TCL 5 Series/S555 2022 QLED TV Review

The TCL 5 Series Roku TV has a very nice, premium design. The side and top bezels are extremely thin, and other than a small gap of dead space between the frame and the first pixels, it blends into your surroundings well. The bottom bezel is a bit thicker, with a brushed metal finish, and it looks nice.

This TV isn't part of our accelerated longevity test, but its predecessor, the TCL 5 Series/S535 2020 QLED, is.

The v-shaped feet are pretty basic, but they support the TV well. There are two positions for the feet, which is great if you have a smaller TV table and aren't planning on wall-mounting it.

Footprint of the 65" stand in the narrow position (as shown): 26.7" x 12.7". In the wide position (as shown here), the footprint is 50.9" x 12.7". In both positions, the feet lift the screen about 3.11" above the table, so most soundbars fit without blocking the screen.

Like most budget TVs, the back is pretty plain, but unlike the Amazon Fire TV Omni QLED Series, there are clips on the feet for basic cable management. The inputs all face to the side and are easy to access when the TV is wall-mounted.

The bottom half of the screen houses all the electronics and inputs, and it's thicker than the top half. The thicker section prevents the TV from sitting completely flush against the wall if it's wall-mounted.

The TCL 5 Series Roku TV has decent overall build quality. The stand is stable and supports the TV well, and although there's a bit of flex in the back panel, it's not too bad and won't cause any issues. It's mostly made of cheap plastic, and although it doesn't feel very premium, it looks good, and there are no serious issues. There are a few spots on the display that you can see when displaying uniform images (like football or hockey). They appear to be pressure points and are likely a factory defect.

The TCL 5 Series Roku TV has superb contrast. Dark scenes are displayed well, with deep blacks, even when bright highlights are on the screen. The local dimming feature increases contrast a bit, but it's limited by the relatively large size of each dimming zone.

The local dimming feature performs the same in Game Mode as in the other picture modes.

Unfortunately, this TV has just okay peak brightness in HDR. Some bright highlights stand out well, but very bright scenes aren't bright enough to stand out.

These measurements are in the 'Dark' HDR Picture Mode with the Backlight at its max, TV Brightness set to 'Brighter', Contrast at '100', Local Contrast on 'High', and the Color Temperature set to 'Warm'.

Switching to 'Game' mode doesn't result in any noticeable difference in peak brightness with HDR games.

The TV has excellent PQ EOTF tracking. Shadow details are preserved well, but near blacks are dimmed a bit. With content mastered at lower peak brightness levels, there's a sharp cutoff near the TV's peak brightness, but content mastered at 4,000 nits has a smoother roll-off, so fine details are well-preserved in bright scenes.

The TCL 5 Series Roku TV has great peak brightness in SDR. It's bright enough to handle moderate amounts of glare in a bright room, and there's very little variation in brightness with different scenes. Very small highlights in near-black scenes are dimmed by the TV's local dimming feature, though. It's a lot brighter than most comparable TVs, including the Sony X75K.

These measurements are after calibration in the 'Movie' Picture Mode with the Backlight at '100', and TV Brightness set to 'Brighter'. Local Contrast was set to 'High', Contrast was set to '100', and the Color Temperature set to 'Warm'.

The TCL 5 Series Roku TV has a great color gamut in HDR. It has fantastic coverage of the DCI-P3 color space used by most current Ultra HD Blu-ray movies. Its coverage of the wider Rec. 2020 color space is more limited, though, which isn't ideal. The tone mapping is very good for the most part, which is important for content that exceeds the color space of this TV.

The color volume is just decent. Thanks to its superb contrast ratio, it displays dark saturated colors well. Unfortunately, it's limited by its relatively low peak brightness in HDR.

The overall accuracy of this TV in SDR before calibration is excellent. There are no noticeable issues with colors, but very bright shades of gray are a bit off. The color temperature is very close to our calibration target of 6500K. Gamma is close to the target of 2.2 we chose for a moderately-lit room, but darker scenes are a bit too dark, and bright scenes are slightly too bright.

This TV is very easy to calibrate with the Roku companion app, and the results after calibration are fantastic. We didn't have to adjust any colors, as they were already fantastic after calibrating the white point to D65.

You can see the full settings used for our calibration here.

The TCL 5 Series Roku TV has decent gray uniformity. The sides of the screen are a bit darker than the center, and there's some dirty screen effect in the center that can be distracting when watching sports like football or hockey. There are also a few round spots, especially four large spots along the top edge of the screen. These appear to be pressure points that occurred during assembly.

The black uniformity on this TV is fantastic. Even with local dimming fully disabled, the screen is remarkably uniform, and the dark spots noticeable in the gray uniformity slides aren't noticeable. Enabling local dimming (Active Contrast) worsens the black uniformity, as the large size of each zone causes a halo around bright objects, like the test cross. For something similar but with even better black uniformity, check out the TCL Q7/Q750G QLED.

Unfortunately, the TCL 5 Series Roku TV has a sub-par viewing angle. Colors fade and appear washed out as you move off-center. This TV isn't a good choice for a wide seating arrangement or if you like to move around with the TV on, as you'll see a degraded image from the side. If you have a wide seating arrangement, a TV like the Sony X75K is a better choice.

The TCL 5 Series Roku TV has just decent reflection handling. The semi-gloss finish reduces the intensity of direct reflections but causes some smearing across the display. It's bright enough that glare won't be an issue for most people, though.

Unfortunately, this TV has poor sharpness processing with low-resolution or low-bitrate content. Fine details are hard to make out, and text is a bit blurry.

The Sharpness setting doesn't appear to do much overall, but the optimal sharpness settings for low-resolution or low-bitrate content, with no over-sharpening, are as follows:

• Sharpness: 25

Like most TVs on the market, this TV uses a BGR (Blue-Green-Red) subpixel layout instead of the traditional Red-Green-Blue layout. For video content, it doesn't cause any issues, but if you're planning on using this TV as a PC monitor, this reduces text clarity a bit, although there are easy workarounds for it. You can read more about this here.

The TCL 5 Series Roku TV has a very good response time. There's very little black smearing in dark scenes, which is great, and transitions are consistent for the most part. There's some motion blur behind fast-moving objects when watching sports or playing games, but it's not that noticeable.

Unfortunately, the TCL 5 Series Roku TV isn't flicker-free. It uses pulse width modulation (PWM) to dim the backlight, and it flickers across all picture modes with all settings. It flickers at a very high frequency, though, which won't bother most people.

There's an optional backlight strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion. It only flickers at 60Hz, but unfortunately, the timing is off, causing a duplicate image. The score for this test is based on the flicker frequency and not the actual performance.

This TV has an optional motion interpolation feature to improve the appearance of motion. Like most budget TVs, it works best with slow motion, as it can't keep up with busy scenes, and there are noticeable artifacts.

There's a bit of stutter when watching movies or other low frame rate content. It's especially noticeable in slow panning shots.

Unfortunately, unlike the TCL 5 Series/S535 2020 QLED, this TV can't remove judder from 60Hz sources like a cable box. Enabling the Natural Cinema feature is necessary to remove judder from 24p sources, including anything with a Match Frame Rate feature like an Apple TV.

This TV supports a variable refresh rate to reduce screen tearing when gaming. Unfortunately, due to the 60Hz max refresh rate, the screen can only refresh within a narrow range, and low framerate compensation (LFC) isn't supported, so you'll see more tearing in games that are locked at a lower refresh rate or in busier scenes.

The TCL 5 Series Roku TV has superb low input lag, resulting in a very responsive gaming experience. The input lag is also low in 'PC' mode, which is great as you can enjoy clear text and a smooth desktop experience.

This TV has good compatibility with most resolutions at 60Hz. Chroma 4:4:4 is displayed properly with all supported resolutions, even when 1440p is forced, which is great as this is necessary for clear text from a PC.

This TV can't take full advantage of the PS5, as its HDMI ports lack the bandwidth for 4k @ 120Hz gaming from the new-gen consoles, and it's limited to a 60Hz refresh rate anyway.

This TV can't take full advantage of the Xbox Series S|X, as it's limited to a 60Hz refresh rate and its HDMI inputs don't have the bandwidth necessary for 4k @ 120Hz gaming from the new-gen consoles.

Unfortunately, this TV doesn't support HDMI 2.1 bandwidth. All four HDMI inputs are limited to 18Gbps, so despite TCL's advertising, we don't consider this to be HDMI 2.1. Unfortunately, it doesn't support ATSC 3.0, so over-the-air broadcasts are limited to 1080p.

The TCL 5 Series Roku TV supports eARC, but strangely, it doesn't support the two most common audio formats supported by eARC. If you watch content mastered with those formats, it instead downmixes the signal.

The TCL 5 Series Roku TV has a disappointing frequency response. Like most TVs, it has very little bass, with no thump or rumble. Dialogue is clear and easy to understand, and there's very little distortion, even at higher volume levels. Sadly, there's no room correction feature, and it can't get very loud, so it's not a good choice for a noisy environment.

There's some noticeable distortion on this TV, even at moderate listening levels. It hardly increases at all at high volume levels, though.

This TV runs the Roku TV smart interface, which is very simple, with fewer animations and a simpler user interface than you'll get with more premium TVs. It's very fast, though, and easy to use.

Unfortunately, like all Roku TVs we've tested, there are large ads on the home screen and they can't be disabled.

The Roku app store has a great selection of streaming apps, with many free streaming apps built-in.

Unfortunately, this TV comes with the same basic remote found with most Roku devices. This means there's no built-in voice control; you have to use the Roku companion app instead for that. There are a few quick access buttons for popular streaming services, but like most TVs, you can't change them.

The power button is on the back of the TV on the right, and you can change inputs with it too.

• Remote (with 2x AAA batteries)
• Manual