TCL55S517 55-Inch 4K Ultra HD Roku Smart LED TV (2018 Model)

Initial review 7-4-18: Just got it today, so this is an initial impression. Replaced a ~6 year old 50" LG Plasma. Great picture on the plasma but it faces a sliding glass door, and finally got sick of the really bad reflection during the daytime. The reflections on this is much less. Delivered in good condition. Easy setup. First thing I did was to get wireless connected and run some YouTube screen test videos. Zero edge light bleed, no banding, don't notice any dirty screen, haven't noticed any dead pixels.. Connected to the Comcast cable box, and to an OTA antenna. Scanned for the OTA channels. OTA looks great. Tweaked the picture settings as follows:Revised settings 7-28-18: Had picture mode originally set to Movie but found Normal to be better. Normal can produce really flushed faces unless the color setting is turned down - but also produces the sharpest most accurate picture in my opinion. Note: I believe these setting are pretty much the default settings except I turned down the color a bit.- TV Brightness: Bright during mid day, darker at night (2 easy clicks to change) - or just keep it on Normal. * This TV is more than bright enough for bright daylight viewing. Saw some complaints that it's not very bright. It's more than plenty bright!- Picture mode: Normal- Audio effect: Theater (sound's not that bad - but by no means as good as a sound bar). I also have it toslink connected to an older 5.1 Denon receiver - sounds great).- Backlight: 100- Brightness: 50- Contrast: 100- Sharpness: 0- Color: 42- Tint: 0- Temp: Normal- Micro Contrast: Low- All other setting turned to Off (noise reduction, etc.)Love the picture coming over cable, antenna, and streaming. HDR on YouTube is stunning. I mostly use the TV to watch Cable TV. Don't have any streaming subscriptions. The picture is very clean, sharp, accurate color, deep blacks, etc. No complaints. Getting around Roku is a snap, and changing settings and all is very intuitive. So far so good, and it is the best TV I've owned. Price is great for what you get.I programmed my One for All universal learning remote for this TV and duplicated the Roku remote perfectly except for the 4 subscription buttons (Netflix and all) which I could care less about. 5 digit code is 11756 (the same code needed when setting up the Xfinity/Comcast remote).* I really wanted the 55R617 but I was scared off from the high % with vertical banding issues and didn't feel like playing the screen lottery. I'm glad I went with the 55S517, and saved $175.00 in the process. 7-28-18: Still love the TV. Can't compare to a high-end OLED, but I really don't need to. The picture quality, the price, and everything about the TV is all I need.

Overall this TV is pretty great, especially if you can grab it during one of the semi frequent sales.I'll start off by telling you the worst thing about this TV in my opinion. That's the edge lit part of the display. The backlight for the screen only comes from the edges of the screen, not throughout the entire back of the display like you see on more expensive TVs.What does that mean? It means when a scene is entirely black, like in a dark cave, or space, you can see, mainly in the corners that the display is brighter there where the backlights are.How much does that affect the viewing experience? Not much. Again, it's only when a scene is full dark, most shows regular shows, movies and games aren't constantly giving you just a black screen to look at, and when things are going on, you're generally watching the center of the screen, not the corners. But you can definitely see it if you look for it in a dark scene.Other than that? The picture is phenomenal. Like any TV you should probably load up a show or movie you're familiar with, and adjust picture and color options to fine tune things the way you like, but it looks really crisp, and really bright.Some reviews complained about the brightness of the display, but I haven't had that issue at all, and I generally like my TVs set brighter than most people, and this one still seems fine, I don't even have the brightness turned up all the way. So the brightness of the display is perfect to me, with all the lights on and curtains open, or at night in the dark, it looks good.This TV is a 60Hz refresh rate, and has the "Enhanced Motion" that most TVs have now a days, that adds extra frames, and can give the "soap opera look". Some people hate it, some people love it, I like it for most movies and shows, and like that it's there. It's an option, and is easy to turn on or off depending on your taste.This TV also has a "game mode" which turns off any Enhanced Motion to create a lag free gaming experience.This TV is also very awesome at upscaling 1080p content to 4K. I had read that some 4K TVs don't display non 4K content very well, but this TV does a crazy good job. I loaded up my original PS4, which does not display in 4K, and put in a Blu Ray, and it looked almost as good as the 4K content I had been watching. In fact most people would probably not be able to tell the difference, it looked really good.Same goes for games, I also have a Nintendo Switch, which is on the lower end spec wise of the current consoles, and only does 720p & 1080p. But it looks REALLY good on this TV, crisp, bright, and clear.None of the games I've played have had any lag as long as game mode is on, and some games that are slower paced, look really good with the Enhanced Motion option on too. But you'll probably want to switch back to Game Mode for anything competitive or fast paced.The TVs menus are clear and easy to navigate, if you've owned a Roku you'll be right at home, or any other media box or stick for TV. You can install apps for Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video, and a ton more. I will point out that when using the Netflix app built into the TV, when you watch specially enhanced HDR content, the TV uses "Dolby Vision" which is just another way of doing HDR, and I don't feel like it does as good of a job at that. When I hooked up a PS4 Pro, and used it's Netflix app, it uses standard HDR instead of Dolby Vision, and I think I liked that better.As for sound, it's a new thin bevel TV, so, not much room for speakers, but that's been the norm for years now. But the built in speakers work, they go loud enough to hear easily, even in a house with other people walking around talking, and you could definitely survive just using those. But if you're a big time audio person, you'll probably want to use a sound bar, or surround setup instead of just relying on the TVs regular speakers.Overall, I've had this TV for a few weeks, and I'm happy with it. Can you buy a better TV? Of course, but not without spending a good bit more money. This TV, at this price, is probably the best you're going to get. I don't think you'd start seeing a better TV without spending hundreds more than this one, so if you've got to work in a budget, and want a really good, easy to use, crisp, clear, 4K TV, you'll be really happy here.