TCL’s NXTPAPER screen tech is getting easier on the eyes
TCL aims to strike a balance with its unique NXTPAPER technology. It’s not an E Ink display the likes of which you see on eReaders, nor is it the same as standard OLED or LCD panels we’ve come to know on mobile devices. While the underlying screen is an LCD, TCL’s take on it is one of the more unique attempts to change up what a display can be.
Its matte finish is specifically designed to mimic paper, and while initially designed to help reduce eye strain from exposure to blue light, its distinctive look makes for an interesting alternative. With the NXTPAPER 11 Plus tablet standing out as TCL’s signature device under its NXTPAPER lineup in 2025, the concept behind this tech is showing signs of maturity.
Bringing paper to screen
Considering the creeping stagnation seen in what Samsung, Google, and Apple continue to bring to market, NXTPAPER feels like a fresh approach, even if it’s not entirely disparate from existing screen technologies. It’s still an LCD panel, only with a blue light filter and nano-matrix lithography to produce the paper-like effect. It makes the matte screen look more textured, partly due to perceived contrast, but also because of the diffused backlight emanating from the display.
That explains why the overall screen brightness isn’t as high compared to other common screen types. Still, it’s rare to see an LCD screen emulate E Ink — both in monochrome and color — making TCL’s NXTPAPER devices the most comfortable ones (aside from eReaders) to read ebooks. There are three modes: Ink Paper desaturates the entire display of color, Color Paper adds limited color, and Regular mode runs the whole color gamut.
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However, two major challenges pop up. First is the lower brightness, which makes the screen harder to see in brighter settings. Although the matte finish reduces glare, higher peak brightness is required to see everything on screen in brighter sunlight, posing a problem for these devices outdoors.
The other is a sort of two-pronged limitation, which is that everything onscreen won’t be as sharp as high-resolution LCD or OLED panels, in spite of TCL trying to ramp up contrast. Nor can it completely block blue light, so your eyes will still be susceptible to strain; it just takes longer for the effects to be noticeable.
Simply put, NXTPAPER can’t match the vibrancy of an OLED panel with good HDR (high dynamic range), a discrepancy that’s also more apparent based on the content you’re looking at. A show or movie on Netflix won’t look as crisp on a NXTPAPER display, though a comic book or graphic novel is far easier on the eyes via TCL’s technology.
While not a 100% substitute for E Ink displays, ebooks do look great on these displays as well. Visual art looks more impactful, mainly because a comic book, graphic novel, lithograph — basically, any medium with a history in paper — appears more authentic because of it.
Color and accuracy
Could that expand to content we take for granted on mobile devices? Is there an advantage in viewing photos, art, and other images on a NXTPAPER display?
TCL thinks so, especially now that it claims NXTPAPER 4.0 reproduces colors accurately enough to compete with LCD and OLED panels. The keyword there is “compete,” but it applies somewhat loosely under the circumstances. While more vibrant than before, especially with gradations, NXTPAPER won’t match the contrast ratio and vibrancy of LCD or OLED panels.
Despite that, TCL says it has finally achieved 100% sRGB color accuracy in NXTPAPER 4.0 (up from 70-80% in 3.0), putting it right in line with the 95-100% coverage commonly seen in LCD and OLED screens. Not so much with DCI-P3, a color gamut set for film and TV show production, where support is standard for phones, tablets, TVs, and monitors, but not necessarily for NXTPAPER devices.
Brightness also remains a big hurdle, where an increase to a peak of 450 nits in NXTPAPER 4.0 still falls well behind the 500-1,000 or more nits you can expect from those other panels. TCL positions its matte finish and blue light filtering as an equalizer, as it’s intended to make it easier to see in both bright and dark conditions without straining.
Personalized Eye Comfort Mode adjusts color, brightness, and contrast to fit with your own preferences.
That can depend on said conditions, which is why TCL is trying its hand at injecting AI into the mix. Newer features like Smart Eye Comfort Mode will adjust screen settings no matter what’s onscreen, addressing both content consumption and creation. In tandem with that, Personalized Eye Comfort Mode adjusts color, brightness, and contrast to fit with your own preferences.
The idea is that your viewing experience may differ from someone else using the same device, but that’s hard to tell without properly testing the newest version.
An evolving process
When I saw the new NXTPAPER devices at CES in Las Vegas and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, TCL reps presented other changes engineers made to the underlying tech.
Where previous generations have chemical etching, the latest version uses a more advanced nano-matrix lithography etching process to produce a crisper and clearer image for text, images, and video. It’s hard to gauge that under brief demos, but some before-and-after examples of text and photos suggest there’s merit to the claim.
This might explain why TCL markets the NXTPAPER 11 Plus as a productivity device as well. Unlike previous versions, where the focus lay more on consumption as an e-reader alternative, improving color and brightness is supposed to lend more credibility to this latest iteration, being more than that.
TCL sees the potential for art, painting, drawing, sketching, and photo editing this time around.
It’s just not entirely clear what that means yet. The limited color gamut in previous models didn’t always translate to the best accuracy across all visual mediums. TCL sees the potential for art, painting, drawing, sketching, and photo editing this time around, all indicated by the fact that the 11 Plus comes with a stylus. Moreover, the new TCL 60 XE NXTPAPER phone will also showcase the latest version, so we’ll see how it all looks on a smaller display as well.
The thing is, neither of these new devices is a flagship tablet or smartphone competitor. TCL’s screen technology is still decidedly mid-range, likely as a means to keep costs down and prove NXTPAPER’s viability in an otherwise tight market dominated by incumbents.
Time will tell how it turns out, but for now, this unique screen technology is showing signs of meaningful progress. Yet, if it doesn’t gain more traction, could TCL license the technology to others, especially since it owns patents specific to eye protection? Perhaps, but that seems unlikely in the short term.
Much like TCL plays a patient game within the TV and home theater category, it may very well be playing the long game in the mobile space, too.
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