The insane 115in TV that we smuggled out
of China and into my theater room is
fully set up. And I've been watching movies. I've been playing games. I've
been just basking in its 5,000 nits of
peak brightness. But I've also been working. [music] No one has ever seen
this thing outside of China, and there is absolutely nothing quite like it on
the market. The Labs team was understandably skeptical. If your
marketing leads with big, surely that
means it comes with some trade-offs that you're not talking about. But the
results are in. And there is no denying that the X11G Max's otherworldly size
gives it some superpowers, even if it also gives it some [music] peculiar
drawbacks that we do have to acknowledge. I can't tell you guys how
excited I was to do this video because it's not very often these days that I
get to review a product that I have never experienced before and that has no
competition and okay wait Lionus I can
practically hear you guys saying surely you have watched TV and of course it has
competition and you guys are right okay
sitting closer is competition a projector is competition and Samsung's
the wall is obviously ly competition, but all of those things are also not
competition. Compared to a projector, for instance, the difference in contrast
and brightness and color volume is almost literally night [music] and day.
I mean, I have a light controlled room, but here's the thing. I don't need it
anymore at all. And compared to sitting closer, guys, nothing I have ever
experienced matches the sheer immersiveness of a screen this size. cuz
it's not just the size relative to your field of view, the light it throws out
into a room when there's a a full screen flash or explosion goes off. I mean,
even my wife Ivonne, who watches almost exclusively in portrait mode on her
phone, was like, "Wo, that's crazy." And
the sitting close strat, well, that might work for you, but it'll never work
for your friends who are in the second row. As for the wall, well, I mean,
guys, this is a really expensive product, but the wall is 20 times the
price. 20 times. That's kind of like
saying this competes with this. But I'm
getting ahead of myself. Let's take a tour. The mounting system, honestly, is
kind of scary. You get two floppy discsized metal plates that attach with
a single bolt each to the back of the TV. Then you just hang the whole thing
on another set of plates that screw into the wall. I would say the only highlight
of the install experience was finally getting my Valencia theater seating
back. These guys sent these chairs ages ago, but I don't think I've ever
appreciated them more than after I was stuck with that inflatable couch from
the AllWish home theater video for 2 months. The spec we were most skeptical
of the first time around was the claimed [music] 20,000 plus dimming zones. I
mean, it just sounded preposterous when you consider that that's an order of
magnitude greater than heavy hitters like Apple's liquid retina XDR display.
But by displaying a thin white line across the screen, we were able to
painstakingly count the dimming zones. And as they illuminated, sure enough,
180 rows by 190 columns for a grand total of 20,520,
which I guess explains the plus in the spec. Now, even at the size, just to put
that number in context, guys, each of those dimming zones is just about a half
an inch by a half inch, which is pretty
normal on a monitor. But guys, I'm not sitting arms length from this thing. I'm
sitting way back from it. And from that kind of distance, the dimming zones
disappear, and the effect is fantastic.
It's still not an OLED, but from the
right spot. More on that later. Brandon from the lab described its contrast as
OLED like, which is truly high praise,
and I can totally see what he means. The black levels are really low. So, the
letter boxing glow is far less noticeable than the LCDs of yestery year
and my laser projector. [music] And while you're still going to see a glow
around white text on a black background, that is largely just from the veiling
glare in the human eye. And guys, everything I just said, that's with the
local dimming set to high, which is
where I'm keeping it surprisingly for two reasons. One, this screen does not
look nearly as good with the local dimming turned off. Look at this side by
side. Do you see all of that? That is not smoke or a fog machine. That is just
poor uniformity, which is one of VA
technologies greatest weaknesses. an Achilles heel that is exacerbated by
this screen's bigness. It's a huge
yikes. Or at least it would be if fixing
it wasn't this easy. Reason number [music] two, once this thing is dialed
in, everything looks incredible on it. Even SDR content pops off of the screen
in a way that I've just never experienced before. We reached 850 nits
of brightness in a full screen window
with local dimming off. For context, guys, even aside from the gimmick of it
being huge, [music] ratings has only tested two TVs ever
that can [music] do that. And then got real. We turned local dimming to high
and measured anywhere from 850 to 5,000
nits in SDR. With deep blacks and
specular highlights that shine at that brightness, combined with the excellent
upscaling in NVIDIA's Shield, which I have connected to this thing, you can
watch older 1080p non-HDR Blu-rays. And
I mean, even our camera guys, Andy, did you think that was HDR?
That was crazy. Absolutely crazy. And that's before we
even turn on HDR content. This monster supports both Dolby Vision and HDR10
Plus, which is really nice because at this kind of price, why not both? What
is the big TV manufacturer's excuse? And when you're in HDR, it reaches levels
where you actually get close to like squinting when there's a big enough
explosion. And and guys, I don't mean that in a bad like, oh, so unpleasant
way. I mean that like I'm in the room. I'm here with the characters like, "Oh,
whoa." I mean it like that. It's not
just beyond anything I've ever experienced at home. It is beyond what
you can experience in a movie theater with a projector. I mean, that's the
first thing Andrew said. It's like, "Wow, I would never go to the theater
again." And it's not just a onetrick pony. Because this TV uses quantum dots.
The color performance is as great as we've come to expect, too. It's
downright awesome in HDR. And SDR is
good. Even though it does have imperfect gamma tracking, leading to tones and
shades being a bit brighter than they probably should be across the board. And
that's something that's exacerbated by turning local dimming on. We would still
recommend keeping it on because of the dirty screen effect I talked about before, but if you're optimizing for
color accuracy and SDR, you may want to set it to low. All of which is to say
this thing is no longer a business expense. Aside from the logistical
challenges of taking it back to the office and storing it, I completely
forgot that it was 5 in smaller than the projector screen that I had before the
second I turned it on. And I just don't think there's any going back, which
doesn't mean that it doesn't have drawbacks. Both this specific TV and the
whole concept of TVs this large. This one was never made for the North
American market and it's quite Chinese.
You can, of course, set the language to English, which thankfully applies to the
decently deep settings menu, and I'm running it with my NVIDIA Shield anyway.
But before it will work at all, even turn on, the TV requires a Chinese phone
number to register it. And that native dashboard forever remains Chinese. But
there is a setting to boot into your last used input. And even if I do find
myself on the native dashboard, I can usually navigate it with my Shield
remote via HDMI CEC, so I never have to use the remote that came with the TV.
And speaking of the remote that came with the TV, I honestly didn't spend
much time with it. Kind of like the included speakers. Like guys, if you're spending this kind of money, what are
you doing using the factory remote and speakers? But it's fine. It's tactile,
even if it's sort of uninspiringly plastic and lacks backlighting.
definitely feels like a quality mismatch compared to the display it controls.
Speaking of controls, gaming, it's kind
of great. Assuming you have a supported source, it does 144 hertz variable
refresh rate at 4K with a very competitive game mode that we measured
at just [music] 5.2 milliseconds. So, between the screen that's big enough to
give every split screen player their own 55-in TV and the amazing performance of
this panel, I got to say, I just love gaming on this thing. But the issue is
the [music] pixel response times. At first boot, you're looking at 21
milliseconds, which noticeably affected my aim in first person shooters. And
even once it's warmed up, which reduces the viscosity of the liquid, which is
crazy, it's still in the 15 millisecond range. To be clear, guys, if I wasn't
spoiled by OLED and laser projection, I probably wouldn't mind. And you can play
anything at a non-professional level, especially anything with a controller
that's not a pixel perfect platformer. But if gaming is your number one
priority, you would be far better off picking up one of these and then 300 or
so of our excellent high performance LT store deskpads. ltstore.com.
Another drawback of this guy, as I alluded to before, is the viewing
angles. That's something that VA panels are already known to struggle with,
where being offaxis can make the picture appear noticeably less uniform. Look
closely at how this orange glow and the contrast from the buildings gets duller
toward the edges of the screen. Making matters worse, the halos around local
dimming zones also become more prominent, which if you remember is a
really important feature of this TV to keep on. Now, usually with a regulariz
TV, you're only going to be that far off axis if you're the last born child and
everyone else gets the alpha couch. But with this thing, you can be front and
center and still be offaxis to the edges of the screen because you're just so
close. The good news is that in practice, anywhere beyond 2 m away is
outside of the danger zone. And even when I was closer, I was so busy being
immersed in my content that I didn't really notice. Anyway, TCL actually did
try to improve this situation by adding a viewing angle improving layer in the
display stack. But unfortunately, the reason that we know this is because it
introduces a rainbow artifact when it is directly lit, like from the pots that I
have in the room here. It's only visible in some scenes. And I mean, I intend to
keep the lights off during movie time anyway, but if you were to install this
in your living room that has floor toseeiling Windows, it could get
annoying. Also annoying is that TCL has
bakedin dynamic tone mapping that you cannot turn off in HDR10 mode. This can
be a benefit. JVC's projectors, for example, stand out from the rest for
their excellent implementation of exactly this feature, but they're using
it as a crutch to compensate for projectors limited peak luminance. This
TV doesn't need that. It's so color
accurate and so bright that it can produce a color volume that is really
similar to the 4,000nit reference monitors that are used to master the
content in the first place. To explain this a bit further, basic HDR10 signals
only provide metadata that gives you the highest and lowest brightness values
across an entire film. So on a scene by
scene basis, [music] you might be leaving a lot of the performance of that display on the
table. Dynamic [music] tone mapping does this frame by frame.
In theory, doing a better job of consistently lighting the content. The
problem is that the implementation gives the content a bit of a best buy effect
as opposed to strictly conveying the artist's intent. [music]
Now, obviously, I spent half of this video out the mouth about the picture
quality of this thing, so it's not egregious. But come on, guys, at this
price, why not give the purists the option of turning dynamic tone mapping
[music] off? maybe at least in expert mode. The good thing is it does turn
itself off when you're watching in Dolby Vision or in HDR10 plus which handle
this scene by scene metadata on their own. My last big downer is that
heartbreakingly just found it this morning. I have a
dead pixel. I can't see it all the time,
but I know it's there. And because TCL
only warranties this TV inside of China when it's installed by an authorized
solutions provider, there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. Obviously,
this is a first world problem, but it illustrates the risks [music] and the
challenges associated with niche products in general, and especially one
like this. [music] Think about it. Even if I did have coverage, would I want to
go through the rigomearroll of replacing this thing? TVs this size are going to
need to fundamentally change before you're going to be able to pick one up
at the local Best Buy and drive it home. It doesn't fit in a pickup truck and you
need two maybe three strong people to
maneuver it around corners and stairwells and get it mounted to the
wall. [music] So unless future generations just roll up and then kind
of wallpaper on, this is always going to be a premium hightouch product. Even a
high-end projector setup with ceiling mounting and inwall wiring and attention
screen and all the fixings can be done by one rogue enthusiast. It [music] will
take more time, but it can be done. And
that's a way to help you stretch your budget with this. No such luck. And
speaking of the price, we should talk about that. It's $11,000.
That is frankly [music] a stupid amount of money to spend on a TV, especially
when you consider the way that TV sizes only go this way and TV prices only go
this way. But is it a bad deal? To
answer that, we got to do some comparisons. [music] In 2019, LG's 77in
C9 OLED was $4500.
By comparison, [music] their signature series 88 in Z9 was
$30,000. That is almost six times more dollars
per diagonal in a pretty hefty premium for their largest screen size.
Meanwhile, in LCD land, an 85in Samsung
Q80C is $2,000, while the 98 in one is
$8,000. That's over three times more per
inch. And there's a very real justification for this premium on topiz
models. For one thing, all TVs are cut from a larger sheet of what's called
mother glass. So, in order to justify
producing one monster, like this one,
TCL has to offset the opportunity cost of making many smaller TVs out of that
glass instead. Furthermore, when you're chopping my glass into smaller panels,
you can cut around any [music] defects or imperfections. That helps reduce
waste, which helps reduce the price. With this thing, [music] you need one
big completely flawless piece. [music]
Anything else is garbage. Or if there is a flaw, you could ship it to the dumb
guilo who can't do anything about it. I guess the other major comparison point
is going to be projectors. You can get something really nice for half the price
of this thing. The Epson LS12000, which I've been using, won Projector Central's
Editor's Choice Award and costs $5,000.
[music] But then you're on the hook for another grand or two for a screen, a
bunch of money and time treating your room, and an experience that is just
plain full of compromise. The contrast
is always going to suck by comparison, you can never perfectly align a
projector. Just get close enough that it doesn't bother you. And unless you blow
a h 100red grand on a Christy or something with their [music] fiber optic
extension thing, you can never get rid of the fan noise. This one completely
silent. Doing the math on the TCL, then it comes in much higher than the Samsung
98 inch at about $95 per diagonal inch.
There's no denying it's really high. But considering that it is alone in this
size class and that the price includes white glove delivery and installation in
China, I don't think they're that off base. And like come on guys, if we're
talking about dumb rich people, you know, like you're the kind of person who
spends thousands of dollars on shoes or hats, this is kind of the bang for the
buck option, right? And this is kind of a segue to our sponsor. Really is quite
comical. I They're still on there because I actually need to bring it down
to adjust some things about the mount. But see those [music] metal butt plug
looking handles? Each person on one side grabs the two of them and that's how you
move it. Weighs almost 400 lb.