Cool Runnings, Kickboxer, The Natural – there are plenty of great examples in film that show just how much we all love a good comeback story.
I mean, who doesn’t love to see a redemption arc where a plucky underdog rises to the challenge and beats the odds?
And sure, none of the above examples is about home cinema hardware. And yes, I agree that a TV brand overtaking an established market leader is probably not the stuff of Oscars glory, even if it were chronicled in a film.
This year, though, I got to experience at first hand one of the biggest revivals I have seen during my tenure as a TV tester, in the shape of TCL’s epic comeback.
To set the scene, TCL is one of the biggest TV manufacturers in the world when it comes to sheer volume.
And, like arch-rival Hisense and to some degree Samsung (at least until it gave up and embraced QD-OLED in 2022), TCL is also one of many brands trying to push Mini LED as the future of TV and a valid alternative to OLED.
This is a panel technology that aims to offer better light control, black depth and contrast than is possible on normal LCD sets by arranging smaller clusters of LEDs in a grid format. Then it can charge individual zones, rather than the entire backlight, giving the set more granular control of the panel.
While that sounds cool and has its merits, the technology has struggled to get the same recognition as OLED in serious movie-fan circles. Despite being cheaper, Mini LED sets have usually come with some major compromises, especially around black level and dark detail.
Last year, though, TCL made major strides towards getting Mini LED the respect the manufacturer believes it deserves with the TCL C845K. This set's competitive pricing, solid feature-set and decent picture quality led to it winning TCL its first ever What Hi-Fi? Award for a TV.
We tested rival Mini LEDs sets from Hisense, Samsung and more, and the C845 was simply the performance-per-pound champion in 2024 – and one worth celebrating for our audience of serious movie fans on a budget.
As in any good story line, TCL then had a fall from grace, or at least a stumble, with its follow up set, the TCL C855K.
This was not, by any stretch of the imagination a bad TV. It retained a lot of the positives of its Award-winning forebear, including a competitive price and decent features.
But it fell victim to an ongoing trend that truly frustrates me: focusing on peak brightness as the be all and end all of picture quality. When we tested it, the set did indeed go incredibly bright, but at the expense of other key metrics.
As I said at the time in the review:
“TCL’s efforts to show how incredibly bright the C855K can go are too heavy-handed. During [numerous test scenes] while the peaks look dazzling, the TV artificially over-brightens the entire image, making the peak look slightly less impressive and damaging the picture’s contrast, making it look slightly flat overall.”
This was a key reason it lost out to rivals and didn’t even make it into our best Mini LED TV guide, let alone list of Award-winners. Honestly, as the dust of 2024 settled I was concerned TCL's success may have been a flash in the pan.
But, after seeing this year’s models, including the mid-range TCL C7K and wonderfully affordable C6KS, I can safely confirm I was wrong; 2025 is turning into one of the Chinese firm’s best to date.
And the reason is pretty simple: based on our experience with the brand’s latest sets, TCL has altered its direction, and is now putting light control as a key focus.
This is a key reason the 65-inch and 98-inch C7K models we tested offered such all-round gains on last year’s models, with both delivering a more consistent, immersive and mature movie watching experience.
As we said in our 65-inch TCL C7K review: “Super-aggressive pricing, much-improved Mini LED backlighting and expansive Quantum Dot colour make the TCL C7K a performance-per-pound champ.”
And then our 98-inch TCL C7K review: “Its 98-inch pictures are as bright, colourful, crisp, detailed, contrast-rich and immersively consistent as they are huge, and it’s got all the gaming features and most of the smart features you’d hope to get from a premium TV.”
The TCL C6KS then dominated the affordable market, proving to be one of the best cheap TVs we have seen ever, let alone this year, bringing Mini LED to a much cheaper price point than we ever expected.
All of the above is why these sets are What Hi-Fi? Awards 2025 winners. And I can’t help but see TCL as one of the biggest comeback stories of the year so far.
I’ll be curious to see if it can continue this upward trend in 2026, and finally bring the fight to OLED in the upper end of the TV market. It fought admirably in this key battle ground this year with TCL C8K, but ultimately couldn't keep pace; the equivalently priced OLEDs continue to win from a pure picture quality perspective.
Either way, I'm pleased to see TCL deliver so many great-value TVs to home cinema fans this year.
MORE:
These are the best TVs we have tested
We rate the best OLED TVs
Our picks of the best gaming TVs
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