A great TV picture should look vivid, but there’s a point where vivid becomes artificial. You want rich details, but turn up the color too far and a football field can start looking neon green, or faces take on an unnatural tint. It can be tricky to know whether the attention-grabbing pictures you’re seeing are actually accurate.
CNET Labs does editorially independent proprietary testing to measure how tech performs. For TVs, the engineers at CNET Labs use professional equipment to precisely compare the colors a TV is supposed to display with the colors that actually appear on screen. Color accuracy is one part of CNET Labs’ standardized testing process, which uses controlled conditions and objective measurements to evaluate everything from a TV’s brightness and color performance to its input lag.
TCL’s Mini LED lineup, including the QM8L, QM7L and QM64L, use quantum-dot color, precise backlight control and smart picture processing, with the QM8L demonstrating particularly strong color performance in CNET Labs testing and a prestigious Labs Award for brightest TV. Here’s a bit more about what that means.
Why color matters on game day
When you’re watching sports, more color isn’t necessarily better color. A TV needs to distinguish subtle shades of green across a football field, reproduce uniforms and skin tones naturally and keep those colors from becoming exaggerated as the picture gets brighter. That balancing act becomes especially important during daytime games, when a TV needs enough brightness to compete with ambient light without leaving the picture looking washed out or oversaturated.
TCL combines Super Quantum Dot color with Mini LED backlighting to address both sides of that challenge. Mini LED uses thousands of small LEDs grouped into independently controlled local-dimming zones, allowing the TV to put light where it’s needed while preserving contrast in darker areas. While Mini LED controls the light behind the picture, TCL’s Super Quantum Dots help determine the colors that light produces. These microscopic particles convert blue light into more precise wavelengths of red and green, which helps produce purer, more saturated colors while maintaining high brightness.
Picture processing and upscaling add another layer, helping lower-resolution sports broadcasts retain detail when stretched across a large 4K screen.
How CNET Labs tested TVs for color and lag
According to CNET’s reviews of LED TVs, CNET Labs used a Murideo 8K SIX-G signal generator to test color, sending the TV precisely defined test patterns, while a Klein K10-A colorimeter measured the colors that actually appeared on-screen. Calman Ultimate software coordinated the process.
One particularly important measurement of color accuracy is Delta E. It quantifies the difference between the color the source tells the TV to display and the color it actually produces. Lower is better: A score of zero would represent perfect accuracy, while a Delta E below 3.0 is generally considered effectively flawless given the limits of human vision. In SDR Filmmaker Mode, the TCL QM8L recorded a Delta E of 2.80. Delta E tells us whether the TV gets colors right, while gamut coverage tells us how many colors it has to work with; for the latter, the QM8L covered 87.2% of the much broader Rec. 2020 HDR color gamut. To compare, various industry tests of the previous QM8K model found it covered 75 to 80% of the Rec. 2020 color gamut and reached a peak brightness of around 5,000 nits.
If watching football on game day turns into playing a game yourself, another measurement matters: input lag. CNET Labs used a Leo Bodnar 4K HDMI Lag Tester to measure the delay between the TV receiving a signal and displaying the image. In Game Mode at 4K/60Hz, the QM8L recorded just 9.6 milliseconds of input lag. For comparison, a single frame at 60 frames per second lasts about 16.67 milliseconds, so the QM8L’s measured lag is shorter than one frame, even if differences below that threshold can be difficult to perceive.
TCL’s Mini LED TVs turn those numbers into a better game-day picture
The QM8L, QM7L and QM64L all combine Mini LED backlighting with quantum-dot color and picture processing to address several challenges of watching sports on a big screen. A wider color gamut gives a TV more colors to work with, while accurate color helps keep fields, uniforms and skin tones looking natural rather than exaggerated. That precise local-dimming control also helps bright parts of the picture stand out without unnecessarily lifting darker areas around them.
Strong brightness helps the picture stay visible in a sunlit room, while peak brightness gives HDR highlights extra punch. TCL’s AI-driven upscaling tackles another challenge: Sports broadcasts don’t always arrive in 4K. The TV’s processing adapts those lower-resolution sources for a 4K screen, helping the picture retain detail and clarity at larger sizes. Together, these technologies help sports look bright, colorful and detailed without simply turning everything up.
The basic choice comes down to how much picture performance you need compared with how much you want to spend.
| Model | Great for | What you get |
| QM8L | Viewers who want the best picture in the lineup, especially for a large screen or bright room | Up to 6,000 nits, up to 4,000 local-dimming zones, 144Hz panel, anti-reflective/wide-viewing-angle panel, TCL’s more advanced TSR AI Pro processor |
| QM7L | Viewers who want much of the premium Mini LED experience without paying QM8L prices | Up to 3,000 nits, up to 2,100 dimming zones, SQD-Mini LED/Deep Color and Enhanced Halo Control |
| QM64L | Viewers who want an affordable step into TCL’s Mini LED lineup | Around 1,000 nits in HDR, up to 500 local-dimming zones, a native 144Hz refresh rate and a high-contrast HVA panel |
The QM8L is also equipped with an ATSC 3.0 tuner capable of 4K120 for sports broadcasts that support it.
TCL QM64L
TCL QM7L
TCL QM8L
Consider TCL for better game-day viewing
Across the QM64L, QM7L and QM8L, TCL combines quantum-dot color, precise local dimming, high brightness and intelligent picture processing to keep the action vivid without turning the field neon green.
Whether you’re watching an afternoon kickoff or a dramatic night game, TCL’s Mini LED lineup delivers the kind of color your favorite games deserve.
