As a TV reviewer I’ve unboxed countless screens over the years, and most of them were big. But I’ve never seen, let alone opened, any TV box as big as this.
TCL’s 115-inch TV just arrived at CNET’s TV lab but before we could see what it looks like, we had to get it out of the box. And what a box: The slab of cardboard is tremendous, more than 9 feet wide and nearly 6 feet tall. The package weighs more than 220 pounds. To get it here, the freight company needed three burly dudes and we used every inch of the cavernous freight elevator in our New York lab. Hello, double dollie!
During the course of the unboxing I learned a few things. High ceilings are key. Lift with your legs. And TCL has a pretty ingenious method for actually getting the TV itself on its included stand legs. It comes with four solid metal handles you screw into the sides to provide enough leverage to lift. My colleagues Ty Pendlebury, Laura Michelle Davis and I were able to (very carefully) ease it onto a pair of apple boxes to get it a bit off the floor, to a height that felt comfortable watching from the couch.
Once we got it set up, the image looked as impressive as I expected from having seen the TV in earlier demos. It’s incredibly bright, with the excellent contrast delivered by mini-LED and full-array local dimming. Sure, at that size, every imperfection in the video source is revealed, but with high-quality material, like Bridgerton on Netflix in 4K HDR, it looked superb.
To be honest though, we had more fun browsing CNET’s YouTube channel and summoning images of our co-workers that were literally larger than life. Or putting up a fireplace video and roasting some pretend marshmallows.
Here’s where I mention that this TV costs $20,000, and that other TVs just a bit smaller are much, much more affordable. That said, this TCL is the only one that checks the “biggest” box.
