The insane 115-inch TV that we smuggled out of China and into my theater room is fully set up. And I've been watching movies, I've been playing games, I've been just basking in its 5,000 nits of peak brightness. But, I've also been working. No one has ever seen this thing outside of China, and there is absolutely nothing quite like it on the market. The labs team was understandably skeptical. If your marketing leads with big, surely that means it comes with some trade-offs that you're not talking about. But the results are in, and there is no denying that the X11G Max's otherworldly size gives it some superpowers, even if it also gives it some peculiar drawbacks that we do have to acknowledge. After we acknowledge our sponsor. MotionGrey. If one of your New Year's resolutions is having better posture, MotionGrey can help. Their affordable sit-to-stand desks come in a variety of configurations, and their ergo chairs are simplistic, yet highly adjustable. Check them out at the link below and use offer code LINUS for 10% off your purchase. I can't tell you guys how excited I was to do this video, because it's not very often these days that I get to review a product that I have never experienced before and that has no competition. And, okay, wait, wait, wait, Linus, I can practically hear you guys saying, surely you have watched TV, and of course it has competition. And you guys are right, okay? Sitting closer is competition. A projector is competition, and Samsung's The Wall is obviously competition. But all of those things are also not competition. Compared to a projector, for instance, the difference in contrast and brightness and color volume is almost literally night and day. I mean, I have a light-controlled room, but here's the thing, I don't need it anymore at all. And compared to sitting closer, guys, nothing I have ever experienced matches the sheer immersiveness of a screen this size. Because it's not just the size relative to your field of view. The light it throws out into a room when there's a full-screen flash or explosion goes off. I mean, even my wife Yvonne, who watches almost exclusively in portrait mode on her phone, was like, whoa, that's crazy. And the sitting close strat, well, that might work for you, but it'll never work for your friends who are in the second row. As for The Wall, well, I mean, guys, this is a really expensive product, but The Wall is 20 times the price. 20 times! That's kind of like saying this competes with this. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's take a tour. The mounting system, honestly, is kind of scary. You get two floppy disk-sized metal plates that attach with a single bolt each to the back of the TV. Then you just hang the whole thing on another set of plates that screw into the wall. I would say the only highlight of the install experience was finally getting my Valencia theater seating back. These guys sent these chairs ages ago, but I don't think I've ever appreciated them more than after I was stuck with that inflatable couch from the All-Wish Home Theater video for two months. The spec we were most skeptical of the first time around was the claimed 20,000-plus dimming zones. I mean, it just sounded preposterous when you consider that that's an order of magnitude greater than heavy hitters like Apple's Liquid Retina XDR display. But by displaying a thin white line across the screen, we were able to painstakingly count the dimming zones. And as they illuminated, sure enough, 180 rows by 190 columns for a grand total of 20,520, which I guess explains the plus in the spec. Now, even at these size, just to put that number in context, guys, each of those dimming zones is just about a half an inch by a half inch, which is pretty normal on a monitor. But guys, I'm not sitting arm's length from this thing. I'm sitting way back from it. And from that kind of distance, the dimming zones disappear, and the effect is fantastic. It's still not an OLED, but from the right spot, more on that later, Brandon from the lab described its contrast as OLED-like, which is truly high praise. And I can totally see what he means. The black levels are really low, so the letterboxing glow is far less noticeable than the LCDs of yesteryear and my laser projector. And while you're still going to see a glow around white text on a black background, that is largely just from the veiling glare in the human eye. And guys, everything I just said, that's what the local dimming set to high, which is where I'm keeping it, surprisingly, for two reasons. One, this screen does not look nearly as good with the local dimming turned off. Look at this side-by-side. Do you see all that? That is not smoke or a fog machine. That is just poor uniformity, which is one of VA technology's greatest weaknesses, an Achilles heel that is exacerbated by this screen's bigness. It's a huge yikes. Or at least it would be if fixing it wasn't this easy. Reason number two, once this thing is dialed in, everything looks incredible on it. Even SDR content pops off of the screen in a way that I've just never experienced before. We reached 850 nits of brightness in a full-screen window with local dimming off. For context, guys, even aside from the gimmick of it being huge, Ratings has only tested two TVs ever that can do that. And then s*** got real. We turned local dimming to high and measured anywhere from 850 to 5,000 nits in SDR with deep blacks and specular highlights that shine at that brightness. Combined with the excellent upscaling in NVIDIA's Shield, which I have connected to this thing, you can watch older 1080p non-HDR Blu-rays and, I mean, even our camera guys. Andy, did you think that was HDR? That's crazy! Absolutely crazy! And that's before we even turn on HDR content. This monster supports both Dolby Vision and HDR10+, which is really nice because at this kind of price, why not both? What is the big TV manufacturer's excuse? And when you're in HDR, it reaches levels where you actually get close to, like, squinting when there's a big enough explosion. And guys, I don't mean that in a bad, like, oh, it's so unpleasant way. I mean that, like, I'm in the room. I'm here with the characters. Like, oh, whoa! I mean it like that. It's not just beyond anything I've ever experienced at home. It is beyond what you can experience in a movie theater with a projector. I mean, that's the first thing Andrew said. He's like, wow, I would never go to the theater again. And it's not just a one-trick pony because this TV uses quantum dots. The color performance is as great as we've come to expect, too. It's downright awesome in HDR. And SDR is good, even though it does have imperfect gamma tracking, leading to tones and shades being a bit brighter than they probably should be across the board. And that's something that's exacerbated by turning local dimming on. We would still recommend keeping it on because of the dirty screen effect I talked about before. But if you're optimizing for color accuracy and SDR, you may want to set it to low. All of which is to say, this thing is no longer a business expense. Aside from the logistical challenges of taking it back to the office and storing it, I completely forgot that it was five inches smaller than the projector screen that I had before the second I turned it on. And I just don't think there's any going back. Which doesn't mean that it doesn't have drawbacks. Both this specific TV and the whole concept of TVs this large. This one was never made for the North American market. And it's quite Chinese. You can, of course, set the language to English, which thankfully applies to the decently deep settings menu. And I'm running it with my Nvidia Shield anyway. But before it will work at all, even turn on, the TV requires a Chinese phone number to register it. And that native dashboard forever remains Chinese. But there is a setting to boot into your last used input. And even if I do find myself on the native dashboard, I can usually navigate it with my Shield remote via HDMI CEC. So I never have to use the remote that came with the TV. And speaking of the remote that came with the TV, I honestly didn't spend much time with it. Kind of like the included speakers. Like guys, if you're spending this kind of money, what are you doing using the factory remote and speakers? But it's fine. It's tactile, even if it's sort of uninspiringly plastic and lacks backlighting. Definitely feels like a quality mismatch compared to the display it controls. Speaking of controls, gaming. It's kind of great. Assuming you have a supported source, it does 144 Hertz variable refresh rate at 4K with a very competitive game mode that we measured at just 5.2 milliseconds. So between the screen that's big enough to give every split screen player their own 55 inch TV and the amazing performance of this panel, I gotta say, I just love gaming on this thing. But the issue is the pixel response times. At first boot, you're looking at 21 milliseconds, which noticeably affected my aim in first person shooters. And even once it's warmed up, which reduces the viscosity of the liquid, which is crazy, it's still in the 15 millisecond range. To be clear, guys, if I wasn't spoiled by OLED and laser projection, I probably wouldn't mind. And you can play anything at a non-professional level, especially anything with a controller that's not a pixel perfect platformer. But if gaming is your number one priority, you would be far better off picking up one of these and then 300 or so of our excellent high performance LTT store deskpads. lttstore.com Another drawback of this guy, as I alluded to before, is the viewing angles. That's something that VA panels are already known to struggle with, where being off axis can make the picture appear noticeably less uniform. Look closely at how this orange glow and the contrast from the buildings gets duller toward the edges of the screen. Making matters worse, the halos around local dimming zones also become more prominent, which if you remember, is a really important feature of this TV to keep on. Now, usually with a regular size TV, you're only going to be that far off axis if you're the last born child and everyone else gets the alpha couch. But with this thing, you can be front and center and still be off axis to the edges of the screen because you're just so close. The good news is that in practice, anywhere beyond two meters away is outside of the danger zone. And even when I was closer, I was so busy being immersed in my content that I didn't really notice anyway. TCL actually did try to improve this situation by adding a viewing angle improving layer in the display stack. But unfortunately, the reason that we know this is because it introduces a rainbow artifact when it is directly lit, like from the pot lights that I have in the room here. It's only visible in some scenes. And I mean, I intend to keep the lights off during movie time anyway. But if you were to install this in your living room that has floor to ceiling windows, it could get annoying. Also annoying is that TCL has baked in dynamic tone mapping that you cannot turn off in HDR10 mode. This can be a benefit. JVC's projectors, for example, stand out from the rest for their excellent implementation of exactly this feature. But they're using it as a crutch to compensate for projectors limited peak luminance. This TV doesn't need that. It's so color accurate and so bright that it can produce a color volume that is really similar to the 4000 nit reference monitors that are used to master the content in the first place. To explain this a bit further, basic HDR10 signals only provide metadata that gives you the highest and lowest brightness values across an entire film. So on a scene by scene basis, you might be leaving a lot of the performance of that display on the table. Dynamic tone mapping does this frame by frame, in theory, doing a better job of consistently lighting the content. The problem is that the implementation gives the content a bit of a best buy effect as opposed to strictly conveying the artist's intent. Now, obviously, I spent half of this video frothing out the mouth about the picture quality of this thing, so it's not egregious. But come on, guys, at this price, why not give the purists the option of turning dynamic tone mapping off? Maybe at least in expert mode? The good thing is it does turn itself off when you're watching in Dolby Vision or in HDR10+, which handle this scene by scene metadata on their own. My last big downer is that heartbreakingly, I just found out this morning, I have a dead pixel. I can't see it all the time, but I know it's there. And because TCL only warranties this TV inside of China when it's installed by an authorized solutions provider, there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. Obviously, this is a first world problem, but it illustrates the risks and the challenges associated with niche products in general, and especially one like this. Think about it. Even if I did have coverage, would I want to go through the rigmarole of replacing this thing? TVs this size are going to need to fundamentally change before you're gonna be able to pick one up at the local Best Buy and drive it home. It doesn't fit in a pickup truck, and you need two, maybe three strong people to maneuver it around corners and stairwells and get it mounted to the wall. So unless future generations just roll up and then kind of wallpaper on, this is always gonna be a premium high touch product. Even a high-end projector setup with ceiling mounting and in-wall wiring and attention screen and all the fixings can be done by one rogue enthusiast. It will take more time, but it can be done, and that's a way to help you stretch your budget. With this, no such luck. And speaking of the price, we should talk about that. It's $11,000 US dollars. That is frankly a stupid amount of money to spend on a TV, especially when you consider the way that TV sizes only go this way and TV prices only go this way. But is it a bad deal? To answer that, we've got to do some comparisons. In 2019, LG's 77-inch C9 OLED was $4,500 US dollars. By comparison, their signature series 88-inch Z9 was $30,000 US dollars. That is almost six times more dollars per diagonal inch, a pretty hefty premium for their largest screen size. Meanwhile, in LCD land, an 85-inch Samsung Q80C is $2,000, while the 98-inch one is $8,000. That's over three times more dollars per inch. And there's a very real justification for this premium on top size models. For one thing, all TVs are cut from a larger sheet of what's called mother glass. So in order to justify producing one monster like this one, TCL has to offset the opportunity cost of making many smaller TVs out of that glass instead. Furthermore, when you're chopping mother glass into smaller panels, you can cut around any defects or imperfections. That helps reduce waste, which helps reduce the price. With this thing, you need one big, completely flawless piece. Anything else is garbage. Or if there is a flaw, you could ship it to the dumb guilo who can't do anything about it, I guess. The other major comparison point is going to be projectors. You can get something really nice for half the price of this thing. The Epson LS12000, which I've been using, won Projector Central's Editor's Choice Award and costs $5,000. But then you're on the hook for another grand or two for a screen, a bunch of money and time treating your room, and an experience that is just plain full of compromise. The contrast is always going to suck by comparison. You can never perfectly align a projector. Just get close enough that it doesn't bother you. And unless you blow a hundred grand on a Christie or something with their fiber optic extension thing, you can never get rid of the fan noise. This one, completely silent. Doing the math on the TCL, then. It comes in much higher than the Samsung 98-inch at about $95 per diagonal inch. There's no denying it's really high. But considering that it is alone in this size class and that the price includes white glove delivery and installation in China, I don't think they're that off base. And like, come on, guys. If we're talking about dumb rich people s***, you know, like you're the kind of person who spends thousands of dollars on shoes or hats. This is kind of the bang for the buck option, right? And this is kind of a segue to our sponsor. Step into 2024 with confidence, thanks to Manscaped and their Performance Package 5.0 Ultra. It includes their Lawn Mower 5.0 Ultra Groin and Body Hair Trimmer, so you can turn that overgrown forest into a serene garden. Also included is the Weed Whacker 2.0 Electric Nose Hair Trimmer. We're getting older. You got to keep that in check so it doesn't look like some eldritch horror is trying to escape from up there, you know. 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