Metz MQE7600 (65MQE7600ZUK) review

Metz has been a stalwart of the German TV scene since the 1950s, and has often caught our eye over the years with its consistently huge and spectacular stands at the annual IFA technology show in Berlin.

It hasn’t really made a concerted and sustained effort to crack the notoriously tough and brutal UK market, though – until now.

On the surface, at least, the Metz MQE7600 wears the stamp of a TV that really has been designed with the UK in mind: as well as having a Freeview HD tuner, it also supports the Freely smart system, meaning you can live-stream many of the Freeview broadcast channels without needing an aerial.

Can the MQE7600 also, though, offer the sort of increasingly impressive performance standards that British TV buyers are increasingly starting to expect even from the relatively budget end of the TV world?

Price

Under normal circumstances, the £659 that Metz is charging for the 65-inch MQE7600 would look like a potential bargain. As it happens, though, Metz’s TV has arrived hot on the heels of a couple of really quite insane bargains, in the shape of Sharp’s £479 70-inch GK4245K and the 50-inch TCL C6KS, which is now a snip at just £399.

Like the Metz MQE7600, the Sharp GK4245K features Tivo/Freely smarts and Quantum Dots, while the TCL C6KS boasts Mini LED lighting and 160 zones of local dimming, which is unprecedented at its price point. The TCL is just 50 inches in size, though.

Still, all of that means that Metz is going to have to work harder than it may have expected to make its set's £659 price look truly irresistible.

Design

The MQE7600 is a pretty good-looking TV for its money. Three sides of its screen’s frame are on-trend skinny, and the slightly thicker bottom edge looks cute in its glossy light grey metal-effect finish.

It’s fairly chunky around the back, making it a relatively cumbersome wall-hanging option, and that rear is clearly made of plastic rather than metal, too, reminding you as you’re setting the TV up of its relatively affordable status for a 65-inch model. The set ships, though, with an eye-catching, centrally mounted ‘open’ style stand where a narrow bar ovals out to support the front of the screen, and two more straightforward silvery feet support the back.

All in all, the MQE7600 manages to look and feel like an affordable but ambitious TV rather than just an ultra-cheap one.

The remote control looks pleasing with its mixture of light grey highlights and main black-fronted button area, and while its button layout is rather basic and crowded, it does at least provide direct access buttons for Freely, Tivo, Netflix, Prime Video, YouTube and Disney+. Its build quality follows the screen in being pretty plasticky, though.

Features

As you would expect given its affordable pricing, the Metz MQE7600 isn’t overloaded with fancy features. It does have a few potentially useful tricks up its sleeve, though, most notably the Tivo smart system. This delivers an exceptionally slick and intelligent smart interface that carries most of the world’s key video streaming services – and even the one it doesn’t carry natively, Apple TV+, is available via Prime Video these days.

Tivo is particularly good, too, at working with even quite vague content search terms to track down relevant content, thanks to its seemingly forensic knowledge of every film and TV show known to man. The excellent search engine is also unusually brilliant at recognising and interpreting spoken instructions and search terms, and always runs slickly and speedily.

The Tivo smart engine is backed up with Freely, the relatively new service backed by the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5, which lets you live stream many of the Freeview channels rather than having to depend on an aerial to watch them. As well as providing access free of charge to thousands of hours of on-demand content.

The MQE7600’s core panel hardware has a couple of promising specifications up its sleeve. First, it’s directly lit, meaning its LEDs sit right behind the screen – a set-up that typically delivers better contrast than screens with LEDs around the edges. Second, it uses a Quantum Dot system to generate its colours, which typically provides wider colour gamuts and finer colour tone blends than basic RGB LCD TVs.

There’s no local dimming in this TV to help enhance contrast, though; you just get global dimming, where the lighting of the whole screen is adjusted when the TV is trying to optimise its pictures to the content being shown. The screen only supports 60Hz refresh rates, too, rather than 120Hz. Neither of these limitations, however, is by any means unusual at the MQE7600’s price level.

The native 4K screen can also handle high dynamic range content, and this HDR support extends to the premium Dolby Vision format on top of the basic HDR10 and HLG systems. Dolby Vision carries extra scene-by-scene picture information that tends to be particularly useful at helping relatively budget TVs achieve better picture quality.

The MQE7600’s Dolby connection extends to Dolby Atmos sound playback too – though this is only delivered by a 2 x 10W sound system.

Despite its aggressive pricing, the MQE7600 carries a few promising picture set-up features, including a Gamma adjustment (complete with an unusually helpful onscreen explanation of what this does), an adaptive luma control adjustment, dynamic backlight settings, a resolution enhancer and even a dynamic tone mapping option that gets the TV to ‘rework’ HDR pictures so that they are optimised to the MQE7600’s specific screen capabilities. Capabilities that include a rather uninspiring claimed brightness of just 380 nits.

The MQE7600’s connections, finally, include a trio of HDMIs, two USBs, a LAN port, an optical digital audio output and a 3.5mm AV input. This is a solid roster for a £659 65-inch TV – though, predictably, given the screen doesn’t support higher frame rates than 60Hz, none of the HDMI ports support modern premium gaming features such as high frame rates or VRR. One of the HDMIs does, though, support the eARC feature that lets you pass sound from your TV to an eARC-capable soundbar or AV receiver.

Picture

Despite its Quantum Dot colours and direct LED lighting, the Metz MQE7600’s picture quality sadly doesn’t make the grade, even by today’s affordable TV standards.

Particularly disappointing right off the bat is how grey and washed out dark scenes look – so much so that they also take on a distracting blue undertone. To make matters worse, there are some really pronounced areas of backlight clouding in multiple areas of our test sample’s screen, leaving us feeling like we’re watching dark scenes through some kind of spotlight effect filter.

The grey-blue wash and clouding over dark scenes is severe enough to cause the image to look dull and lifeless, as well as causing subtle shadow details that give dark scenes a sense of depth to go AWOL.

These issues are particularly noticeable in the default HDR Natural preset, and switching to the HDR Movie mode does improve things a bit (more shadow detail is retained, at least). Making tweaks such as increasing the local contrast to high and activating the Adaptive Luma feature can add a little more punch to dark scenes, too. Nothing we tried, though, ever got dark scenes looking satisfactory.

Making the MQE7600’s dark scene problems harder to forgive is the fact that it’s not a particularly bright TV either. You do get a sense of HDR content’s expanded light range compared with SDR, but the switch isn’t as pronounced as we’ve started to become accustomed to seeing, even with very cheap TVs.

The screen’s brightness limitations cause the brightest highlights of HDR images to look really odd, too. Depending on whether you’ve got the provided Dynamic Tone Mapping feature active or not, bright HDR highlights either appear like empty white holes torn into the picture, or else they show a bit more detail but still look weirdly artificial compared with the rest of the picture – and the balance between dark and bright peaks feels forced and distracting.

The dynamic tone mapping system also causes distractingly extreme and frequent adjustments to the picture’s baseline brightness – so much so that we’d say the feature is essentially unusable.

There are a few picture areas where the Metz MQE7600 does okay. First, its pictures look reasonably sharp and detailed for such an affordable TV, and motion looks passably natural, with only mild resolution loss and judder during camera pans and around moving objects.

Second, during bright scenes, at least, its colours are surprisingly punchy and balanced. To the point that they almost fool you into forgetting, for a moment, the screen’s limited brightness. Third, an anti-reflection filter that the MQE7600 surprisingly turns out to have fitted to its screen does an effective job of suppressing reflections from a bright room.

Finally in the positive column, the screen responds quite well to Dolby Vision content if you’re able to feed it some, with the extra picture information helping to get the best from the screen much more effectively than Metz’s own dynamic tone mapping can. At least in the Dolby Vision Bright preset (the Dark option goes back to crushing out too much shadow detail).

Even with Dolby’s help, though, the 65MQE7600UZ’s pictures never rise above deeply average, and, appropriately enough, we need to wrap this section up with one more major limitation of Metz’s screen: its hugely limited viewing angles. Watch this TV from pretty much any angle at all, and colour and, especially, contrast start to fall away really severely.

Sound

Joining the MQE7600’s dated and slightly odd pictures is a pretty underwhelming sound system. Trying to crank up the volume to give movie soundtracks a cinematic feel soon reveals that the TV really can’t get very loud – a sign of underpowered speakers that’s underlined by a failure to project any sound outside the TV’s physical boundaries. As a result, the MQE7600’s soundstage doesn’t really enjoy much left and right spread, nor is there any sense of height effects to support that aspect of Dolby Atmos soundtracks.

Vocals sound a bit muffled if they have to compete with any significant background noise in a mix, and the midrange can sound thin and weedy under pressure. In fact, the MQE7600 falls prey more than any other TV we can think of to the phenomenon of its sound actually collapsing in on itself as action or horror scenes expand towards their loudest payoffs. This sort of inverted reaction to the densest soundtrack moments really can be very distracting.

Bass isn’t completely absent from the MQE7600’s presentation, it should be said, and what there is of it can maintain a fairly nice, rounded tone to a point. The bass performance readily breaks down into distortions and crackling when put under any sustained low-frequency pressure, though – especially, oddly, if you’ve got the TV set to its Dolby Atmos mode.

In fact, the MQE7600 delivers a much cleaner, less distracting sound if you turn the Dolby Atmos mode off, pretty much proving that its speaker system really isn’t up to the job of coping with Dolby Atmos’s dynamics and multi-channel soundstaging. Even outside of Dolby Atmos mode, though, to be clear, the MQE7600 remains a basic and fragile audio performer.

Verdict

The Metz MQE7600 looks pretty, boasts wide-ranging and effective smart TV features, and is fairly aggressively priced for such a large screen.

Neither its picture nor its sound quality, though, are enough to stand against the sort of talents being shown these days by some of its even more affordable rivals.

SCORES

• Picture 2
• Sound 2
• Features 3

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