is a senior reviewer covering TVs and audio. He has over 20 years experience in AV, and has previously been on staff at Digital Trends and Reviewed.
Since I saw the TCL X11L SQD-Mini LED TV at a pre-CES event in December, I’ve been eager to get a close look at it in my living room. At first glance, the TV impressed me enough that I named it the best TV of CES 2026.
From the moment I completed Google TV setup and started watching the TCL X11L I was amazed. I could immediately tell it’s the brightest TV I’ve had in my home, but it was the color vibrancy that I found most impressive. The colors we’re all most familiar with — skin tones, the sky, green grass and trees — all look as close to realistic as I’ve seen on a TV. And with the color vibrancy it looks staggeringly good.
It’s a flagship TV unlike any other that TCL has made, with vibrant colors and incredible blooming control. It competes with flagships from all the major TV manufacturers — including the Sony Bravia 9, LG G5, and Samsung S95F — and it gets brighter than any of them. But it’s also expensive, with the 75-inch model I tested going for $7,000, and the 85- and 98-inch versions for $8,000 and $10,000, respectively. And with a bunch of RGB LED TVs on the way this year, for likely comparable prices, you might want to wait before committing to the X11L.
While the TV industry leans into RGB LED — and TCL is too, on other TVs — TCL’s flagship instead uses an evolution of mini-LED technology. The X11L uses blue LEDs for its backlight with super quantum dots (hence the SQD) and an upgraded color filter that together provide the widest gamut coverage we’ve ever seen from a mini-LED TV. Both technologies should have similar light output and color performance, although the individual red, green, and blue LED backlights of RGB LEDs could deliver more accurate colors — or they could have visible color crosstalk issues. We won’t know until RGB LED TVs are more readily available. What we do know is that mini-LED is a proven technology, and that TCL has made significant improvements to its performance with the X11L.
It also has a higher-end design than previous TCL TVs, with a solid metal frame and uniform thickness across the chassis that’s just about an inch deep. It uses a B&O audio system, including front-firing speakers along the bottom of the TV that deliver clear dialogue and, with the built-in subwoofers, surprisingly deep and booming bass. (The system can also be expanded with TCL’s Z100 FlexConnect speakers, which I’ll be testing soon.)
TCL X11L specs Display type: Mini LED with super quantum dots Backlight: Blue LEDs HDR formats: Dolby Vision, HDR10+, HDR10, HLG OS: Google TV HDMI inputs: 4 x HDMI 2.1 (one with eARC/ARC) Audio support: Dolby Atmos, DTS Virtual X Gaming features: 4K/144Hz, VRR (up to 288Hz), ALLM, FreeSync Premium Pro Sizes available (inches): 75, 85, 98
Filmmaker mode is, as usual, the most accurate according to my testing. Grayscale performance is the best I’ve seen from TCL, with the only perceptible issue being that it crushes black a bit. With default settings, the TCL tracks a little under the EOTF curve (meaning as the gray approaches white, it isn’t quite as bright as it should be). When I increased the brightness from the default 50 to 70, it tracked the EOTF almost perfectly and still tracked grayscale very well, apart from the small near black issue, which was still a little too dim. It’s not quite as accurate as the LG G5 OLED, but it’s comparable to the Sony Bravia 9. And even in Filmmaker, the TCL can get significantly brighter than either.
Default Filmmaker mode isn’t the brightest of the modes available, with a 10 percent window peaking at 2,789 nits, but the X11L can easily get brighter. With my Konica Minolta LS-100 luminance meter (which is more reliable over 6,000 nits than either my colorimeter and spectrophotometer) I measured just over 8,800 nits from a 5 percent window in Filmmaker with brightness at 100, local contrast at high, and peak brightness set to boost. By comparison, the mini-LED TCL QM9K hit 5,844 nits, and the brightest OLED of last year, the LG G5, topped out at 2,340 nits, both also in Filmmaker mode.
While it’s great that the TV can hit that, especially in its most accurate color mode, for the vast majority of people and their living rooms it isn’t necessary. For most of my viewing I set the brightness at 70, local contrast at medium, and peak brightness at high. If I had the light off, I sometimes turned the brightness down further because the extra brightness wasn’t necessary for the situation.
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