Recs.
Updated
The TCL P607 is a great wallet-friendly 4K TV. It performs fairly well for movies and excels at gaming.
SpecsUpdate
Pros
Pro Great for HDR content
On top of its excellent picture quality, the P607 has everything essential to a great HDR experience: local dimming, wide color gamut, and fairly high peak brightness level.
Highlights will really stand out as the deep black levels are further improved with local dimming. It can make parts of the screen darker when the image calls for it, resulting in a fairly huge boost in picture quality as the black levels become deeper.
The wide color gamut enables the panel to reproduce the full range of colors required for true HDR playback. The screen can get sufficiently bright at a peak level of ~500 nits to light those colors up and make HDR details really pop.
Pro Excellent value for money
At $650, it's hard to find a better deal for a 55-inch 4K TV that can also handle HDR content reasonably well.
Compared to its direct competitors, its picture quality is more or less similar to them. Although the HDR performance is just a tad below them, it's still great, especially for the price.
It's also more versatile because it has better features for gaming - the input lag of ~15ms is among the lowest in 4K TVs on the market, and it has a motion blur of ~12ms that stacks up to more expensive options.
The screen size is large for the price when compared to TVs in this price bracket, such as the Sony X900E which costs ≥$250 more for the 49" model.
Pro Great color accuracy
The P607 is excellent at reproducing colors accurately out of the box.
Even without calibration, the colors are spot-on. They're very close to what the source signal demands, and any inaccuracies are generally considered imperceptible to most end users.
The overall average difference between the source signal and the panel's reproduction of the color is measured in Delta-E, where lower means better accuracy. The P607 has a Delta-E of below 2.0, and anything below 3.0 is generally considered accurate for most end users.
Pro Decent at handling glare
In a decently-lit environment, the P607's colors won't look dull thanks to the panel's high peak brightness levels and decent handling of reflections.
It's bright enough to fight off glare with peak brightness levels of ~500 nits for both SDR & HDR, and the intensity of reflections are also reduced by panel's semi-gloss finish.
Pro Great for gaming
The P607 has low input lag and barely noticeable motion blur, making for a responsive and fluid gameplay experience.
The input lag is barely noticeable at ~15ms for both SDR & HDR inputs, and the panel only requires ~12ms to fully change the pixels color, resulting in fast-moving objects not leaving any trails on the screen, eliminating virtually all motion blur.
Pro Intuitive & smooth user interface
The P607 runs on the Roku TV smart platform, touted for its simple, straightforward, and lag-free UI.
It’s easy for anyone to grasp how navigation works, thanks to its two-column design with the menu on the left and options on the right.
There’s also no noticeable lag during navigation or menu selection.
Pro Excellent picture quality
The P607 looks true-to-life with lots of details.
There’s a great depth to pictures and you’ll be able to see everything stand out. Dark scenes are great and you won't miss out on any details, even in shadows.
The panel has a contrast ratio of about 6500:1, which means it can produce blacks that are 6500 times darker than the brightest white. This can be pushed even further to over 7000 with local dimming.
The colors are lifelike and accurate even without any calibration by the user. They will look really vibrant even in bright scenes because of the panel’s high peak brightness levels of ~500 nits for SDR & ~550 nits for HDR.
Even in a decently-lit environment, the P607’s picture quality can still hold up - the panel is great at handling reflections and it can get bright enough to fight off glare.
Cons
Con Not suitable for sports
The color uniformity of the P607 is quite poor, and the viewing angle is narrow.
When displaying large same-color objects, such as football or hockey fields, certain areas of the screen will look darker than the others, resulting in uneven colors. This becomes worse when paired with the bad viewing angles that makes the picture quality deteriorate even further, and also makes it unsuitable for watching sports with a group because the picture quality won’t be consistent to all viewers.
Con Not suitable for group watching
The P607 has poor viewing angles that makes it unsuitable for group watching.
Its picture quality gets progressively worse when viewed further away from the center of the screen. At just ~10° away from the center, the blacks start degrading into grays, and colors will start looking dull at beyond ≥20° from the center.
Recommendations
Comments
Flagged Pros + Cons
Pro Good black levels and uniformity
The black levels of a TV affects the viewer’s perception of other colors next to it. If the black levels are not deep enough and doesn’t remain uniform across the screen, the overall picture quality will look “flat” without much depth. The P607 handles this well with only <1.8% deviation (across the entire screen) from what a pure black screen should be — this results in a significant gain in its native contrast levels, thereby increasing the picture quality.
Pro Great for dark rooms
When situated in a dark environment, the P607's picture quality will be improved by a fairly huge margin because the panel won't have to compete with glare.
Pro Excellent color representation
Just like many other TCL TVs from 2017, the P607 does an excellent job with color accuracy — the colors are almost perfectly accurate out of the box and there is no calibration required.
Pro Dark scenes looks great
The P607 can display dark scenes really well. The colors will pop out more because the panel is able to produce really deep blacks thanks to the high native contrast ratio of 6437:1 native, and 7269:1 with local dimming enabled.