Imagine this: you're at the store, and there it is, the biggest TV you've ever seen. You need to have it. Okay, that's fine. You'd rather go home and talk to your wife and kids anyway. But then you notice the open box section. Woo! Is that nearly 100 inches of TV goodness for just 1,500 bucks? Take my money! But on the way home, you start to wonder what sacrifices had to be made to get a TV this big, this cheap. I mean, surely it can't be 4K with support for HDR. Oh well, there's no way it supports high refresh rate gaming. Oh okay, does that too. I mean, but there's no way that it has a segue to our sponsor. Really, OD? Do their all-in-one business management suite lets you dump your mismatching apps and unify your processes. Check the link in the description for a free 15-day trial and start running your business the way it deserves to be run. If like us, you find an open box TCL 98 S550 GH, the first

complication is going to be getting it home. This particular open box model wasn't available for delivery, so we had to pick it up ourselves. And TVs this big, they're heavy. But hey, we got it here. Time to unbox it now. Adam and I are seasoned pros at unboxing giant TVs now, so I'm sure this is going to go very smoothly. Were you really cutting toward my face? Oh, seasoned pros, we don't have to worry about safety. We're so good at it. Hey, this one comes with legs. He mentions that because the 150 in one that I bought didn't. Okay, we managed to open it backwards, unfortunately. Uh, okay, all right. I guess we're looking at the I/O first. Here's something that's a little confusing to me though. What is it about a 100 in TV that allows it to be packaged relatively normally, but the 115in TV, which is know only this much bigger, had to come in a crate? I guess part of it is that the other one was

thick. She's a trunky boy. Yeah, this is like half of the weight, I think, of your TV, but it looks very similar in terms of the ID. Yeah, it even has the square pattern and then also Ultra base. Your TV can also work as a project mat. Like, are these 1 centimeter by 1 centimeter? It kind of looks like it. They're Clos. You could cut fabric patterns. I need to know now for the io. We got four HDMI ports. The top one is 4K 144 Hertz, which is weird 'cause didn't the front of the box say 120? Useless, useless. The squares are exactly 1 cm by 1 cm, but then the gaps in between just throw the whole thing out of whack. Well, I'm glad you figured out that mystery. Uh, yeah, so we're not really sure what the deal is with that. The input's 144 Herz, but the panel says native 120. Maybe it's overclockable. I guess we'll find out. As for the rest of it, it's pretty usual, but uh, it's weird.

to see a composite input on a modern TV still, so that's nice. One other unusual thing that I was about to point out before I realized that the back of the TV does this was the Vesa bolt pattern. It's 500 mm x 600 mm, so it's not square. And because this thing is heavy, what I would strongly recommend doing is something similar to what you guys saw me do in the Cleanest Living Room Makeover, where I put a big piece of wood, just like a flat piece of plywood, screw that into the studs, and screw the mount for the TV into that. Since we're not doing any of that today, we need to put the feet on. H H, how do we do that? They said refer to the manual smart first. Get a table that's bigger than the TV. Where the hell am I supposed to get that soft cushion surface? What is this? Look at this hypothetical soft cushioned thing that exists. Who has a giant cushioned table? Where are we going to put this? Here's

the thing this video really was inspired by us just stumbling across this open box TV at what seemed like an unbelievable price at the time. Um, so it doesn't have the little protective soft covering on the screen. We don't really have a way of laying it down. Down. I have an idea. I have. We put. There we go. Oh, she's heavy. Yeah, damn boy. Okay, now I've done this trick a lot of times where the air cushion that forms between the TV and the ground keeps it from hitting very hard. So we can just let her fall. I'm kidding. You were going to let me do it. I wanted to see what we. You were going to let do it. It would have been cool. Why would you do that content h all right. That's not so bad. I'm on. Oh my gosh, it fits. What was the TV back? What's the size of this? Is that a 65? I think that's a 65 in behind it. That was a 65 in TV. It's gone sitting on a pretty normal height.

couch. This belongs on r/TV too high. Do you think we also maybe were just like a little close to it? Sure, sure, still way too high. I didn't really think about it in the theater because it has theater seating in it. In fact, it has tiered theater seating, so you're really aiming for an optimal middle ground between the front and the rear row. But if I was putting something like this in my living room, I would only want it like 8 in above the floor, like 20 cm above the floor. Right out of the gate, Google TV is standard on all of TCL's TVs, at least here in North America. Mine doesn't, which will make it really easy for Adam to turn off the gross motion smoothing. Yeah, it's pretty bad right now. You know, every once in a while, I'll go, Yeah, maybe it's not that bad. When I haven't looked at it in a while, like I'll say to myself, Maybe I wouldn't notice if I went into someone's

house and they had motion smoothing on, and then I get a new TV, and I'm like, ew. When I first was testing this, even the boot logo had motion artifacts, and I was like, w, turn it off immediately. It was so bad. Whoa, is that a display? Hey, you have a monitor. I do, several in fact. I love the hoodie you're wearing today. It's so appropriate. It's huge. It's not very bright. It goes up to a max of 500 nits. We got 498. This ends up looking kind of flat overall though, which I'm surprised by because in the past, the larger the display, the greater the volume light it's throwing at you, even if the peak brightness isn't as high, and it can really help with immersion. I still think it looks pretty okay for how giant of a TV this is, and it's not OLED. How much this cost you? 1,500 bucks. Comparison is the thief of Joy. If we had another TV right here, I'd be like, 'Oh yeah, this thing sucks,' but like as is just walking into this room, that's a big

TV good. It's a big TV, and it's fun watching it. I mean, it sucks the Plex is loading right now, but uh, yeah. I don't think it has the fastest Wi-Fi card, but in the time since we bought that open box, the New Gen one has come out, so you can get a brand new one from TCL this size. That's 2 Grand. How much better is the brand new one? Is it brighter? It seems to be pretty darn close, but maybe better. They say surprisingly little about anything but their Flagship TVs, of course, because TCL is not like a big Flagship brand like Sony is. So, what are they going to advertise? Well, there's nothing wrong with buying TCL. They don't know that I had a TCL TV in my home for a long time. They're the TV of the NFL. Hey, like the colors look okay. I don't tell. I don't know if they're correct, but like it's colorful enough. They look pretty okay, and I think the measurements had it at a Delta e of about 4 and a

half what on average, yeah, just on in the movie mode. Uh, Vivid mode gets awful, and of course, yeah, yeah, don't turn on Vivid mode if you care about the artist's intent and everything, no matter what trends a little blue. Sure, sure, it's wild how much, like, how far that's come in just the last four years. If we were looking at this TV 5 years ago, 3 years ago, oh, it would be over $10,000, and it would be terrible. Yeah, now how many local dimming zones does it have? Did we count them? Does it have local dimming? 'Cause this, the contrast does not look great. It looks like a boat. In fact, I don't know if it has local dimming zones. Is this just a VA panel with pretty okay contrast? We counted one local dimming zone. The brightness is okay, but a part of why it doesn't pop off the screen is that to appreciate the peaks, you gotta have the valleys. Credit to their anti-glare, though. This is a very demanding environment for that with

studio lights all over the place. It's not bad. I've got like a pretty good string of lights in my field division, at least right there. But other than that, it's fine. And that's a pretty small, like when you consider how big the TV is, that's a pretty small portion of the TV. If one of my friends bought this thing for $5,100, and I walked into their house and this is their TV, I'd be like, That's a sick TV. One thing that is kind of disappointing but also understandable is the black uniformity. Yeah, like you can see patches of whiteness. Brutal. There's like a big triangle here. Yeah, you're only really going to notice that though in those big panning shots. Yeah, yeah. When we got it dark enough to test, it was very noticeable. Oh, super noticeable. There's a hot spot like right up the left side. Because you don't have local dimming, you're relying on that diffusion layer to absolutely perfectly spread out the light from the backlight though.

tcl's credit. They didn't go EDG lit, which ratings found recently does not really have any picture quality advantages but can lead to premature death. So even though it doesn't have local dimming zones, it is direct backlit, which I would say is a good thing. Yeah, I've seen that too when one part of the light fails and then it's just dim like that one part of the monitor TV. So I found a listing for an open boox S9 95b that's $1,600. That's a great deal. So this is a generation old but QD OLED panel, really nice TV. It's too bad it looks like the child of that one. Yeah, even with the not amazing ambient light rejection of QD OLED, it's a lot better, dude. Look, look where you can see both of them. I know, but remember QD OLED has that kind of Purple Haze compared to Wed. So this is even as good as this can look at M, dude, this Sun, the color volume, that's the thing is anything that has to

do with full array local dimming is just going to. It's going to lose the one that really stands out to me is the richness, yeah, of these tones here. Yeah, this has no saturation. This looks like I took some cheesecloth and I put it all over the front of the screen. I'm looking through a veil, and all the shadows have actual depth to them. Mhm, you don't lose anything in the image, whereas with this, it doesn't even get that dark. It's not crushing blacks or anything 'cause it's not even getting. Look at how much more realistic the sky looks. That looks like blue, looks real, especially with the leaves and stuff. Yeah, but big, big TV, big TV. Okay, but let's talk about gaming 'cause you've kind of left me waiting here. I got to say this doesn't feel that bad. No, it looks like it's 120 HZ. I don't even mean that. I just mean the latency. Yeah, how do we set it to 144 though? I don't, I

don't I don't know actually. I'm not going to lie. It's really confusing. Did they advertise it? Yeah, they call it game accelerator 240. I'm pretty sure it's just a backlight strobe. Oh, what do you mean 240? No, I'm talking about the 144 Hertz. Yeah, I don't know how they get that. Can you stop messing with it? So what do you think? Where am I supposed to go up here? What do you mean? Wow, dude, this level's scary. Scary. You know what, though? This feels great. Try it. Sorry, it's funny. That's fine. Nice, nice, nice, nice. You got needled. It was really nice up until when it wasn't nice. Yeah, it feels totally fine. Feels completely responsive. I could game whatever game you want to game on this TV, and it would feel okay. Way better than LCDs that came out in the early 2000s. Felt awful. I think overall, I think it's totally fine. Yeah, I guess I'm like, who's it? I guess

it's for old people and bars frat house. Yeah, actually, if you walked into the frat house, if they can spring for 1,500 bucks for frat house, it's still a bit much. You and 15 of your friends pitching a hundred bucks, right? You bring this bad boy in, play Smash on it, eight-player smash, yeah, no problem at all. I have no idea what the long-term quality of it is going to be like. Obviously, this is like not by any means a bad TV, no, no. And like I can, I would recommend it to somebody if they were in the market for a really big TV and had a very low budget, um, that was their goal, yes, yeah, big TV cheap. It's mind-boggling, and we'll link to it in the description and everything like that, uh, as well as some other good TVs that you can check out if you don't have the space for 98 in. Whoa, okay, I just found something that's cheaper than this. What? And bigger. Cheaper and bigger. That's right, that's right. Wait, we're

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you like this video. Why not check out another video on an impressive $1,500 display? The reflective LCD display that the The Sun Shines on it, and it is a beautiful thing. It's not very, very good. It's cool.

‌I only paid $1500 for this HUGE TV

Linus Tech Tips is a passionate team of "professionally curious" experts in consumer technology and video production who aim to educate and entertain.
