There are some limitations here that you cannot get past. The color temperature changes, for instance, so if you wanted the brighter average picture level but the more accurate white balance and color rendering, you’d have to do a lot of work to get it. The issue I have with that is that you give up on some of the other accuracy-focused settings found in Dark HDR when you move to the normal HDR setting. In the “normal HDR” mode, each of these selections is brighter than the same settings within the “Dark HDR” mode, which indicates we’re dealing with a sliding scale. Not only that, but within the Dark HDR picture mode, it appears that there are limits on just how bright it will go. So, while it’s nice to have this quick way to just brighten things up, maybe depending on whether you’re watching in the dark, or on a gloomy day, or a really bright day, this kind of goes against the idea of having backlight control at all. The TCL was set to Dark HDR, but within this, there are also options for Darker, Dark, Normal, Bright, and Brighter. The Hisense picture preset was set at Filmmaker mode, though I got similar results with HDR Theater mode. I ran a comparison of HDR content simultaneously on both TVs using their built-in YouTube app. Figuring that out has taken a lot of my time. But for now, if we accept that the Hisense U8H is a bright TV, we naturally want to find out how the TCL 6-Series compares. Whether that’s good for you is something I’ll get to below. And it’s not just the peak brightness for HDR highlights that’s brighter - it’s bright all the time. It likely won’t come as a surprise that the Hisense U8H is, on balance, a brighter TV.

But for a TV like the R655 6-Series or even some of TCL’s higher-performance TVs, that limited access causes a few concerns for me and for anyone else who really wants to get the best out of their TV. In fact, I think it’s a bonus because it helps keep things simple for folks who want simple.

For a Roku TV like the TCL 5-Series or 4-Series, or even some of the lower-end TVs like Hisense’s Roku TVs, that’s not a problem at all.

Tcl 6 series rtings