Review on TCL 65R635 65-Inch QLED Roku Smart TV 2021 Model With 4K UHD, Dolby Vision HDR by Thomas Unruh

Short version:This TV ain’t bad. The blacks are true black, but at the expense of losing a lot of mid-tone values, resulting in a lot of dark silhouettes instead of dark details. Tweaking settings will help, but only so much before you succumb to the limitations of LED sets. OLED is the solution, but still very expensive. Brightly lit scenes are very good. Roku user interface is irritatingly glitchy or laggy at times. Built-in speakers are surprisingly good.Long version:If you read the reviews from sites like cnet or similar, you’d think this TV was the holy savior — an affordable mid-priced TV that rivals other non-OLED TVs almost twice its price. The only thing true is that "for its price range” it probably is the best TV in terms of picture quality. But that doesn’t mean the picture is amazing, because it’s not. If you’re watching scenes that are very bright and well-lit, yes the picture is fantastic in 4K. But for scenes that are medium-lit the picture quality is "okay/acceptable” at best. And for scenes that are mostly dark, the picture is downright terrible. Unfortunately, most movies and TV shows today have medium or dark scenes. Therefore you will not have many opportunities to see this TV at its best.Medium to dark scenes have always been the biggest problem with LCD/LED TVs since they came out in the early-mid 2000s. After almost two decades, the only significant step forward to solve that problem was the invention of "Local Dimming”. The only other [but much better] option is to buy an OLED TV, which unfortunately are still very expensive today.Local dimming is like if the pixels were playing zone defense instead of man-to-man. Theoretically it’s the best alternative to OLED if you want blacks to be truly black. And the more LD "zones” your TV has the better.On this particular TV, I do notice pure black, so that’s good. Unfortunately, if you have pure black details in addition to a lot of other shades and values, more likely than not you will lose those other details and just get sections of the picture that are just very dark or black. You lose a lot of detail that is like 70% black or 55% etc… it just all appears as very dark silhouettes. I say this as someone who spent a lot of time fine-tuning and color correcting the picture on all its different modes (vivid, sport, normal, etc… the factory settings are terrible) and yes, I even use the "secret settings” that you can only access through the Roku app on your phone and adjusted the gamma. I believe I maxed out all the settings to get the best picture quality possible, in all its modes, to get the best mid-tone detail separated from the pure black details, and my review above is the result. I didn’t even mention how bright parts of a scene next to dark parts will have the "holy effect” which is my way of describing the way the light areas glow next to the dark areas (it’s not a good thing and the scenes were not shot that way).Local dimming can only do so much.I don’t game, so I won’t speak on that.For crying out loud turn OFF Auto Motion Plus. True 60hz is much much better than fake 120hz. Most movies and shows (if not all?) still only use 60 fps anyway.The only time when AMP is acceptable is when watching sports. I mostly watch F1, MMA and sometimes baseball, and AMP makes things clearer and easier to see. But for everything else non-sports or video games, motion blur is part of the cinematic quality and AMP absolutely ruins it and makes it look like some weird soap opera.Overall I like Roku. But the built-in Roku UI on this TV is always laggy or glitchy to the point it is irritating to use. The Settings section needs to be better organized as well. The remote takes a long time to be detected and sometimes it will drop out for no reason.A major plus on this TV imo are the built-in speakers. Yes I know nothing is better than separate standalone speakers with subwoofer, but for built-in speakers the sound is exceptionally good, particularly the mid-tones and base. Good enough that I can hold out on purchasing an expensive standalone set.