellar picture quality.

The TV is claimed to hit 5,000 nits of peak brightness — again, we’ll see — and it’s got almost all of the other specs you may want. Here comes an onslaught of acronyms:

• HDR10
• HDR10+
• HLG
• Dolby Vision
• 120Hz refresh rate
• ATSC 3.0 tuner
• Two HDMI 2.1 ports
• Two HDMI 2.0b ports
• Two USB ports
• ALLM
• VRR with FreeSync Premium Pro
• And ONKYO — that’s legendary audio brand Onkyo slapping its badge on the sound system.

Need more? You get a backlit Google TV remote with voice control as well as a voice mic on the TV itself, plus a built-in room sensor for automatic brightness and color temperature control.

Yes, it can be too big

OK, so, I’ll get into some measurements and talk about the picture quality in a moment. But frankly, what I’m about to tell you first is the most value information I can offer you in this review.

This TV’s size is its most notable asset and its greatest advantage. But its size also is a liability of sorts, just not for the reasons you might think.

Sure, you’re gonna need some space for your 115-inch TV. But I imagine that most folks considering this TV plan to put it in a dedicated space where there’s likely a wall at least 8 feet wide.

And I imagine a lot of you folks might be thinking: “well, it’s so huge, you’d have to sit at least 15 feet away from it, right?” No, you don’t have to. While it’s true that many “optimal viewing distance” calculators will suggest a viewing distance of at least 12 feet, I’m here to tell you that I’ve been sitting just 9.5 feet away from this 115-inch TV and have have — well, almost every minute of it. There’s a caveat there that I’m going to get to in a moment.

The key takeaway here is that this TV can be viewed from what a lot of folks would consider a “normal” viewing distance without it feeling overwhelming, and without seeing individual pixels. It is tremendously immersive. It can occupy your entire field of view and really put you in the content without you feeling like you’re missing any part of the scene.

Now, I can see potentially see motion sickness being an issue for some folks if they are especially sensitive. That’s just physics and biology. But, while I’ve gotten a little queasy feeling in the past in some theater scenarios, I have not gotten once felt ill at ease with this TV. Now, super shaky camera movement? Well, that’s just annoying, and there’s nothing you can do about that. Maybe skip anything with Jason Bourne.

The real liability issue with size is that a big screen like this just gives you more of everything. It gives you more brightness, more contrast, more color, more immersion, more just straight-up fun and excitement.

But just as it amplifies all those good things, it also amplifies the bad things.

And in this context, I’m talking about the amplification of poor-quality content. To be clear, high-quality content looks just awesome. Pull up a 4K or 4K HDR show on Netflix or Disney+, or Max — any of the streaming services with high-resolution or high-bitrate content — and it looks outstanding. Like, knock-it-right-out-of-the-park amazing.

But lower-quality content — and this is less about resolution than it is highly-compressed content or content captured by less-than-stellar cameras? It’s just blatantly obvious that it is lower-quality content. And before you jump to conclude that means this TV’s processing, upscaling, and digital enhancements are wanting, let me assure you that’s not the culprit. There’s only so much any TZ processor can do when the source material isn’t good.

And that’s really what’s at play here. There’s no hiding the failings of the content when your viewing distance to screen size ratio is at this level. Even an 85-inch TV shows it less than what you’ll see on the QM89.

It’s really just a math problem. This 115-inch TV has just shy of four times the screen surface area as a 65-inch television. That’s like zooming in on the content with 4X magnification. It’s kind of like the photos you take on your phone. They can look fantastic on your phone, tablet, and maybe even a laptop screen. But put them on a big screen, and suddenly you can see all their faults.

It’s not just video content, either. If an app developer phoned it in on the resolution of an app tile for Google TV, or the graphic from a TV network isn’t up to snuff — anything that wasn’t made at a resolution high enough to look good at this scale, well, you’re going to see some jagged edges. That can be true for game graphics, as well. If developers decided to skimp here or there not anticipating their game would ever get played on a screen larger than 85 inches, well, you’re gonna see it. It kinda feels like catching someone slacking, to be honest. I don’t hate it.

I imagine that most folks who buy this TV are going to use it for watching higher-quality content. But if you plan on using this TV to watch old Seinfeld episodes, or YouTube content captured by inexpensive cameras, you need to be prepared to see all of what’s in the content. And some of it — maybe even a lot of it — just is not as good as you think it is from watching it on smaller screens.

Sound, heat, and picture

Now that we’ve covered the big-screen experience from several angles. I want visit the audio system. It’s pretty impressive. And I expected it to be because if you make a TV this big, it better house some great audio. It can’t match a proper surround system with subwoofer, but you will not be disappointed with this on-board speaker system. The upfiring drivers, rear-firing drivers, and subwoofer drivers all combine to offer a huge sound. And unlike most TVs, this one is wide enough to offer some real stereo separation and stereo width, the likes of which I’ve not heard from even the best-sounding Sony OLED TVs. I still think folks should match this to a killer home theater audio — this TV deserves that pairing. But for anyone who doesn’t want to pull out the big guns for everything they watch, this TV can put out some damn impressive sound.

A big TV probably means big heat, right? If I spot-check this TV with my laser thermometer, I don’t get readings any higher than, say, the 65-inch TCL QM8 from 2023. However, you do have to take into account the amount of screen area here — it essentially makes the TV an even bigger radiator. Anecdotally, I can tell you that, yeah, when you walk by it you can feel some warmth coming off it. But any TV at this size is going to generate more heat than a comparably equipped 65- or 75-inch TV. I suppose if it is in a smaller room — which seems unlikely because, again, the size — you’d notice it warming things up that much quicker. But is it likely to jack up your A/C bill noticeably? I kind of doubt it.

Let’s get down to some picture-quality stuff. As it’s performing now — this unit I’m testing — if you want accuracy, you’ll need to pay for a calibration.

I turned off the room sensor and placed the TV in the Movie mode picture preset. The default brightness setting for SDR Movie mode is 30. You’ll still see a green leaf here in the menu, but that is not an indication that eco mode is still on. It just signals that the TV uses less power. That leaf disappears at 50 and up.

Default performance for SDR movie mode — the 10% white window registered at a blasting 2,400 nits — is way too bright for SDR accuracy in a dark room. But it looks good to the average viewer. Juice the brightness to the max, and you get 3,900 nits.

Two-point white balance was not bad! Under a delta E of 3 on both points measured, and that’s great. But when we measure the grayscale, we see that it is well off the mark in all but the darkest and brightest areas of the grayscale charts. I think for the price you pay, this needs to be better. And I think TCL can remedy this, unless I just have a rogue unit here.

Color accuracy is kind of a similar story. The primaries look OK. But when we expand to a wider palette of colors, we see the errors are well above what we’d want to see in a premium TV. It’s odd that the primaries are solid, but all the other colors are not.

In HDR, I got peak brightness measurements of about 4,000 nits. Again, this breaks from the measurements I got off the 98-inch model that was made available to me for testing at TCL’s event in New York, where even with test pattern windows, I saw readings up near the 6,000-nit territory. Specular highlights do appear brighter than the smallest test patterns windows, which indicates that the TV does deliver on its promise to hit about 5,000 nits for HDR highlights. But since the AiPQ processor is in charge of that business, it’s hard to measure.

HDR color without luminance errors was pretty good. But with luminance errors, it’s pretty out. Again, based on the readings I’m getting, it appears calibration will be essential for cinephiles who want accuracy out of this TV. And I think better out-of-box accuracy than what I’m getting should be expected given the price of the TV.

The lack of accuracy didn’t get in the way of my thoroughly enjoying the TV. But there’s something else that did — something TCL says it’s about to fix with an update. And this bug may actually be responsible for some of the grayscale errors I saw as well. We’ve had instances where the entire screen dims just slightly and then pop back up when captions are shown. As the captions come up, the screen dims. Then as they disappear, the screen goes back to its original APL.

Now, if we got into Dolby Vision Bright mode, which has a much higher APL by force, it’s so difficult to see the fluctuation that it will likely go unnoticed. And, to be fair, most folks I talked to didn’t. Still, since it was indicative of a software or firmware issue and not a hardware problem, I was sure to share it with TCL. They replicated it, got to the bottom of it, and will fix it in an update. And I’m hopeful the update may change some other aspects of the TV’s accuracy as well. That means we’ll have to revisit this TV post-update to see what’s changed.

Here are my key takeaways on the picture quality: Most of the time, it is spectacular. And, yes, a lot of that is due to the sheer scale of the image. But this TV can get much brighter than most folks need, if you push it to do so. The local dimming system is capable of doing a great job of mitigating blooming and halo so you get deep blacks and impressive contrast in most scenes. The color is eye-popping, if not quite as well saturated at the brightest levels as, say, a QD-OLED TV. Cinematic motion looks great without the aid of motion smoothing, though if you get any frame drops due to a slow internet connection, that will feel a bit more jarring because of the screen size.

I mean, the picture quality you get at this screen size is — it’s just breathtaking, even if it isn’t Hollywood-grade accurate. I grin ear to ear every time I turn this TV on because I know I’m in for a whole lot of fun. And the smiles I see on others’ faces when they see this TV? That’s worth a lot as well. You just can’t deny it is literally awesome.

If cost were no object and you had the space, I’d say run, don’t walk, to get one. There’s no shot you’d be the least bit disappointed. It’s just a riot, this TV.

But in a $20,000 television, cost is an object. So, the real problem with this TV is that more people won’t be able to enjoy it because it is just so expensive. I don’t think we should be surprised that it costs so much. The first 4K TV was extremely expensive. The first 8K TV was extremely expensive. The first 85-inch and 98-inch TVs were extremely expensive. Of course the world’s first 115-inch consumer-grade TV was going to be extremely expensive.

But I think there’s hope, because the price is going to come down. It will come down this year — still not enough to be affordable for most folks, but it will come down. And next year it will cost a little less, and again the year after that. And the fact that this TV exists, and that its price will be coming down? That just means that other big-screen sizes — like the 85s and 98s — will become even more affordable than they are already becoming.

That local-dimming bug I mentioned before appears to be fixed via a private firmware update (which should go public soon), but I still expect better accuracy, especially since I’ve measured better out of the 98-inch version of this series. Obviously, TCL can do it. You should not spend twenty grand on a TV and have to deal with those issues.

But I give this TV my whole-hearted, unreserved recommendation to anyone with the means to own it. There’s nothing else like it on the market, and the experience you get from it is simply unmatched.