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Tom’s Guide
Tom’s Guide
Technology
Malcolm McMillan

This new QLED Fire TV is just $449 — and it's not made by Amazon

The TCL Q7 QLED TV on a living room wall.

When you think of Fire TVs, you’d probably think of Amazon’s in-house offerings like the Amazon Fire TV Omni QLED. And you probably wouldn’t think of TCL TVs — but you’d be wrong.

TCL announced it was adding Fire TVs to its portfolio of 4K QLED smart TVs back in October 2022 with the TCL CF6 Series, but at the time these were limited to Germany, Italy, Spain, and the U.K. They were conspicuously left off the TCL 2023 TV lineup. But now, these 4K Fire TVs are available in the U.S. as the TCL Q6 Series Fire TVs, exclusively from Amazon.

These Fire TVs from TCL come fairly loaded with features as well. The QLED 4K display panel is limited to 60Hz natively but uses Motion Rate 120 to digitally replicate a 120Hz display. And the combination of a quantum dot filter and direct backlighting for the LED display panel should provide excellent color reproduction and incredible brightness.

In addition to the 4K display, the TCL Q6 Fire TV also gets support for HDR content in HDR10+, HDR10, HLG and Dolby Vision formats, so basically any HDR show and movies will get a boost from the Q6, even if the TV doesn’t manage to hit the 1,000 nits peak brightness necessary for true HDR picture quality. For gamers, there’s an Auto Game Mode (also known as auto low-latency mode [ALLM]) to keep input lag to a minimum.

Currently, the TCL Q6 Series Fire TV comes in three models:

 TCL Q6 Series QLED TV: Choose your smart TV OS

(Image credit: TCL)

Of course, this version of the TCL Q6 Series is powered by Amazon’s Fire TV OS. So that means you get support for Alexa voice commands through the included Alexa Voice Remote. The Fire TV Q6 also gets support for Apple AirPlay 2 and HomeKit, but no Google smart features.

But if you prefer the Google TV smart TV interface or using Google Assistant, there’s good news. The standard TCL Q6 Series is powered by Google TV, and it comes with most of the same features as the Fire TV version. You also get the same 3 HDMI ports and support for eARC and Dolby Atmos, just the smart TV user interface changes. 

Pricing for the Google TV TCL Q6 Series is similar to the Fire TV models, though there is also an 85-inch version if you're looking for an extra-large option:

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