Hands on: TCL RM9L review

The RM9L represents TCL’s first and most high-end foray into the suddenly oh-so-popular world of RGB Mini LED technology.

As such, it's the model that we would have expected to be TCL’s flagship TV for 2026. At CES 2026, though, the brand announced that the flagship title is in fact going to its ‘Super QLED’ X11L.

We went into some detail in our TCL X11L hands-on to explain just why TCL has gone against the current TV industry grain with this unexpected hierarchy, but we’ll try to sum it up more succinctly again in the course of this hands-on with the RM9L, which has left us with a very positive first impression despite its sub-flagship status.

Price

Unlike the X11L, the RM9L was not made available to order following its unveiling at CES 2026, and no price information has so far been provided.

All we can confidently say at this stage is that it will cost at least a little less than an equivalent-sized X11L.

Prices for the X11L, to give at least a little context, have been confirmed for the US at $7000 for the 75-inch version, $8000 for the 85-inch model, and $10,000 for the 98 incher.

There’s no UK pricing available for the X11L yet.

Design

The RM9L sticks out substantially further around the back than the X11L does.

The result isn’t ugly or even really cumbersome, though. In fact, TCL can even just about get away with its description of the design as “slim and integrated”. It just doesn't look quite as slender and elegant when hung on a wall as the X11L does.

Build quality and finish seem high, though, and TCL leaves you in no doubt about what technology is inside the RM9L by stylishly incorporating a badge saying 'Premium RGB MiniLED' into the screen’s right-hand edge.

There’s no repeat on the RM9L of the soundbar along the bottom edge that you get with the X11L – though a Bang & Olufsen logo in the bottom corner confirms that the premium Danish brand has again been involved in this new QD model’s sound design.

Features

TCL essentially claims in its 2026 TV range information that its new ‘Super’ class of QLED TV is capable of delivering more colour brightness, more local dimming precision and more colour precision than the RGB Mini LED can.

The X11L certainly did a compelling job of selling these claims during our hands-on with that model, but, on paper at least, the RM9L really doesn't come up far short of TCL's SQD flagship set.

Set to be available in 85-, 98- and a monster 115-inch screen size, the RM9L is claimed to cover ‘up to’ 100% of the massive BT.2020 HDR colour spectrum.

TCL also claims that the RM9L is capable of hitting a mammoth 9000 nits of peak brightness (only 1000 nits down on the peak brightness of the X11L), while control of all that light is delivered by a pretty epic 16,848 claimed local dimming zones (a drop of just under 4000 from the unprecedented claimed dimming zone count of the X11L).

As with the X11L, the RM9L is built on TCL’s new WHVA 2.0 Ultra panel. It also shares a bunch of other features, including native 4K/144Hz gaming support (or HD 288Hz support via TCL’s Game Accelerator system), Google TV smarts, playback of both the Dolby Vision IQ and HDR10+ premium HDR formats; and playback of the IMAX Enhanced system supported by most Marvel films on Disney+.

There’s also the Bang & Olufsen-designed speaker system capable of playing Dolby Atmos sound that we alluded to earlier.

TCL’s new AiPQ Pro processor is provided, finally, to help continually optimise pictures to the screen’s emphatic capabilities. Though you can also choose a more ‘as the director intended’ look for movie nights if you prefer.

Picture quality

Looked at in isolation, our early 85-inch RM9L's picture quality looks seriously, in some ways next-generationally, impressive.

The ‘next-gen’ bit comes from its phenomenally intense colours, which are delivered with a level of richness and purity – at least with the majority of TCL’s predictably extreme demo footage – that’s arguably even more easy on the eye than the vast colour scapes achieved by the first two RGB Mini LED and Micro RGB TVs we got our eyes on last year.

The ‘out there’ contrast and colour range of most of TCL’s demo footage would have represented a substantial challenge to lesser TVs, but the RM9L's light controls handled everything as if it were the easiest job in the world.

We were blown away, for instance, by how spectacularly bright pictures typically looked, despite the screen also being able to deliver black levels that often appeared almost OLED-like in their depth and freedom from clouding and instability.

The screen’s colours don’t degenerate/fade away in the most vibrant areas either, and the brightness is especially impressive with relatively complex colours involving a mixture of the panel’s core red, green and blue components.

Colours hold up excellently well with wide-angle viewing, too, and aside from clipping a little subtle shading in the brightest HDR highlights, the amount of subtle shading that’s retained in richly coloured picture areas is generally outstanding.

While the RM9L looks genuinely sensational when viewed in isolation, though, side-by-side comparisons with TCL’s flagship SQD X11L TV does reveal one or two limitations.

The RM9L's pictures aren’t quite as bright, for one thing, especially in picture areas containing an expanse of fairly pure red, green or blue content. This brightness disadvantage applies to HDR peaks as well as general baseline and full-screen bright HDR content.

To be clear about this, though, this brightness ‘limitation’ is only evident against the insanely bright X11L. Against pretty much any other TV around today, it’s still blazingly bright.

The remarkable colour saturation advantage so evident with relatively pure red, green and blue image content on the RM9L reduces somewhat with the rare moments of more natural, less extreme moments in TCL’s content reel.

There’s also a touch more greyness around bright highlights when they appear against black backdrops than there is on the X11L, especially if you’re watching the TV from a severe angle.

This blooming and clouding difference seemed fairly small under the show floor lights, though, and certainly never turned into aggressively obvious backlight clouding or blooming.

We didn’t feel troubled, either, by potential colour crosstalk problems during the play-through of TCL’s demo reel, though the starkness of this content versus regular video may have played in the demo screen’s favour in this respect.

The RM9L's pictures aren’t quite as crisp and sharp as those of the X11L – but, again, it’s a small difference, really, and doesn’t stop the RGB Mini LED model from looking every inch a native 4K TV.

While the RM9L's pictures don’t achieve as much intensity and impact or quite as much general picture consistency as the X11L's, they still look outstandingly promising versus most of the rest of even the premium TV world – and let’s not forget that the RM9L will likely be more affordable than the X11L.

Sound quality

The RM9L's sound appears to be a more substantial step down from the X11L than its pictures.

While Bang & Olufsen was still involved in the TV’s speaker design, there’s no forward-facing speaker ‘bar’ hanging from the screen’s underside, so all of this TV’s sound depends on speakers built into its sides and rear – a fact that immediately makes the set’s sound feel less direct and impactful. Bass sounded significantly more limited during our demo session, too.

Subtle effects were still presented quite cleanly, though, with a good balance , and we were impressed by how the sound seemed to exist right across the screen area, rather than only emerging from its edges and leaving a ‘gap’ where the pictures are.

There was none of that sense of an empty audio space between the left and right edges that you can get with other big-screen TVs.

Early verdict

While the RM9L we hung out with during CES wasn’t quite as all-round explosively impressive as TCL’s flagship X11L, it still delivered a premium performance, especially with relatively pure colours, that’s got us salivating for the finished product.

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