in late 2019 i ordered a 6 series and it was shipped fedex they left it leaned over at about a 30 degree angle on my neighbors porch and it was only supported by one side so it was sitting there dangling in the wind bouncing in its box, there were holes all over the box and it just didnt look taken care of during shipping. and after the 2 hours it took to break down my setup, clean everything and install the new tv it was broken when i powered it on. the under screen was shattered and spiderwebbed in about 3 different spots. thanks fed ex. so i sent it back and after doing some research i learned about the 2020 tcl and decided to wait to replace my bedroom tv. in the meantime ive replaced 3 other screens in my house and two other times since then i got bad screens or broken/damaged/defective tvs...... the return process always sucks for a tv. but this time i feel like i lucked out.
well anyway i finally got my 55r635 yesterday. theres no light bleeding on the edges, no dead pixels, color looks uniform across the panel, i get a soap opera effect watching older shows on Rokus Netflix(i think thats the screen trying to upscale to 4k but idk enough about it) but otherwise its not too shabby. i havent tried to game on it yet but i did watch the entire new season of Castlevania in 4k tonight and that was AWESOME. any cartoon would seem flat on every other 1080p screen looks 3 dimensional in 4k. Its literally the only cartoon ive watched in my adult years and just becuase Castlevania and childhood feels dont judge meh. Also using roku netflix vs my pc netflix. Roku wins hands down as far as video clarity. although, I have my pc setup for 1440p 120 hz so its really no contest.....i did try to run 4k on my gtx 1080 but video looked choppy-ish or just not smooth.
Am i happy? yes! my panel is flawless and 4k is kind of jaw dropping. Was it worth the over the year wait that i forced myself to go through? definitely. Should you buy it? sure but if you read other reveiws people complain it doesnt have hdmi 2.1... i dont really care about that becuase theres not much out there that uses it and if i was going to take advantage of it id probably need to drop 2 grand(2021 prices) on a new gpu which i wont be doing anytime soon so * shrug * do what you think is right but to me this is the king of budget tvs.
Roku interface is really simple and on this tv its fast, responsive and theres really nothing wrong with it. it doesnt have much in terms of interface customization you can change the background or theme but picture wise id like to see more added to it or at least let gaming mode get motion clarity, dynamic contrast etc. but thats fine still happy.
Audio: i dont know its tv speakers the bass is meh so its whatever... i am using an old Sony 5.1 dvd receiver for my pc setup... i havent even looked into figuring out how to connect that through the tv yet but im thinking about getting a TCL alto 9 sometime
Gaming: i assume 1440 @120 is going to be awesome but i havent tried it yet. so no stars were given.
About the remote. its voice activated although i havent looked into using it, syncing it was no problem and it feels heavier than my older roku remotes even though they look the same so to me it has an overall higher quality feel.
Since everything else is great or acceptable to me and i dont really have any complaints If i have to complain about something its how far away from the wall this thing sits with the legs on it.... it sticks out about 4 inches further than my old tv on my desk so i feel like im sitting right up on the screen..... ill be wall mounting it soon but for now its good enough.
Review is over you can move on if you want to but:
a side note: i havent looked into this or had enough time to begin to troubleshoot if its a problem or just the show i was watching, but a few times while reading subtitles i noticed that like 1 and 1/2 letters would get stuck randomly just for a second or two after the rest of the subtitle changed. it could happen anywhere in the sentence but for now im just going chalk that up to network lag.
also while watching older shows and trying to get used to the soap opera effect people would look clear and you can see peoples pores on thier faces! but they look like they were sticking out over the background but the background itself would look blurry or choppy? idk.... for example a guy is speaking past the camera and the camera is focused on his face and isnt moving at all while hes talking and behind him is a smooth brown wall that should but doesnt look all one uniform color and that the paint was artifacting? or automatically being motion blurred even though the camera wasnt moving at the time?? it wasnt that the wall was out of focus or the blurring would have looked consistent, it just didnt look natural as it looked spotty or grainy? i dont know how to explain it properly as i havent had this tv for 24 hours yet but i havent found any setting to play with that would fix something like that. it reminds me of when im trying to watch a video at 1080p but network lag isnt giving me enough bandwidth so what i see is 480p (except in this case just the background) for a few seconds until the buffer catches up before it automatically clears itself up. The tv doesnt clear it up though it stays like that for the entire scene. its just weird.....
| Brand Name | TCL |
|---|---|
| Color Name | Black |
| Special Features | Flat |
| Speaker Type | subwoofer |
| Standing screen display size | 36 Inches |
| Aspect Ratio | 16:9 |
