Hands on: TCL X11L (85X11L) review

TCL’s flagship TV for 2026, the X11L, is a real tale of the unexpected.

For starters, unlike the top tier of TCL’s 2025 range, it looks as though UK buyers will actually be able to buy the X11L if they fancy it.

It also delivers a technical surprise, though, in that it's sticking with Quantum Dot technology rather than boarding the RGB Mini LED / Micro RGB bandwagon being so enthusiastically embraced by most other TV brands this year.

This isn’t to say that TCL isn’t doing RGB Mini LED at all in 2026 – the brand actually has more than one RGB Mini LED TV range waiting in the wings – but it’s definitely a twist to find ‘QLED’ still sitting at the top of TCL’s new TV pile.

Of course, TCL has long leaned into Quantum Dots more than most, from small touches such as the QD LED badges it incorporates into many of its TV designs, to the epic quantities of QLED panels it produces from its own factories.

Its extensive QLED history, though, is not the only reason TCL has decided that QDs still reign supreme versus RGB Mini LED. The brand also believes that QLED TVs can still be the best performers.

Especially when, as with the X11L, they’re packing TCL’s new Super QLED technology…

Price

Unusually, TCL actually had the X11L ready to buy in the US on the same day it was announced at CES 2026, with prices set at $7000 for the 75-inch screen, $8000 for the 85-inch version, and $10,000 for the 98-inch model.

UK pricing has yet to be confirmed, however.

Design

It's the 85-inch version of the X11L that we were able to spend time with for this hands-on, and the first thing that struck us about it was how slim it is.

Its monolithic shape is just two centimetres deep – substantially slimmer than the bodywork of TCL’s most premium RGB Mini LED TV, the RM9L (hands-on coming soon).

This is actually one reason why TCL favours its Super QLED screens over RGB Mini LED for flagship status, as the latter technology needs more depth in order to minimise the potential for its different red, green and blue LEDs to bleed into each other. We’ll get into this in a bit more detail later.

The slender side panels of the X11L have a premium-looking dark metallic finish, while the bezel around the screen, as you sit looking straight at it, is remarkably slim considering the screen sizes in question.

Build quality appears excellent too, and the design is elevated by a couple of unusual touches: a logo embossed down the screen’s right side saying 'Premium SQD-MiniLED', and the unmissable addition of a full-width integrated ‘soundbar’ that adds two to three inches of grilled elegance to the screen’s height.

This speaker enclosure sports a Bang & Olufsen logo, confirming that it’s the latest result of the TV sound design relationship TCL established with the premium Danish audio brand in 2025.

The X11L’s slim, monolithic shaping makes it ideally suited for wall mounting, but it can also be placed on a pair of large, metal-finished feet if you prefer.

Features

TCL’s new Super QLED TVs do not, sadly, wear capes or have laser eyes. They do, though, feature two significant new hardware innovations that TCL claims take QLED TVs to a whole new level.

First, their QD layers feature a new generation of Quantum Dots developed using new, more excitable (which in TV speak means responsive and efficient) crystal substances.

Second, TCL’s SQD MiniLED TVs use a new super high ‘Ultra’ colour filter.

Put together, TCL says these new innovations deliver five key claimed advantages: a wider colour gamut (TCL claims that the X11L can cover 100% of the world’s most extreme BT2020 colour gamut); the potential to use more local dimming zones than RGB MiniLED screens can due to the relative compactness of Super QLED’s single blue or white (rather than RGB) LED light source; enhanced brightness; slimmer designs than you get with TCL’s current RGB Mini LED technology; and, last but not least, immunity to the colour crosstalk issues it seems that RGB Mini LED displays can suffering with.

This crosstalk issue – which we’ll be on the look out for in our hands-on with TCL’s most premium RGB Mini LED model, the RM9L – is caused by the way the red, green and blue colours emitted by the three LEDs in an RGB Mini LED lighting ‘zone’ can end up scattering and spilling across one another, causing areas of coloured clouding.

For instance, if the light from a red LED crosses over into an area that already contains light from a neighbouring green LED, then you could see brown clouding as the two stray colours mix.

Such crosstalk troubles can apparently be reduced by increasing the RGB LED ‘throw distance’ (i.e. making the TVs thicker), but it isn't an issue for SQD Mini LED TVs in the first place, hence the potential for slimmer designs.

The higher brightness TCL claims for SQD Mini LED screens vs RGB Mini LED is explained by the fact that for the vast majority of the time, not all of the red, green and blue LED chips involved in an RGB Mini LED array will be fully activated at the same time.

For instance, with a relatively pure green hue, the red and blue LEDs will be pretty much dormant. This results in lower overall screen brightness, at least with content that uses fairly stark and pure colours, compared with the SQD Mini LED approach, where every LED ‘chip’ is effectively always fully illuminated by the white or blue LED.

Using a single LED to light each picture zone rather than an RGB LED trio is also the reason, according to TCL, that it’s possible to fit more separately controlled local dimming zones into an SQD Mini LED screen than it is with a same-sized RGB MiniLED screen, resulting in potentially finer light control.

Putting some numbers on all of this, TCL claims that the X11L can hit a huge peak brightness of 10,000 nits, and that it features 20,736 dimming zones – the highest such figure we’ve seen from a consumer TV. Even Hisense’s 116UX RGB Mini LED debutante had 'only' 3584 dimming zones.

Other key features confirmed for the X11L so far include a new Pro edition of TCL’s AiPQ processor, designed to ensure that even today’s relatively limited content can potentially make use of the full range of the TV’s capabilities; native 4K/144Hz gaming support that can be switched to HD/288Hz support via TCL’s Game Accelerator feature; Google TV smarts; support for both of the premium Dolby Vision IQ and HDR10+ HDR formats; support for the IMAX Enhanced format that most Marvel movies are available in on Disney Plus; and support for Dolby Atmos sound.

Picture quality

It took no time at all during our hands-on with the X11L before we started noticing its pretty remarkable picture quality charms.

Its killer combination of 10,000 claimed nits of brightness and more than 20,000 dimming zones delivered a truly spectacular contrast performance, for starters, where inky blacks share the screen with bright highlights that erupt off the screen with an intensity that its RM9L RGB Mini LED stablemate just couldn’t match.

In fact, we can’t recall seeing an equivalent level of brightness from any other screen, bar some of the crazily expensive Micro LED displays that pop up at technology shows every year. Not even the uber-expensive Hisense 116UX gets beyond 8500 nits.

It wasn't just the X11L’s raw brightness that impressed, though. The way it was able to retain most if not all of that peak brightness even when a bright highlight appeared against a near-black backdrop (something that TCL boldly allowed to happen a lot in its X11L demo footage) was incredible to behold – especially as it was achieved while throwing up remarkably little sign of the sort of haloing, blooming or zone ‘flickering’ issues that we’d normally expect to see with a local dimming TV delivering contrast even a fraction as intense as that of the X11L.

The brightness also held up outstandingly well with HDR images that filled the whole screen with bright content, providing a stark reminder of this advantage that LED currently retains over even the latest and brightest OLED screens.

The incredible contrast also held up remarkably well even when looking at the X11L from a wide viewing angle – though there was some mild colour shift from wide angles, and backlight haloing/blooming became a bit more noticeable.

In all of the above image areas, the X11L outperformed the RM9L screen next to it. The only area where the RM9L consistently outperformed (kind of) the X11L was with very pure colours.

Rich red flowers or bright green meadows, for instance, enjoyed purer saturations on the RM9L. A simple side effect, we guess, of the X11L having to mix QD colour filters with a single-colour LED backlight, rather than colours being crafted from pure red, green and blue LEDs as happens with the RM9L’s RGB Mini LED lighting system.

It certainly seemed to us, though, that as predicted earlier, the RM9L’s greater single-colour purity comes at the expense of some brightness versus the X11L.

Perhaps because of its extra dimming zones and brightness the X11L’s pictures also looked slightly sharper and more detailed than those of the RM9L.

Sound quality

The full-width integrated B&O ’soundbar’ attached below the X11L's screen carries left, centre and right channels, while two more speakers in the chassis fire sideways to left and right, and a pair of large, gold-finished rear-mounted woofers provide low frequencies.

The sound produced by all these speakers really did sound excellent in the admittedly highly imperfect surroundings of CES. The soundstage sounded really detailed, but also had a lovely, rounded, harshness-free tone, even at high volumes.

The way the sound was propelled towards us from the forward-facing integrated soundbar created a much more immediate and impactful sound, too, than anything we heard from TCL’s 2025 B&O-toting TVs, while the new woofers deliver seemingly more low-frequency heft than those of any 2025 TCL model, too.

If you really want to take the bass to properly cinematic levels, though, you can add TCL’s new Z100-SW wireless subwoofer.

In the demo session, this extended both the impact and depth of the bass substantially, but did so impressively seamlessly, enjoying a good tonal match with the TV’s integrated sound system and avoiding any obvious frequency response ‘gap’.

Early Verdict

We’re going to need to spend much more time with a finished, production sample of the X11L and our own favourite real world content before we can deliver a final judgment on TCL’s surprising new flagship screen. But the signs so far are looking auspicious to say the least.

MORE:

Check out all of the news from CES 2026

Here are the best TVs you can buy right now

Read our first impressions of Samsung's new flagship OLED in our Samsung S95H hands-on