TCL Series 5 (S535)
infinity edge
honest review
Hi from HeadQuarterTV. Today we are looking at TCL S535. We will start with design and move on to picture quality, motion, input lag, sound and other useful information. This might not be the best TV on the market right now but its really worth the price tag of the product. Let’s find out why. (Amazon Price: €448.99 for a 55 Inch). There are Amazon affiliate links on this page make sure to check them out
Design:
So overall it has a pretty clean design and the back of the screen is made by metal but has a little bit of flex and the area where all the inputs are located is made with plastic. The stand is basically as wide as the TV and this might make you think it could not hold the TV that well but trust me it does its job pretty awesome. There is only 1 button at the back of the TV for switching between Inputs and it also controls the power button. The bezels are thin and look really good and the TV is a bit thick on the bottom portion of the screen so if you have plans to mount it on the wall it will stick out a little bit.
Inputs and Outputs
This Tv have 4 HDMI 2.0 ports, a USB port, a digital audio out, analog audio out, a composite in which requires and adaptor as its not included, a TV tuner and an ethernet port. In terms of cable management on this TV you are going to have a track route through each foot of the stand on the both side which is actually very useful.
Quality:
Lets move on to picture quality. First of all, Contrast ratio. This TV has an exceptional contrast ratio of 7200:1 that will give you deep and inky blacks. contrast ratio is a ratio between the darkest black and the brightest white that the TV can display. A high contrast ratio will show deep blacks that can make darker scenes appear to have more details. This Ratio right here is better than TCL series 6.
Now lets talk about viewing angle which is how accurate the image remains when viewing off-center. This is something that is important if you have a wide sitting arrangement. This TV has poor viewing angles which is to be expected as a TV with a VA panel. So if you have an open room and you want to put this in, it might not be the best option but this is something that you may or may not notice too much.
Reflection:
If you are planning on using this tv in a bright room is really important to have a good reflection handling and TCL series 5 (s535) is decent. It will be able to handle a moderately lit room but if you have a window place on the opposite to the TV, it might be a little difficult to see what is happening on the TV because of the reflection.
Next up is color gamut which is the range of colors that a TV can display. The color gamut on this TV is actually pretty good as it is a QLED TV. It displays a wide color gamut for HDR content which this is an improvement from the last year. Color volume is also good on this TV as it will be able to display nice and deep saturated colors.
Uniformity:
For TCL series 5 (S535) overall its pretty decent black uniformity just a bit of cloudy in the middle of the screen. and gray uniformity is not better than series 6 that much but still compatible as its darker in the middle and around the screen. If you don’t know what Uniformity is let me explain to you; Uniformity is how even uniform colors appear throughout the display. for example for gray uniformity you can see if its bad or good by seeing the screen being completely gray or having some parts which are black and that makes it a bad gray uniformity. Same as black uniformity so if you are able to see some dark blue or white around the screen while being on black screen then that’s a bad black uniformity.
Motion:
Now lets talk about motion handling starting with the response time. So response time is the time it takes for display to change from one color to the next and slower response time could end up leaving a blurry trail behind a fast moving objects, this is known as ghosting. The S535 has a very good response time that is a little slow in darker transitions so you might see a bit of motion blur but there isn’t any overshoot and personally I don’t think its even noticeable. For the most part, fast moving content is going to look pretty smooth on this TV.
IF you want to improve the appearance of the motion even more you can enable black frame insertion(BFI). The way BFI works is by turning off the display between frames to reduce the persistence blur of modern display. When you activate BFI on the S535 it flickers at 60Hz and does a great job at reducing the motion blur without dimming the TV as much as some other models.
Input Lag:
Having low input lag is an extremely important feature for anyone that likes to game. Its basically just makes your experience more smoother and more enjoyable. The S535 has an inedible input lag. When in game mode it will be around 11ms and when game mode is disable the input lag will spike up to around 110ms which is pretty high but its quite common for TVs to have a high input lag outside of gaming mode.
Smart Features:
Moving on to Smart Features, The S535 runs on Roku TV which is a pretty good operating system runs very smoothly. It will have great selection of apps but unfortunately there are large ads that are on the home screen that cannot be disable. The remote is small and pretty basic but it will be enough to navigate the menu.
Sound:
The sound on this TV is pretty average like many other TVs and nothing special about it. The frequency response is okay and doesn’t produce much bass and the distortion performance is good.
And that’s it guys for today’s review we helped you chose the right decision for yourself and we hope that you learned something about this TV that you didn’t know before. If you are interested in this TV there are links down here and on the top of the page. These are affiliate links and will help you get the best offer you can and also helps us to run this website and hopefully get better and better. If you have any questions you can check out our CONTACT US page. Have a great day!!!
