TCL R646 / 6 Series – A reasonable price and still all the important features?

The R646 honestly looks similar to many other flatscreens. Not bad, but definitely not special either. The feet support the TV well, but they take up a lot of space in the front and back, which is why you should check in advance whether there is enough space or whether you want to mount it on the wall.

If you decide to mount it on the wall, you can hang the TV on the wall with the matching VESAThe Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) defines standards for the TVs wall mounting measurements. wall mount. In this case, it stands a bit away from the wall, since the lower part of the TV is quite bulky due to the included hardware.

The R646 has a Direct LED backlight with full array local dimming and a 120Hz 10-bit VAVertical Alignment, type of LCD Panel-type LCDLCD = Liquid Crystal Display – a type of screen using liquid crystals for creating the image panel.

In terms of picture quality, the R646 surprised us by having an amazing contrast ratio, which is increased to almost 20000:1 by the Full Array Local Dimming. As a result, blacks are extremely dark and those who generally don’t want an OLED TV will get as close as they can with this TV.

With a peak brightness of 1200Nits, the TV also gets very bright and thanks to the mini LED backlight, it can be controlled more efficiently and more precisely, which makes for a really juicy HDRHigh Dynamic Range – image/video with more dynamic range (contrast range) picture. You can clearly see the difference between SDRStandard Dynamic Range – image/video with a conventional gamma curve (opposite: HDR) – “normal” videos and HDR here, and thanks to HLGHLG or Hybrid Log Gamma facilitates the transmission and reception of signals by combining the SDR and HDR signals. If the device supports HDR, the HDR part of the signal is used, otherwise the SDR part., HDR10+License-free, dynamic HDR-format in competition with Dolby Vision and Dolby VisionDynamic HDR-format with a color depth of up to 12 Bits and Mastering of up to 10,000 Nits, all relevant formats are included. In addition, even the color space is wide, because the Quantum Dot technology, which by the way gives the abbreviation QLED its name, enables the highest possible color space.

So, it becomes clear that a real home theater atmosphere is created for a moderate price! However, even the best image is useless if the colors are washed out from the side. The TV has a great performance, but the viewing angle at which it is maintained is extremely narrow — typical for a VA panel. You should therefore refrain from buying this TV if you are planning to use it for sports evenings with a group of friends or if you have a wide seating area. And while we’re on the subject of the TV’s weaknesses. There are problems with upscaling 480p content, which is especially important with old DVDs or old consoles. According to TCL, there should be an update for this in the future though. If you only want to use the TV for new content, you won’t encounter these problems, and on the positive side, the gray uniformity is quite good compared to other TCL TVs.

The motion handling of the TCL TV is really impressive. It has a 120 HzHertz is the derived SI-unit of frequency with 1Hz=1/s – When talking about TVs this means how many different pictures a TV can display in one second. panel and a fast Response Time of 4 ms. This makes movements look very smooth, and the Black Frame InsertionProcess that inserts black “blank images” as intermediate images. This makes movements appear finer and clearer. feature or Motion Interpolation can help if there are any problems with the presentation.

JudderInconsistent time frame due to the input frequency not mismatching the TV’s frequency (e.g. 24p via 60Hz) can be completely removed from all sources and the panel is not flicker-free, but at a frequencyHertz is the derived SI-unit of frequency with 1Hz=1/s – When talking about TVs this means how many different pictures a TV can display in one second. of 960Hz even sensitive viewers should not notice any flickering.

A quick look at the checklist on the right already shows that the R646 is well suited as a gaming TV. In addition to the good picture quality, which is as important as the features for gaming, the R646 supports everything that the Xbox Series X and PS5 can output.

The 120Hz panel makes 120Fps possible, and the low response time further ensures that everything is displayed smoothly. The input lag is good in itself and really, really good at 4@120Hz — every action on the controller is directly reproduced on the screen. 2 HDMI 2.1 ports are also included and a Auto Low Latency Mode, as well as a VRRVariable Refresh Rate – synchronizes the display’s refresh rate with the output refresh rate of the graphics card is also supported in the form of AMD Free Sync.

You can already see that there is not much to complain about — only the very limited viewing angle causes couch co-op games to really suffer from the restriction. Thus, we give the “go-ahead” to solo adventurers sitting directly in front of the TV, but those who often play with others on the same screen should look for alternatives.

The R646 has a 2.0 Channel Sound System with 15 watts. As is always the case with Flatscreen-TVs, there is a lack of depth to really produce a bass sound that has enough punch. This can make action-packed games and movies sound a bit lackluster.

In general, however, the sound profile is well-balanced. It should also be noted that there are no distortions even at high volumes, and speaking of volume, it gets quite loud. An HDMI eARC port is available, which allows uncompressed Dolby AtmosObject-based surround sound format with 3D-Sound from any direction to be passed on to a suitable Soundbar or HiFi-system. This is recommended for almost all TVs, especially for more expensive ones, because a cheap Soundbar already makes a huge difference.

Unlike last year’s 6 Series, the R646 does not use TCL’s own Roku TV, but the smart OS uses the largely more popular Google TV. Although it is not the usual Google TV like Sony and others, since they use their own Version of it, everything runs smoothly here as well and the app selection is huge as usual via the Google Play Store.

A PVRPersonal Video Recorder, recording TV programs to a USB-Memory Device function and timeshift can be used, but unfortunately only a single tuner is installed, which should bother the fewest. The TV’s remote control has shortcuts to Netflix, Prime Video and YouTube, and there is also a built-in microphone to access the TV via voice control, but the remote itself looks very simple — which of course has nothing to do with the user-friendliness.

You definitely get a smart TV here, but as it has become standard, advertisements on the home screen are unavoidable.