TCL - 85" Class S55LR Series 4K UHD HDR LED Smart TV with Roku TV (2026)

Unpacking - Important - Grab a friend and prepare to have help when working with a TV this large ! The TV itself was packed into molded foam with an inner wrap. We carefully opened the box to determine the "screen side" to install the stand prior to completely unboxing. Overall installation only took a few minutes, the television is not that heavy less the packaging material. Roku TV: Connected to wifi, Signed in, set it up and few updates later everything was ready to use. The menus are easy to navigate and there is a ton of content. If you are using something else, it's easy to switch inputs. Picture Quality: It's excellent given the price tier of this television. This is considered a "budget" big screen but the lack of individual lighting zones make for a not so great watching experience in a pitch black room. For watching the game, or gaming with a higher level of ambient light - the pure size of the screen makes up for the lack of deep blacks. The 120hz refresh rate and gaming work quite well - motion blur is present but minimal. Sound: It has speakers in it. Yes, It does. That is a subtle hint that an ideal pairing is an inexpensive soundbar. Who it's for: Family rooms, streaming households, sports fans, casual gamers, anyone who wants the biggest screen for the least money and doesn't care about theater-grade contrast. An 85 inch already looks big at the store, if you have yet to have one in your house - IT'S HUGE ! Who should spend more: Dark-room movie watchers, HDR purists, competitive gamers who need pristine motion clarity. For those, a Mini-LED at a few hundred dollars more may be a better option. Overall - It's an excellent value for a MASSIVE screen !

I didn't know what I was missing until I upgraded to this TV. Our daughter was in need of a newer TV so we gave her our existing 65 inch and got this 85 inch for ourselves because, well, why not right. . The picture is so much more clear and bright than the old one which was also a TCL, however slightly older.The difference in picture quality from just a few years ago is truly exponential.Installation was an absolute breeze and from unboxing to the time it was hung on the wall & hooked up to my apple tv 4k was less than 30 minutes total. This is also our first Google TV (the old one was ROKU) which I guess has some perks since we use Google with our home automation but I have not looked into this quite yet. Remote worked as soon as you put batteries in and no set up issues to deal with. Sound is your typical good enough if you can not afford an audio system. I wish they would just stop including speakers in the tv's & use that money on better video components because no one uses them these days.Overall I would recommend this TV.

This 85" TLC is my largest flat panel TV I have. For years I've had multiple projectors in my family room (which is 32' x 16') My seating area is 16' from my drop down screen. I decided I wanted to compare this 85" TLC to my projector. My setup has always allowed two display devices so setting up the TLC with my surround sound system was pretty easy. This 85" S55LR does not have local dimming so comparing it to a projector (which cannot have local dimming) should be a fair comparison. I have Roku boxes connected to 4 of my TV's so I'm very familiar with their user interface. I did update the Roku app on my iPhone so my phone can now control all 5 devices. I went through the TLC setup and registration, installing/updating the Roku TV app on the TV.  Setting up the TV with all my streaming services and DirecTV took nearly an hour. I first started a std HD DirecTV baseball game, I attempted to get the color and brightness settings of the TV and my projector to be as similar as possible.  The TLC does not have as many advanced setting as my projector. I set the TLC to it's darkest mode which to me presented blacks and darks areas more realistically. The has four times the number of options.  It allowed me to "tune in" the two pictures to be pretty similar. No matter what I did the TLC's greens were a little brighter than the projector.  The blacks on the TLC were also a little brighter.  Looking at a pure white screen the TLC was slightly whiter but more even than the projector especially in the corners. With solid colors (test pattern) the TLC was 100% consistent.  Both of them displayed red, blue very evenly. Yellows were a different tone but both very even, the TLC was a tad brighter. The projectors blacks were a perfect inky black, the TLCs were brighter maybe offering more shades of black (just not as deep). But onto live TV. A top over bottom (see image) comparison of the two showed the TLC had some additional detail, both had some blurring with very fast motion. The TLC has what they call Motion Rate 240 with MEMC, the projector has a motion flow feature, both claimed to improve full motion clarity. Both struggled with clarity of Baseball's fast action. The resolution of the fine details, the blades of grass were clearer and the lines on the field and numbers on uniforms were sharper. The grass on the projectors image seemed a more natural color.  The more I watched for differences, the more the TLC revealed finer details. Now on to a UHD 4K movie (Blu-ray) with both devices sharing the same signal.  First up: Top Gun Maverick.  I again attempted to get the colors as close to the same, by adjusting the two devices during the Menu Loop; they were close, the TLC still had a slightly brighter overall display; blacks and bright areas were close with the projector being slightly darker.  Both were very detailed in the picture quality, a credit to what UHD 4K can deliver.  After more critical watching of a few scenes a couple of times, it became clear that the TLC struggled with the darkest areas, details were missing from within the shadows. With fast paced full motion scenes the TLC captured the edges more crisply, where the projector seemed to smoothed out some of the details, the edges were not as fine.   I did another comparison watching Dante's Peak and except for very dark scenes I overall preferred the TLC with it's slightly brighter picture (in a fairly dark room). I also compared the sound from the TLC to my home theater, which was not a fair comparison. The TLCs sound when below 15 sounds acceptable. Over 20 (21-99) it get tinny and noisy. Just watching a ball game below 20 is fine for background noise. The TLC can almost fill a big room, but not with high quality sound The down firing stereo speakers are obviously under powered and they distort as the volume level increases. In short get a sound bar or use a good quality surround sound like I do (connected using eARC). The built in Roku for streaming is excellent. But the only remote is a TLC remote that looks just like every Roku remote (minimalist) except that there is no microphone button for voice control. It's fine until you add something with lots of channels (like DirecTV) which then forces you to scroll through pages and pages of channel selections, with no means of keying in a channel number (that I could find). The TLC integrates well with Apple Home, Apple Airplay, Google Home and Alexa.  Voice commands from all worked (as did the Roku voice commands when I swapped out the provided TLC remote for a newer backlit Roku that I happened to have on hand). The installed Roku supports voice commands but the provided remote has a sleep button where the mic button should be (they maybe saved a dollar - Boo). I did run into situations where more than one service tried to respond. I ended up using only Google Home and Roku Voice. With a wide variety of streaming services Roku presents a fairly unified menu across the different services/apps. I looked at my Fandango support and all formats including UHD worked fine, I tested both with a 5G wireless connection and a Ethernet connection both streamed without any problems. So, for now, I can use either my projector or the TLC 85", the difference in screen size is barely noticeable. There are times when I prefer the screen up higher, and times where I like it low (TV sitting on the floor, me on the couch). With both sharing the home theater system it's hard to choose, I no doubt prefer the TLC when the room is very bright (which is unusual). BTW all of my TV's and projectors have their own sound bars or full blown theater systems, so thinking the TLC's sound is weak is not surprising (few flat panel TVs have good enough sound to satisfy me).

The TCL S55LR series is a wallet friendly Roku based 4K TV lineup. This is the largest in the lineup at 85”. I am a fan of the Roku based systems, and have been a Roku streaming stick/box user for quite awhile. This is our 3rd 4K TCL Roku TV, and it has been a solid ownership experience so far. The I/O panel features (3) HDMI ports, Ethernet LAN, S/PDIF port, USB 2.0, and a Coax input. 1 HDMI port supports eARC, and I believe that is the only HDMI 2.1 port available. The other 2 ports are likely HDMI 2.0. The TV comes with the option to use the 2 included stand legs or wall mount with e VESA 300x600 capable mount. The TV itself displays at a native 3840x2160@60Hz (4K60). The TV has TCL’s Game Accelerator 120 software which allows the panel to display at 120Hz. It does this by reducing the resolution – I believe it drops it to 1440p. This is a gaming specific feature. The other gaming feature is Auto Game Mode (ALLM), which reduces input lag. In practice this seems to work well. The panel also supports HDR10+, HDR10, and HLG. It does not support Dolby Vision, but HDR10+ does come close to matching it. Regardless, that is a decent level of HDR support for a budget friendly panel option. The initial unboxing was pretty smooth – I almost couldn’t get the box off because my basement ceiling is a little lower. The TV was packed in nicely. I planned to wall mount, so I left the TV in the bottom packaging while I attached the rear support mounts. The manual says you can lay the TV face down on a table or floor (with a padded blanket underneath) to do this step, but I didn’t have any issue doing it when it was upright. The VESA mounting patten is located in the bottom 1/3 of the TV, so definitely take some extra time and thought when you do your measurements to set the height of your panel. Also, since the mounting pattern is not centered the top of the TV will “lever” the wall mount. I would make sure to use a sturdily built mount even though this TV is not overly heavy for its size. Build quality of the panel is pretty good. The screen has a some reflectivity when the display is off. The connections in the back are somewhat difficult to get to because I used a low-profile mount. Overall it looks pretty good up on the wall and certainly looks large. It is replacing a 92” projector screen, so it’s a little smaller than we are used to but still plenty big enough. The backlight isn’t perfectly uniform and has some hot/bright spots. These are noticeable in very dark scenes and with a black screen being displayed. There is some backlight bleed around the edges, and some uniformity issues. With content playing it is pretty difficult to pick this out, and is only noticeable during very dark scenes where contrast is important. The TV runs Roku OS, which is my favorite smart TV platform. I have been a user for 10 years, so I tend to gravitate towards displays using their platform. I am already very familiar with their setup, and I really like how well they support the various streaming platforms. During setup of the TV I plugged in my Roku credentials and I had my streaming accounts ready to go. Its one of the fastest setups I have gone through, and it is often a selling point for me. I run my audio and any additional connections through my AV receiver. I plugged into the eARC enabled HDMI port and ran that to my AVR. My Switch and Xbox stayed attached to the AVR. I changed the audio settings to use the eARC connection instead of the onboard speakers. The onboard speakers aren’t too bad, and they are no better or worse than any flat panel speaker setup. I have an existing surround sound system, so I really never intended to use the onboard speakers. I know 3 onboard HDMI ports is limiting for some folks, and without my AVR I would have my connections maxed out. Gaming on the panel has been pretty good. Our projector had a considerable amount of input lag, which made it impossible to for the kids to play Smash Bros or other fast paced games. Switching over to this panel has definitely made the kids happier. I don’t have a gaming system that supports 120Hz output to test out the Game Accelerator 120 mode, but my Xbox One X has VRR support. I didn’t really notice a difference with that enabled – honestly I think this would benefit a PC more than console. As far as gaming performance the screen looked pretty good for the vast majority of scenes. Areas that get pretty dark and require a lot of contrast were the only weak points I came across. This was especially evident when the room was lit up. The panel gets plenty bright enough to handle a well-lit room, but those areas that need the contrast between very dark and medium dark didn’t have the definition that I would want. However, this was the only area I could nitpick. Overall, I was really happy with the screen performance. My kids were the most excited because family game night could include Smash Bros on the big screen finally. Playing content the panel looks great. I know its not a perfect panel, and I have certainly seen better out of Mini-LED and OLED panels. With that being said this is a great looking panel at a very reasonable price point. We have watched a dozen movies and TV shows across HBO, Netflix, Hulu, Youtube, and Amazon Prime. They all look great, and my family has loved it. The first watch I noticed the motion smoothing, and I jumped to turn that off. I can’t stand any motion smoothing on TV’s, but I know that’s not everyone. The motion smoothing looks decent on live sports, and is about the only area I can stand to see it. However, with movies and TV shows I don’t like it, so I disable it. To turn it off you have to start playing some content and go through the menu options by hitting the little gear button on the remote. Go to “Settings>Picture Settings>Customize Picture>Expert Settings>Action Smoothing” to set it to Off, Low, Medium, or High. The panel does a nice job with HDR content – the screen has plenty of brightness to make the image on screen really pop. I can’t say I really noticed much blooming or artifacting on the screen, and when it did show up it was during very fast motion or dark scenes with a bright object on-screen. The effect was minimal, and again to the point that it didn’t affect the watch experience. Overall, is a really solid 4K panel that absolutely gives decent bang for your buck. Its an 85” 4K panel for under $1K, and it really gives you a good amount of value. I feel confident in recommending this panel to others, and I will continue to be a fan of the Roku OS based TV’s. Honestly its worth a look, and it has a lot going for it.

Most TVs these days are made really well, and this 85‑inch monster from TCL is no different. It has all the creature comforts you’d expect: multiple HDMI ports (including one with eARC), crisp image quality with vibrant colors, good sound, built‑in streaming, and an easy‑to‑use remote. Watching anything on this screen is genuinely pleasant, and it makes me excited for movie nights. Gaming on it is also a blast. I’ll mention that Motion Rate and Game Accelerator don’t mean much to me personally, but gaming has been extremely satisfying and I haven’t noticed any significant lag. The TV is rated at 60Hz, which is more than enough for me; and honestly for most people. One thing I really love is the bezel‑less design. The top and sides have no bulky borders, so if you ever wanted a massive multi‑screen setup, you could line up four of these and make them look like one giant display. I don’t need that, but the temptation is very real (hehe). Overall, you can’t go wrong with this one, especially if you catch it on sale!