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It's been quite a while since we've seen a new display technology that really catches on. OLED debuted on mobile devices 15 years ago with the release of the original Samsung Galaxy, eventually usurping LCD as the de facto standard display type.
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However, the tides are shifting, and customers want something more user-friendly than OLED, a technology that looks great but causes headaches and eye strain in a notable percentage of people. Enter TCL's NXTPAPER technology, a custom type of LCD that includes multiple comfort layers and custom tuning, including a matte anti-glare layer and black levels previously thought unachievable for the tech.
The TCL NXTPAPER 60 Ultra is the first smartphone equipped with the latest version of NXTPAPER, and it just might be my favorite smartphone display of all time. As someone who regularly seeks out alternative types of displays with better comfort ratings, NXTPAPER greatly appeals to me. Now, with NXTPAPER 4.0, I'm finally seeing the fruits of TCL's labor and can fully recommend it as a legit alternative to OLED. Here are all the details.
Comfort above all
As I said in my Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra display review, all modern flagship phone displays look good. Any rating assigned to one over the other is generally nitpicking between characteristics that the average person simply doesn't see or care about.
That's why comfort is the new benchmark of display quality. A high comfort rating ensures all users can see and enjoy content on a display, no matter if they're looking at it for 5 minutes or 5 hours.
In the modern digital age, where a smartphone is practically essential for everyday life, it's becoming increasingly more important for companies to make devices that work for everyone, including those of us with visual disabilities or limitations.
Reflectivity and brightness
An up-and-coming trend in smartphone displays is glare reduction. All NXTPAPER devices feature a matte anti-reflective layer, but NXTPAPER 4.0 features a redesigned substrate and nano-matrix lithography application to enhance brightness and color accuracy.
This updated anti-glare layer is incredibly effective, reducing reflections so much that the display looks almost identical to full-color paper printing. It's actually wild looking at the screen throughout the day and seeing such a gorgeous, flat-lit display that doesn't force me to squint or strain to see.
The effect is best in any indoor condition or when outside in partial shade. Inside, the anti-glare layer is perfect for reducing those annoying reflections from adjacent lights or any brightly lit object. In this environment, zero reflection of any kind is visible, and it makes the phone a joy to use versus any other display technology I've used to date.
One of my favorite things about NXTPAPER 4.0 is its ability to create a superb picture without following normal display expectations. Take sunlight viewability, for example. At 850 nits, you'd expect this to be difficult to see in the sunlight. The Pixel 10 series hits 3300 nits to ensure it's nice and bright, for instance, but you'll quickly learn that the problem wasn't brightness all along. It was glare.
Outdoor visibility comes with an interesting caveat, though. It's super easy to see in direct sunlight, but only if the sun isn't directly reflecting off the matte surface. I'm writing this at 3 pm, sitting in my car while I wait to pick my son up from school, and it's incredibly easy to see. It's also excellent for dashboard navigation. But if I were trying to type this up on my back deck with the sun overhead, I'd have to hold it at an angle.
That angle is the only really weird thing about this display, as the matte layer will completely occlude the display if the sun is shining straight into your vision. It's not a huge deal since you only have to slightly adjust the angle — you would never keep the sun directly on any other display, either — but it does look different from a normal reflective display. I would recommend using the scheduled light/dark theme option to keep light mode on during the day if you spend a lot of time outside, as that also makes a huge difference for visibility.
Elsewhere, the brightness level is simply brilliant and always feels comfortable. It can even get down to 2 nits when extra dim display is enabled, something that was a problem with previous generations of NXTPAPER. I've always found these displays to be too bright to read in bed at night, but the TCL NXTPAPER 60 Ultra fixes all that.
The best part is that it achieves this with zero flicker, unlike OLED. That's because OLED normally has to switch to PWM dimming when you get to lower dimming levels, creating an uncomfortable flicker that can cause headaches and eye pain. Not something you want right before bed.
This phone is completely flicker-free and never uses PWM dimming at any time. It's true voltage-adjusted DC dimming, and it's one of the strengths of this display tech.
Eye comfort settings
NXTPAPER 4.0 features a built-in blue light filter that performs exceptionally well. Additionally, the phone features two automated modes that adjust the display's color temperature to match the time of day or automatically based on ambient light temperature. You can enable both modes at the same time, if you like.
Since the screen doesn't use PWM dimming, there's no need to have any kind of flicker reduction option. By default, however, the phone uses temporal dithering to adjust display colors and to create more accurate grey colors. Turning off all three options under NXTVISION display settings reduces the amount of dithering system-wide.
Sticking to normal and black & white ink modes ensures the least amount of dithering, and using sRGB or Natural color space options seems to disable dithering entirely when NXTVISION is disabled. The phone's Color Paper display mode seems to dither no matter what options are selected.
TCL features a notable number of additional eye care features found under the NXTPAPER zone menu. An automated alert can be enabled that will tell you to take a break after a set amount of screen time to help you stave off digital addiction.
A number of posture alerts can also help you correct problems with normal device use. Staring at the screen too closely can generate a posture alert, and the same will happen if you lie down and read with the phone for too long.
You can also enable alerts for when you're using the phone in an environment that's too shaky — on a train or somewhere else that could cause eye-strain while reading — or when you're in environments that are too bright or too dark to look at the screen for a long time. All of these options can be enabled if you like, and are disabled by default.
Colors and ink modes
One of the most unique parts of NXTPAPER technology is the ability to switch between full color, "color paper," and black & white "ink" modes with the switch on the right side of the phone. Switching takes a few seconds and is accompanied by a beautiful animation to show the progress.
NXTPAPER devices have always had these three options, so they're no different visually from those. Normal mode is what you expect: a full-color experience that looks like a modern smartphone display. Color Paper makes all the whites a warm, off-white color and changes most colors to pastel. Ink Paper makes everything black and white.
A fourth mode, Max Ink mode, uses the black & white visual appearance of Ink Paper mode but closes all apps except for the ones you whitelist. The idea here is to not only save battery life but also to act as a "digital detox" mode for when you need downtime or want to be less distracted.
As with the "reading modes" or "e-book modes" on some phones, these modes just alter the color of the display. They don't adjust the backlight itself or change the nature of the display itself, so they're not quite the same as using an E Ink phone for eye care.
Motion, resolution, viewing angles
The TCL NXTPAPER 60 Ultra's display automatically swaps between 120Hz and 60Hz, but you can select to keep it at 60Hz for battery or eye comfort reasons. At 7.2 inches, this massive display looks a little soft with 2340 x 1080 resolution.
I don't think the display looks traditionally low-resolution, which normally infers that you can see the individual pixels or that edges of icons and text have a stair-stepping pattern to them. Everything here is clean and clear, it's just softer than you might expect because of the additional light scattering and matte filters above the panel.
Lastly, we'll take a look at some of the traditionally weakest points of LCDs: motion blur, viewing angles, and black levels. Viewing angles and black levels are downright spectacular and are the best I've ever seen on an IPS-based display. Most of the time, I can't tell the difference between the black levels on this display and an OLED, although OLED continues to have better overall contrast.
When using the phone to scroll in dark mode or in low light, you'll be hard pressed to tell the difference between it and a high-quality OLED panel. Most OLEDs tend to "bleed purple" when you slowly scroll in low light or in dark mode, and that effect is equivalent to the slight motion blur you'll see from the slower-refreshing pixels of NXTPAPER's IPS base.
That difference becomes more readily apparent when using light mode or when the backlight is turned up brighter, especially when scrolling with black text on a light background. This effect is less apparent in videos or while gaming.
In short, motion resolution is worse than OLED but better than a traditional IPS display. I can easily read words as I scroll, even if I flick the screen quickly, so I would still rate this as "good" even if it's not the best.
Verdict
The TCL NXTPAPER 60 Ultra has one of the most incredible displays I've ever used on a smartphone. It's fully flicker-free and offers relief for both people sensitive to PWM dimming and dithering, something that's simply unheard of in 2025 when phones either use some form of dithering or PWM-style dimming, which both introduce flicker to the experience.
NXTPAPER 4.0 also breaks from expectations of LCDs, offering superb black levels and viewing angles, excellent color reproduction, and tons of eye care modes. Outdoor visibility is still the weakest point of the experience, but it is significantly better than any previous NXTPAPER display by a wide margin. It's not hard to see in sunlight, but it's not as easy as E Ink or some OLED displays.
The overall appearance of the display is incredibly captivating thanks to a combination of several bespoke visual filters and a matte surface, giving it a unique look and feel. Readability is much better on this display than most, and I found myself entranced by the display over the past week. It's gorgeous to look at, and ushers in a new era for IPS displays and TCL as a new quality contender.
With eye comfort at its core, the TCL NXTPAPER 60 Ultra is the best choice for anyone concerned about eye health without sacrificing visual quality. It's a paperlike display with active stylus support, so you can take notes and read books in comfort while still enjoying all the normal smartphone things you need.
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