The Dark Side of Dolby Vision: A Review of the TCL 6 Series TV

When it comes to picture quality, there's nothing quite like watching your favorite shows and movies on a state-of-the-art television. But with the ever-evolving world of technology, it can be overwhelming to keep up with the latest advancements. One area that has seen significant improvement in recent years is Dolby Vision, a format designed to provide enhanced contrast and color accuracy. In this article, we'll take a closer look at the TCL 6 Series TV, specifically its performance with Dolby Vision.

One of the most notable features of the TCL 6 Series TV is its ability to produce deep blacks. This is achieved through a combination of technologies, including local dimming and a high-brightness panel. However, when it comes to shadows and darker scenes, the TV's performance can be lacking. In some cases, the image appears to be missing detail altogether, with only a small amount of texture or color left to cling to. This can be disorienting, especially in scenes that are meant to evoke a sense of atmosphere or mood.

A recent example of this issue can be seen in Netflix's Ozark. The show features a scene where an officer is shown wearing a shirt with a gold star on it. However, the image appears more like a pool of black with a tiny glint of gold, rather than a crisp and well-defined logo. This lack of detail is especially noticeable when compared to other TVs that are capable of producing much better results.

But what's behind this issue? The answer lies in the Dolby Vision settings themselves. While the TV has three different modes available - Normal, Bright, and Dark - not all of them are created equal. When set to Normal, the TV will push up the overall brightness level, but it also changes the color temperature. This can result in an image that's more washed out than expected.

The Bright mode is another story altogether. It's cold and unyielding, with a lack of warmth or depth. This is not ideal for watching movies or shows in low-light environments, where you want to be able to see every detail. And yet, the TV does have some redeeming qualities. When it comes to brighter scenes, such as action movies or comedies, the image is punchy and vibrant.

The good news is that this isn't an isolated issue with the TCL 6 Series TV. The same problems are seen in other TVs that support Dolby Vision. In fact, a recent test of the Sony X950G TV showed similar results, where the image appears to be missing detail altogether when set to the Dark mode.

But it's worth noting that not all TVs are created equal. The TCL 6 Series TV is still an excellent performer in many areas, including resolution and color accuracy. It's also relatively affordable, especially considering its impressive specs. So while this issue with Dolby Vision may be a drawback, it's not enough to rule out the TV entirely.

In fact, the real challenge now lies in deciding between TVs that support Dolby Vision. With brands like TCL and Vizio offering competitive pricing, the choice is getting harder by the day. As we move forward into next year, it will be exciting to see how these manufacturers continue to innovate and improve their products. One thing's for sure: the competition is heating up, and consumers are reaping the benefits.

One area where TCL has excelled in recent years is its 8 Series TV, which features a more expensive but still impressive lineup of models. However, when it comes to Dolby Vision, this model also has its limitations. A firmware update was released last year, but unfortunately, it did not address some of the issues that we've seen with other TVs.

The TCL 6 Series TV is still an excellent performer in many areas, including resolution and color accuracy. It's also relatively affordable, especially considering its impressive specs. So while this issue with Dolby Vision may be a drawback, it's not enough to rule out the TV entirely. In fact, it's worth noting that many other TVs on the market are experiencing similar issues.

If you're in the market for a new TV, it's definitely worth doing your research and seeing what other options are available. With so many great choices on the table, it's harder than ever to make a decision. But with TCL's 6 Series TV, you can be confident that you're getting a top-notch performer at an affordable price.

In conclusion, while the TCL 6 Series TV has its limitations when it comes to Dolby Vision, it's still a great option for those looking for a high-quality television without breaking the bank. Its excellent performance in other areas, combined with its competitive pricing, make it a solid choice for anyone in the market for a new TV.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyes yes that's what I'm talking about I knew it sorry I'm feeling a little bit I don't know validated right now because well go back to when we unboxed the TCL 6 series something just didn't seem right last thing I said was something doesn't look right here and we're gonna have to investigate it more and we did and well there's a little bit of a story so here's how this works manufacturers get like a subset of TV samples that they send out to reviewers and once they go out they get reviewed they come back they inspect them then they send them out to another reviewer the original sample that I got for the TCL 6 series had clearly been used by somebody else before but I figured it was probably somebody at TCL you know vetting the TV before it goes out to the reviewer that's what we get we get pretty heavily vetted TVs before they come out to us anyway this thing just didn't look right there was this magenta hue to everything and that was on access when you stepped off access it was unviewable also it lacked sharpness and depth and it didn't really look like it was doing HDR right and I can't tell you what was wrong with the television I did send it back to TCL and I'm hoping that they'll tell me but I just I knew it couldn't be right there's no way TCL took uh step backwards after making such a great TV last year happy to report that is definitely not the case behind me right now is an excellent example of the TCL six series I already love it I'll just tell you that right now but we need to dig into a couple of really important things how's the screen uniformity how is it doing in the really really low black areas and how punchy is it now that it's got quantum dots and more color volumes supposedly how is it punching in those bright highlight areas so we're gonna focus on those because we already know the TCL six series is a great TV the question really is how much better did it get so I'm gonna do this in real time with you that's that's why you see a shadow over here we're an SDR right now and the blooming is it's fairly significant the top boxes are not as bright as the bottom boxes and if we switch over to HDR you'll notice things change right away alright sure you should know that we're an HDR and significantly brighter the background is darker now there's still some blooming but it's definitely better I'm gonna pop out of HDR and switch the pattern so we're an SDR and this is pretty much what I expected to see a little bit of blooming around the edges of this guy and then an HDR we should see something significantly brighter I don't know why it says it's going into double vision it's not we're back into standard HDR here significantly brighter so the brightness potential of the TV is good it is not as good as the TCL 8 series it is not as intense as something like the Samsung q9 er but again for the price it's very very good and I do expect for the color volume to open up thanks to the quantum dots as well so I'm going to keep it in HDR because I've looked at the SDR ramps and they look fine this does not look fine off access I can see some of the delineation in the ramp towards the left where it gets dark but on access it just it blacks out almost at the midpoint which is not at all what I expected I hope that doesn't play out in real content but I'm not feeling super encouraged here's the brightness ramp some slightly better results there I'm gonna test with a different disc I know that if I feed this a thousand nits peak signal it maps pretty well not so much if it's well above that the SDR ramp looked good this one it looks like it's clipping right about here depending on where you're sitting in the room and that's I don't know that's peaking out a little bit early for me so we'll have to see how that plays out now oddly enough this looks fine or maybe it's not so odd because there's a bigger jump in between luminance levels on this particular pattern than the bright white and dark dark pattern that we were looking at earlier I am way less impressed with this pattern though there's a lot of striations and the color gradient some colors are worse than others but the thing that I'm bothered about most is that the ramp down here in brightness the dimming for each individual color is completely it's not even normally we see a pretty smooth and even ramp down here that's not happening here and I'm a little bit concerned this pattern is a good early test for screen uniformity issues if there was dirty screen effect we'd probably see it here due to the light gray background I don't see anything that just leaps right out at me the corners yeah they're a little bit faded and that's unfortunately par for the course all too often a little bit of vertical banding that we saw earlier but but again I haven't seen that in real-world viewing either nothing that jumps out no alarms and that's a good thing how consistent TCL is with the production though is anyone's guess honestly these guys have to be out in the wild for a while before we know about that okay it's subjective picture quality analysis time I'm gonna start with the not-so-great news and that is that this TV definitely does appear to be crushing blacks that is it kind of takes some of the dark gray detail out of the equation and just represents it as black you can see that happening in the shirt of the officer here on Netflix's Ozark it's just a pool of black with a gold star hanging out on it you can barely even make out that there are buttons on the shirt there's just a tiny little glint it makes you look close enough to know that they're there later in this exact same scene there's absolutely no texture or or body or color to Jason Bateman's hair I've seen the scene on a ton of different TVs it's not supposed to be that way and this is in Dolby vision now let me clarify a few things for you Dolby vision has Dolby vision dark normal and Dolby vision bright three different settings on this particular television when you go into Dolby vision normal it does push up the overall brightness level a little bit but it also changes the color temperature and then when you go to Dolby vision bright it's just it's cold as ice and I would never watch it that way it just looks terrible plus the only vision dark and dark HDR modes are supposed to be for when you've got the shades down the lights are off and you don't want super super brightness you you're in a dark room but that doesn't mean you should just drop them to black levels and crush everything below a certain SPECT number it just doesn't it doesn't make any sense this isn't as extreme case though it's an absolutely extreme I mean I imagine if you're watching some of the Batman movies producer Dan was mentioning the the show see that's on Apple TV plus right now as an example those are the instances in which you're gonna probably lose out on some detail so if you watch a lot of dark movies in the dark that's not going to be great on the other hand I've watched a lot of other stuff that looks awesome I mean the good news is that when this TV is producing brighter images it looks great the resolutions definitely there doc top end of the HDR is punchy I definitely appreciate the fact that the colors are expanded a little bit some of this Dolby stuff is super juiced up I mean it's it's completely fake but it's fun to watch it looks pretty good and with most of the content I watched on Netflix and Amazon and Apple TV it looked good until it got super dark and then you know the bottom fell out look some of these images that you're seeing now with the really black backgrounds that's impressive right it looks like you've got really deep blacks and yeah they are deep remember I'm just talking about the detail in the shadows and the complete lack of it in some of the scenes that I've watched on this TV normally I can kind of retool the settings to get a little bit more out of it but I wasn't able to get to that easily not without washing out the image entirely so this is tough right because last year TCL redefined expectations around what you should expect from a 65 inch 4k uhd HDR TV they really came through and that was fantastic this year I think that expectations were elevated because it's next year it should be better right there's quantum dots now definitely it should be better and in many ways it is but with the removal of the shadow detail that I've seen here I'm less excited than I was last year does that mean it's not as good a TV well in some ways yeah I feel like if you're a cinephile it's definitely not as as good a TV as it was maybe last year for most people though it's still gonna be great definitely don't remove it from your shopping list have a look at it yourself see it in person see what you think about this TV maybe it is right for you and look I love the 8 series that TCL put together it's much more expensive but it's a fantastic TV and you know what that one had problems when it came out too and then they wouldn't fix them with a firmware update who's to say they won't also do the same with this television so I still think the TCL six series should be on your shortlist what it offers for the price is still just really really hard to beat but it does make for a tighter race between TCL and say like Vizio which is coming out with very competitive TVs it's similar prices that just gonna be a harder decision this year hey everyone thanks for watching I know I made you wait awhile for this video I hope it was worth it it definitely was to me to make sure that I was getting the right take on the right TV that other one was not right this one is and we still learned something new anyway hit me with a comment down below let me know what you think like subscribe hit that notification bell and always visit Digital Trends calm for the latest tech news and reviewsyes yes that's what I'm talking about I knew it sorry I'm feeling a little bit I don't know validated right now because well go back to when we unboxed the TCL 6 series something just didn't seem right last thing I said was something doesn't look right here and we're gonna have to investigate it more and we did and well there's a little bit of a story so here's how this works manufacturers get like a subset of TV samples that they send out to reviewers and once they go out they get reviewed they come back they inspect them then they send them out to another reviewer the original sample that I got for the TCL 6 series had clearly been used by somebody else before but I figured it was probably somebody at TCL you know vetting the TV before it goes out to the reviewer that's what we get we get pretty heavily vetted TVs before they come out to us anyway this thing just didn't look right there was this magenta hue to everything and that was on access when you stepped off access it was unviewable also it lacked sharpness and depth and it didn't really look like it was doing HDR right and I can't tell you what was wrong with the television I did send it back to TCL and I'm hoping that they'll tell me but I just I knew it couldn't be right there's no way TCL took uh step backwards after making such a great TV last year happy to report that is definitely not the case behind me right now is an excellent example of the TCL six series I already love it I'll just tell you that right now but we need to dig into a couple of really important things how's the screen uniformity how is it doing in the really really low black areas and how punchy is it now that it's got quantum dots and more color volumes supposedly how is it punching in those bright highlight areas so we're gonna focus on those because we already know the TCL six series is a great TV the question really is how much better did it get so I'm gonna do this in real time with you that's that's why you see a shadow over here we're an SDR right now and the blooming is it's fairly significant the top boxes are not as bright as the bottom boxes and if we switch over to HDR you'll notice things change right away alright sure you should know that we're an HDR and significantly brighter the background is darker now there's still some blooming but it's definitely better I'm gonna pop out of HDR and switch the pattern so we're an SDR and this is pretty much what I expected to see a little bit of blooming around the edges of this guy and then an HDR we should see something significantly brighter I don't know why it says it's going into double vision it's not we're back into standard HDR here significantly brighter so the brightness potential of the TV is good it is not as good as the TCL 8 series it is not as intense as something like the Samsung q9 er but again for the price it's very very good and I do expect for the color volume to open up thanks to the quantum dots as well so I'm going to keep it in HDR because I've looked at the SDR ramps and they look fine this does not look fine off access I can see some of the delineation in the ramp towards the left where it gets dark but on access it just it blacks out almost at the midpoint which is not at all what I expected I hope that doesn't play out in real content but I'm not feeling super encouraged here's the brightness ramp some slightly better results there I'm gonna test with a different disc I know that if I feed this a thousand nits peak signal it maps pretty well not so much if it's well above that the SDR ramp looked good this one it looks like it's clipping right about here depending on where you're sitting in the room and that's I don't know that's peaking out a little bit early for me so we'll have to see how that plays out now oddly enough this looks fine or maybe it's not so odd because there's a bigger jump in between luminance levels on this particular pattern than the bright white and dark dark pattern that we were looking at earlier I am way less impressed with this pattern though there's a lot of striations and the color gradient some colors are worse than others but the thing that I'm bothered about most is that the ramp down here in brightness the dimming for each individual color is completely it's not even normally we see a pretty smooth and even ramp down here that's not happening here and I'm a little bit concerned this pattern is a good early test for screen uniformity issues if there was dirty screen effect we'd probably see it here due to the light gray background I don't see anything that just leaps right out at me the corners yeah they're a little bit faded and that's unfortunately par for the course all too often a little bit of vertical banding that we saw earlier but but again I haven't seen that in real-world viewing either nothing that jumps out no alarms and that's a good thing how consistent TCL is with the production though is anyone's guess honestly these guys have to be out in the wild for a while before we know about that okay it's subjective picture quality analysis time I'm gonna start with the not-so-great news and that is that this TV definitely does appear to be crushing blacks that is it kind of takes some of the dark gray detail out of the equation and just represents it as black you can see that happening in the shirt of the officer here on Netflix's Ozark it's just a pool of black with a gold star hanging out on it you can barely even make out that there are buttons on the shirt there's just a tiny little glint it makes you look close enough to know that they're there later in this exact same scene there's absolutely no texture or or body or color to Jason Bateman's hair I've seen the scene on a ton of different TVs it's not supposed to be that way and this is in Dolby vision now let me clarify a few things for you Dolby vision has Dolby vision dark normal and Dolby vision bright three different settings on this particular television when you go into Dolby vision normal it does push up the overall brightness level a little bit but it also changes the color temperature and then when you go to Dolby vision bright it's just it's cold as ice and I would never watch it that way it just looks terrible plus the only vision dark and dark HDR modes are supposed to be for when you've got the shades down the lights are off and you don't want super super brightness you you're in a dark room but that doesn't mean you should just drop them to black levels and crush everything below a certain SPECT number it just doesn't it doesn't make any sense this isn't as extreme case though it's an absolutely extreme I mean I imagine if you're watching some of the Batman movies producer Dan was mentioning the the show see that's on Apple TV plus right now as an example those are the instances in which you're gonna probably lose out on some detail so if you watch a lot of dark movies in the dark that's not going to be great on the other hand I've watched a lot of other stuff that looks awesome I mean the good news is that when this TV is producing brighter images it looks great the resolutions definitely there doc top end of the HDR is punchy I definitely appreciate the fact that the colors are expanded a little bit some of this Dolby stuff is super juiced up I mean it's it's completely fake but it's fun to watch it looks pretty good and with most of the content I watched on Netflix and Amazon and Apple TV it looked good until it got super dark and then you know the bottom fell out look some of these images that you're seeing now with the really black backgrounds that's impressive right it looks like you've got really deep blacks and yeah they are deep remember I'm just talking about the detail in the shadows and the complete lack of it in some of the scenes that I've watched on this TV normally I can kind of retool the settings to get a little bit more out of it but I wasn't able to get to that easily not without washing out the image entirely so this is tough right because last year TCL redefined expectations around what you should expect from a 65 inch 4k uhd HDR TV they really came through and that was fantastic this year I think that expectations were elevated because it's next year it should be better right there's quantum dots now definitely it should be better and in many ways it is but with the removal of the shadow detail that I've seen here I'm less excited than I was last year does that mean it's not as good a TV well in some ways yeah I feel like if you're a cinephile it's definitely not as as good a TV as it was maybe last year for most people though it's still gonna be great definitely don't remove it from your shopping list have a look at it yourself see it in person see what you think about this TV maybe it is right for you and look I love the 8 series that TCL put together it's much more expensive but it's a fantastic TV and you know what that one had problems when it came out too and then they wouldn't fix them with a firmware update who's to say they won't also do the same with this television so I still think the TCL six series should be on your shortlist what it offers for the price is still just really really hard to beat but it does make for a tighter race between TCL and say like Vizio which is coming out with very competitive TVs it's similar prices that just gonna be a harder decision this year hey everyone thanks for watching I know I made you wait awhile for this video I hope it was worth it it definitely was to me to make sure that I was getting the right take on the right TV that other one was not right this one is and we still learned something new anyway hit me with a comment down below let me know what you think like subscribe hit that notification bell and always visit Digital Trends calm for the latest tech news and reviews\n"