This year’s announcement of new TVs was dominated by sets using next-gen RGB LED tech or new brighter OLED screens – but TCL also slipped in a new kind of tech that it calls ‘SQD Mini LED’, used on its flagship TV this year, called the X11L.
The idea with SQD Mini LED is to deliver the super-rich color advantages that RGB TV tech promises, but that also takes advantage of all of the advances made in existing mini-LED tech over the last few years.
Here’s a quick run-down on the differences between regular mini-LED, SQD Mini LED, and RGB Mini LED (which TCL is also using in some TVs this year – just not the X11L):
Regular mini-LED and SQD Mini LED both use a single-color backlight (blue in the case of SQD Mini LED, white or blue in general for mini-LED TVs). All mini-LED TVs also include a quantum dot layer over the pixels, which is an additional color filter designed to help increase color range. The difference with SQD Mini LED is that it uses a more advanced version of quantum dots, which should be both more efficient and capable of an even broader range of colors.
RGB Mini LED uses a multi-colored backlight instead of a single-color light. Each light element is capable of showing a huge range of colors thanks to being made up of individual red, green and blue sub-LEDs. This means the light doesn’t need to be filtered as strongly when it passes through the pixel layer, which means there’s no need for a quantum dot layer. As a result, it offers a very wide range of colors and should be very efficient.
As I mentioned above, TCL is making TVs with all three of the above technologies this year, but it’s interesting that it went for SQD Mini LED for its flagship, rather than RGB Mini LED.
We’ve spoken to TCL about this decision, at it seems to center on the idea that SQD Mini LED will allow TCL to deliver the strongest control of contrast using its latest single-color mini-LED tech — with up to 20,000 dimming zones and 10,000 nits of brightness — while also delivering the same kind of rich colors that RGB TVs can.
On its website, TCL claims SQD Mini LED will deliver 100% of the pro-level BT.2020 color gamut, as well as up to 10k nits of brightness, and now we’ve been able to test on the actual TV itself, and… well, our figures don’t quite say that.
Color
Let’s go straight in with the color. The TCL X11L not only didn’t reach 100% of the BT.2020 color gamut, it didn’t reach 100% of the smaller DCI-P3 gamut either.
We measured it at 91.8% of the BT.2020 color gamut, and 97.7% of DCI-P3, in Filmmaker Mode. Now, I want to make it clear that these figures are exceptional for a mini-LED TV. Before this year, high-end mini-LED TVs usually landed between 79% and 83% of the BT.2020 range, so this is an impressive leap.
But the DCI-P3 color figure of 97%, which is actually the really important one because that’s what HDR is broadcast in (BT.2020 isn’t really used for consumer TV viewing), is the same as the TCL QM9K scored, so the new tech brought no improvement there. This is also in line with the Hisense U8QG from last year (97.5%), though is slightly higher than the Samsung QN90F (93.3%).
We haven’t been able to test any 2026 RGB TVs for their color performance yet, but we have been able to test the Hisense UX116, released in 2025. That scored 92.6% of the BT.2020 color gamut, and 99.4% of the DCI-P3 gamut.
For reference, the best OLED TVs are now able to hit 100% of the P3 color range, or so close as makes no different – the Samsung S95F achieved this feat in our testing, the Sony Bravia 8 II hit 99.9%, and the LG G5 hit 99.6%. These TVs all do worse in the BT.2020 range, though — the Samsung hit 87.5%, the Sony hit 89.3%, and the LG hit 80.3%.
It’s impressive that the SQD Mini LED tech nearly matches the RGB tech for color range, make no mistake. But I’m just going to return to the claim on TCL’s site about the color ranges here, which I quote directly below, and hasn’t been achieved based on our results:
| Row 0 – Cell 0 |
SQD Mini LED |
RGB Mini LED |
QD Mini LED |
|
Colour Gamut |
100% BT.2020 coverage on X11L |
95-100% BT.2020 |
Wide colour via Quantum Dots; typically ~97% DCI-P3 |
However, it’s worth noting that the color accuracy on the X11L is impeccable, with the variation between what it displays and the image it receives being in the range that’s imperceptible to the human eye.
Brightness
So, you can see in the charts above that the X11L doesn’t get anywhere near 10,000 nits in the two modes we report in our test graphs — but we do also test other modes, and we did measure it as reading 9,394 nits in its Vivid mode, in a 5% window.
We always expect Filmmaker Mode to fall well below the stated maximum brightness, especially in mini-LED TVs where there’s a risk of light leakage, because the goal of that mode is accuracy rather than razzle-dazzle.
Still, we didn’t expect to measure it as being less bright than the TCL QM9K in both a 10% HDR window and a fullscreen 100% HDR window.
Even high-end OLEDs are catching up with some of the figures here. It’s less than 20% brighter in fullscreen Filmmaker Mode than the Samsung S95F, and the successor to that TV, the Samsung S95H, is set to be 30% brighter than its predecessor. We haven’t measured it yet, but that’s a pretty big shift in the OLED vs mini-LED war.
Having said that, in Vivid mode, the X11L is massively brighter than any OLED TV, but we would never recommend you actually use Vivid Mode, so…
As I’ve alluded to above, the X11L not being dazzlingly bright all the time isn’t a bad thing for its picture quality — and, in particular, it’s common for improvements in black tone handling to come with brightness restrictions in mini-LED TVs. We haven’t measured how well it handles blooming and dark tones, so we’ll have to come back to that later when we test its real-world use.
But it’s just interesting that the new backlight hasn’t translated into dazzling higher brightness in real-world modes, and that the Hisense 116UX RGB TV absolutely demolished the X11L SQD Mini LED for brightness measurements – but then, the 116UX had some big problems with handling near-black tones, so again, it’s not like that’s any sign of a knock-out blow on its own.
SQD Mini LED — maybe not the next big thing?
What can we take away from this? Well, for a start, this isn’t a full review — measured numbers only tell a very small portion of the story of a TV, even if you just focus on image quality. Blooming, shadow detail, sharpness, motion handling and many more factors come into play. This is far from a final judgment on the TCL X11L.
But given that TCL is giving SQD Mini LED such a big fanfare alongside its launch of RGB TVs, and the fact that it made this its flagship TV over RGB tech, it’s interesting to look at the numbers and consider whether this tech really represents a leap forward in a way that’s meaningful at home.
In the BT.2020 color numbers, it’s a major improvement over the previous mini-LED tech… but we don’t use BT.2020 at home. We use DCI-P3, and it hasn’t meaningfully improved over the TCL QM9K for either P3 color range or accuracy, in our tests.
The brightness hasn’t improved either in the modes we recommend people use most often compared to the existing mini-LED tech, so again we have to ask — is this really worth of being a new-gen tech?
The TCL X11L may turn out to a fantastic TV, but based on our initial measurements, I’m not sure its SQD Mini LED panel will be a big deal — I think RGB tech remains the more interesting avenue, and I’m looking forward to seeing what TCL (and everyone else) has achieved there.
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