During my typical benchmark tests, I found some of the images and clips to be a bit lifeless with poor contrast. A smoky morning scene with horses looked washed out compared to the Frame Pro showing the same images. Skin tones were also too flat in almost every test clip.
I also watched the twisty time travel movie Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice, which looked about as muddy as Sisu. Initially, streaming over Hulu from my iPad over Apple AirPlay, the stream kept stuttering and pausing. I’m on a 600-Mbps fiber connection and a mesh network, so it wasn’t my signal. After pausing the stream myself for a few minutes, it finally worked. An early scene in a house confirmed to me that the contrast is a problem: I could barely make out faces. I also watched a trailer for Harry Potter that’s coming on HBO and it lacked vibrancy.
Passing the Crimson Desert Test
Photograph: John Brandon
One redeeming quality with the NXTVISION has to do with video games. I’m obsessed with the game Crimson Desert right now, along with millions of other people. The game looked bright and colorful on the TCL NXTVISION thanks to Game Master mode. During gameplay, you can pop up a menu on the TV that helps you automatically optimize color quality and improves lag. Suddenly, I felt like I was using an OLED that costs north of $2,000. The NXTVISION supports a 144-Hz refresh rate, matching the Frame Pro for PC gamers.
Why the noticeable difference? It has everything to do with the high-end computer I connected using HDMI. I used an Acer Nitro 60, and with the Game Master mode, the 144-Hz refresh rate, and the high-resolution 4K quality of the game, the mountain vistas looked as good (if not better than) they did using the same type of connection on the Frame Pro.
Still, my final verdict is not exactly positive. Since the NXTVISION is expected to go back to $1,800 in April, that means it’s actually more expensive than The Frame Pro at $1,600. The Hisense Class S7 CanvasTV is only $900 (not on sale) and has a matte finish, 144-Hz refresh rate for gaming, and provides over 1,000 art images. Given that the TCL NXTVISION doesn’t look that great for streaming, it’s hard to recommend when others offer so much better art.