PerfectRec’s bright room score is a proprietary score of a television's performance in a bright environment, taking into account the following factors: screen brightness, reflections, and color volume. A higher score indicates better TV performance in bright conditions, minimizing glare and producing a more pleasant viewing experience. Brightness is crucial in how well the image displays in direct sunlight, and low reflections reduce glare. Color volume contributes to color vibrancy and depth, which are vital in a bright environment.

The TCL QM8 TV excels at displaying cartoons and animation due to its 'Very Good' color gamut and 'Excellent' color volume, which ensure vivid and varied colors that make animated content pop. Additionally, having a 'Good' score for colors out of the box means the TV can display these cartoons and animations with well-represented hues without the need for extensive calibration.

The TCL QM8 has very good picture quality because it exhibits high contrast and black uniformity, ensuring deep black levels and contrast ratio, and its color performance is strong out of the box with an excellent color gamut and color volume, resulting in vibrant and accurate colors.

The TCL QM8 has excellent contrast and black uniformity, which helps deliver deep blacks, enhancing the viewing experience for movies and cinematic content, especially in dark scenes. It also has strong local dimming capability, which improves picture quality by selectively dimming parts of the screen to match the content, creating more dynamic images.

PerfectRec’s gaming score measures a TV's performance when it comes to playing video games. It is based on several factors that can significantly impact the quality of the gaming experience, including screen response time, input lag, and refresh rate. Screen response time is a critical factor that determines how quickly the TV can transition from one color to the next, while input lag measures the delay between the gaming console output and the TV display. Refresh rate refers to the number of times per second that the TV displays a new frame, which can impact the smoothness of the gaming experience. The gaming score also takes into account two other features: local dimming in gaming mode, which can enhance contrast and picture quality, and black frame insertion, which can reduce screen brightness and create a smoother gaming experience.

The TCL QM8's performance for watching news, talk shows, and other TV programs is fair because its upscaling is not very effective, making standard-definition content appear less sharp, and while colors look good right out of the box, the overall picture quality is hindered by inadequate upscaling.

The TCL QM8 offers a less than ideal experience for watching sports due to its limited viewing angles and underperforming motion processing, which can affect the clarity of fast-moving objects and make it less suitable for group viewings. However, its very good reflections handling helps maintain picture quality in environments with some level of ambient light.