TCL 65C8K Australia review

Regular readers will know that in recent years here at Sound+Image magazine we have been championing MiniLED panel technology for televisions as providing first OLED-busting value and then increasingly OLED-busting performance as well. Brightness and dynamic range of MiniLED panels overtook OLED years ago, leaving OLED TVs as recommendations for dark rooms only. And who has a dark room in Australia?

The leading lights in TV development long ago moved from Japan to South Korea, but in the last decade the biggest developments (and often, counterintuitively, also the best information on what they’re doing) are coming from the big Chinese brands.

As with MiniLED they began offering value, but they’re now offering some of the world’s most premium TVs, as well as some of the largest: TCL’s Australian ranges currently rise to the 115-inch diagonal of the X955 model (CSOT, the Shenzen panel manufacturer it owns, can now make any panel size up to 130 inches). Big 98-inchers are now de rigeur, topping multiple TCL ranges at different levels of TV technology; it was the 98-incher in this range which won EISA's 'Statement TV' award for 2024/5.

Given the joys of transport and installation, the only way we could review a 98-incher would be to enjoy it for a few hours in a PR suite or hotel room, and that’s not how we review TVs, or anything else.

So for this review we have installed the lowliest 65-incher for a three-week review. To compensate for size envy, this is a TV from TCL’s ‘premium’ line, the C8K series (see also the UK What Hi-Fi? review here), which bears all the tech advances introduced by TCL for 2025. It is fully loaded.

Build & facilities

Let’s start with QD-Mini LED. This describes a backlit LCD panel which differs from old-style LCD-LED TV in several key areas. Firstly, where the LED backlight used to be one big blazing light, the MiniLED concept broke that down to individually-controlled small LEDs grouped in zones that by now allow close to pixel-level precision. The 'QD' quantum dots then provide a pure colour source, excited into action by the MiniLEDs behind.

This 65C8K has full-array local dimming thanks to its thousands of Mini-LEDs in 1680 zones, which is one zone for an area around 70 x 70 pixels, perhaps a 26mm-wide section of screen. (The number of zones rises with screen size, up to 3840 zones in the 98-inch C8K, which would make each zone around 4cm wide).

As MiniLED TVs have developed (this is TCL’s fourth-gen LED, according to the Australian website), the quality of those MiniLEDs themselves has become a key area of focus. TCL’s latest LEDs use a new ‘super-condensed micro lens’ to further optimise light shaping and minimise side spill, thereby improving light targeting precision per zone, energy efficiency and peak brightness – the headline brightness spec for the 65C8K being that it can hit 4500 nits peak brightness when in Dynamic Mode, and more usefully can deliver stable sustained brightness around 3600 nits in its ‘High-light’ mode. This is double the brightness of only a couple of years ago, and approaches the brightness of the mastering monitors used in the movie industry.

We should emphasise that this brightness is for highlights; it’s not going to sit there burning out your eyeballs all day. Average brightness during operation might be around 700 nits, which TCL compares with typically 200-250 nits from OLED TVs, emphasising MiniLED’s better suitability in particular for HDR viewing in well-lit rooms.

One of the problems of bright lights and even zoned LED panels can be halo artifacts, as zones spill light around a small bright object, or create lagging ‘trails’ as bright objects move across the screen. TCL’s micro lenses address this, as does ‘micro-OD’, an effort to reduce the optical distance from LED to panel (also allowing a thinner TV), along with improvements on how the zones are driven in combination with the panel itself: there is here hybrid 23-bit DC/PWM control for those 1680 independently-addressable zones; TCL says this corresponds to 12-bit linear light processing with transfer functions to accurately render HDR10+ and Dolby Vision curves.

The panel itself is a CrystGlow WHVA panel with a high native contrast ratio of 5700 to 1 (the final Mini-LED contrast ratio was measured in Poland during an EISA event at 29,500:1 in ‘High’ setting). WHVA is a further upgrade of CSOT's HVA (High Vertical Alignment) technology, the W adding ‘Wide’ to indicate better off-axis performance, as well as having higher refresh rates and lower reflectivity. Remarkably there is also production-stage calibration for these TVs to correct for any individual panel and backlight variance.

All this, says TCL, yields improved zone uniformity across the TV image, and gives the ability to enjoy bright highlights and near-true blacks in real HDR scenes, rather than just in isolated test patterns. TCL's zone switching speed has also been increased, with a faster transient response helping display rapid lateral motions, especially in sport and gaming.

As for colour, the MiniLED lights excite the quantum-dot colour conversion of TCL’s QLED technology, here delivering a measured gamut of 97% DCI-P3 and 80% Rec.2020.

It is a 4K TV, of course, and something rarely considered is how little 4K material ever really gets watched on 4K TVs – Blu-rays are 2K, broadcast is 2K and below, anything other than a top streaming plan will likely prevent you streaming 4K movies. So the ability to upgrade from lesser material is a modern TV essential.

TCL’s processing for this lies in the AiPQ Pro processor, upgraded this year to use a broader training set used to identify material type for scene-adaptive upscaling, aiming to improve results especially from 720p and other SDR streams, and even interlaced broadcasts. There is AI, of course! – here deep learning and neural-processing units for artifact reduction and to reconstruct fine detail in edge regions and textures using up to 10-bit gradation.

Indeed there is AI this, that and the other, along with trailing buzzwords everywhere, like a Dynamic Lighting Bionic Algorithm, and Bionic Colour Optimisation Technology! Such things are hard to judge in isolation, of course, so let’s plug it up and see what we actually get.

Installation & set-up

It is indeed a good-looking TV, and the packaging, while necessarily large, is nicely designed to assist in getting it out and attaching the central stand, which requires eight screws to put the stand together and another four to attach it to the TV.

Again TCL implements its minor masterstroke here in offering two sets of holes on the back for the stand. Set A will put the bottom of the TV just 42mm from the tabletop on which the stand is placed, nice and low, but too low for a soundbar, so if that’s your choice of sound system then use Set B, which raises the TV higher to clear a soundbar, even one with feet attached to span the central stand. Screws were all included, and fitted straight into the holes perfectly! Not always the case.

With the TV in position, it was time for the great plastic removal – a full binliners’ worth to strip from the screen: two padded panels, four side strips, three stick-ons alerting you to the three-year warranty and 5-star (450kWh) energy rating, and finally the full-screen peel to reveal the 65C8K in all its beauty. Because it is quite a beauty – from the front, in being marvellously minimalist in what you see other than the picture, and from the side (oh, more plastic there when we went to look) in being sleekly aluminium-edged, slim-backed and straight all the way from top to bottom, none of your big bulbous bit down the bottom at the back.

And we were delighted to note that the stand is almost non-reflective. The screen itself is glossy, said to be the optimal choice for deeper blacks and contrast, but there’s a very effective anti-reflection film which made this TV the first we've had in place on which the missus could play Wordle without closing the skylight blind. These things matter.

We made our connections. Four HDMI inputs are available for external source connections, alongside a USB-A slot (3.0) for file playback, and the LAN Ethernet connection (and dual-band Wi-Fi 6 inside). There’s an optical audio output, but no headphone or analogue audio out.

The HDMI inputs are all labelled in the TV’s specs as HDMI 2.1 standard, but in fact only two of them have the full bandwidth of 48Gbps; the other two are limited to HDMI 2.0’s 18Gbps, so they are labelled on the TV itself as 4K/60 (which is quite enough bandwidth for standard purposes). There is support on these sockets for just a few HDMI 2.1 features (Dynamic HDR, Auto Low Latency Mode), and the HDMI Licensing Administrator allows manufacturers to call such sockets HDMI 2.1, when they clearly aren’t, really. There’s certainly no sign yet of HDMI 2.2 here, which doubles bandwidth again, and will be likely to show up on next year’s premium models.

Audio via eARC is supported on HDMI socket 1, so our resident Yamaha AV receiver was connected there, an AppleTV 4K into another, computer into another. Other sources were plugged into the AV receiver.

We powered up the TV, to be greeted by the latest Google TV interface, inviting us to use the 'Google Home' app to initially set up the TV, showing a QR code to scan (so do this on your phone/tablet, not a computer).

We use Google Home plenty (our home ‘Home’ is quite cluttered, indeed), but we find the system’s hit rate for setting up devices to be low. For example, TCL here doesn’t give enough information for you to make the first choice offered by Google Home: when you press ‘Add device’, Google Home offers three choices: which to choose?

First option is Matter-enabled devices, and this did ask for a QR code as offered by the TCL. But when we offered this QR code, Google returned “this is not the code you are looking for”. Funny, but not helpful.

Third choice is ‘Works With Google Home’, also wrong. The second option: ‘Google Nest or partner device’ is not the obvious choice, but is the one to go for. Google Home still took a while, found a strangely-named TV, and got as far as connecting the TV to Wi-Fi before failing repeatedly to do so, or doing so but then announcing there was no internet anyway.

This left nowhere to go, so we backed out of Google Home (as so often happens) and went through the full manual TV set-up, using the remote control to enter emails and passwords (zzz), after which it connected straight to Wi-Fi and had no further problems. Google TV is great once it’s working; it’s smooth, clever, great for streaming, and it even showed our Google Photos as a screensaver. But sadly, setting up products via Google Home is often just a bit rubbish.

Viewing sessions

We soon had our UHD Blu-ray player playing at 4K through the receiver to the TCL; one early disc played was the animated The War of the Rohirrim, which comes with a magnificent LOTR-style fully-orchestrated Atmos soundtrack. Animated visuals aren’t something we’d calibrate to for colour, but it’s a great disc for seeing how motion is handled, since the 24-frame-per-second 4K delivery combines animations made at 24fps, 12fps and 8fps. Near the beginning there’s movement over maps, mountains and landscapes that makes a great test for smoothness. With some TVs you can struggle to get the perfect cadence; we usually start in Filmmaker mode or equivalent, then dial in as much de-judder and de-blur as required to fix difficult material.

That worked well here; after we cooled the ‘warm’ colours of Filmmaker mode back to neutral, we dialled in ‘Custom’ motion of ‘4’ Blur reduction and ‘5’ Judder reduction. Did the job nicely.

We also realised that the preset ‘Medium’ motion setting did much the same as our custom choices, and we were more surprised to find that both the ‘Intelligent’ and ‘Standard’ picture modes also did much the same, give or take a slightly garish ‘Dynamic Color’ selection for ‘Standard’ which turned slightly blue skies very blue and slightly orange ones into burning sunsets.

That proved too much for the UHD Blu-ray of My Fair Lady; the opening scenes of staircases of haute couture were hyper-realistic in their HDR colour, borderline postery from over-interpolation of frames in ‘Intelligent’ picture mode. So we returned to Filmmaker to dial motion down to 3 Judder; this mode also restrained the colours to more properly cinematic tones.

Great cadence work with 24fps movies, then. How about Australian native 50fps content? There’s no problem viewing this off-air, but what happens when watching Australian catch-up apps via the Google TV interface?

We loaded a torture test, episode 2 of the ABC’s Nemesis documentary in iView; after the intro credits there are vertical and horizontal tracking shots of Canberra’s lake, shots with moving water, then captions over everything; it’s a nightmare for TV processing to handle, and it shows up particularly anything locked to a 60Hz output. Our motion settings for Filmmaker mode worked well; ‘Standard’ did brilliantly well; indeed this combination of image quality and cadence provided the first time we’ve identified a deliberate drop-shadow on the text of those overlaid captions – this was like the video equivalent of hearing new things in your favourite music on a good hi-fi; we’ve watched this clip hundreds of times.

So this is great performance with out-of-the-box default settings – it means that many more users will enjoy good cadence settings. Part of this may be that the genuine HDMI 2.1 inputs can offer 144Hz Motion Clarity Pro, said to minimise judder and stutter across all major content types, while TCL's frame rate conversion interpolates up to 120Hz for film and broadcast, including proper 5:5 pull-down for 24fps content. We didn’t need to invoke TCL's LED Motion Clear, which adds black frame insertion at the cost of brightness; we were already happy. And we are utterly judder-allergic.

These abilities will also service latest-gen games consoles; a Game Bar (see above) is triggered automatically, loaded with information, while supported frame formats include 4K 144Hz VRR, 1080p 240Hz/288Hz VRR, and there’s Auto Low Latency Mode (ALLM) via multiple standards.

The Mr Fair Lady UHD Blu-ray arrived in HDR10: the 65C8K supports also HDR10+ and Dolby Vision, including Dolby Vision IQ, which is the same thing but adjusted using a built-in light sensor, heaven knows where. The HDR10 didn’t lock us into a strict HDR mode, and in our adjusted Filmmaker Mode the blacks really were subjectively total, yet not falsely so, as there was still great detail in the darkened columns and walls around night-time Covent Garden, and marvellous subtlety and texture to the colour tones and texture in Hepburn’s flower-seller costume.

Dolby Vision content does trigger special Dolby Vision (DV) modes; at least it did from Strange New Worlds on Paramount+ via Google TV (we couldn’t get it to do so from Disney+). You then have a choice of three DV modes: DV IQ, using the ambient sensor, or DV Light or DV Dark. On all these, the brightness and motion settings were maxed out; we used DV Dark and tweaked things back to natural cinematic levels. So with this type of content, some user tweaking may be required to avoid something which is only superficially impressive.

Talking of using the Google TV interface, this also offers TCL Channels, both free-to-air and catch-up material; these things vary in quality and quantity, of course, but we stopped counting the free channels at 150, so there’s plenty to play with, beyond other free offerings from endless Android apps like Tubi and Kanopy.

Audio

While we listened initially through a connected sound system, as we imagine many of our Sound+Image readers will do, TCL does make much of its own built-in sound system, on which it has this year been working with Bang & Olufsen, the Danish marque known for entertainment systems, although as much for prioritising external styling as sound quality; presumably it’s the latter TCL is targeting in the collaboration.

This includes a ‘Beosonic’ feature, which took us a while to find – no mention of it at all in the manual; we even tried downloading TCL and B&O apps in case it was there, but neither app could ‘see’ the TV. We found the Beosonic adjustment eventually in the TV’s Audio menus, but it is greyed out until you select ‘Custom’ sound. Then a circle appears with the N-S poles marked as Bright and Warm, the W-E poles as Relaxed and Energetic, and you can move your cursor anywhere in the circle. We’d love to know how many people ever find this and bother to use it! – though it might be useful for taming sibilance on daytime TV. The custom audio mode also alerted us to 'Bass Boost' being selected by default, and the sound cleaned up a little with that turned off.

All this applies only if you’re using the TV’s own speakers, of course. And the built-in system did sound larger than most, spreading sound quite wide, and with both depth and clarity far above most TV audio systems. There’s even an effort at height delivery, though we didn’t notice any. It’s a balance that’s best for keeping movies nice and clear; when we played music through the system, there was no bottom octave of bass at all (even when we put the bass boost back in), and the overall sound balance was revealed as unpleasantly artificial on many instruments and vocals. We used AirPlay to send music (which requires activation first in the 'System' menus); Google Cast obviously works as well, and there’s even Miracast for Windows PCs.

The TV’s own sound system is expandable, rather like B&O does with its own TVs, so you can add TCL's Z100 Flex Connect system supporting up to four wireless speakers, although this system is not yet available here, expected in Australia Q1 next year. But anyway our advice is to connect a good external audio system, and then the TV can be used as a music hub as well as a TV, playing everything via HDMI eARC/ARC into a solid sound system.

There’s an extra audio bonus from TCL around lipsync. While HDMI now is supposed to be clever enough to eliminate lipsync issues, it doesn’t always do so. Here there are adjustments for both analogue Audio Delay and Digital Audio Out Delay; this is common enough. But TCL includes the miracle of negative delay, which thereby fixes lagging audio, nearly always the source of sync problems, and unfixable by delaying audio still further. Negative delay requires memory buffering, which few companies can be bothered to pay for – but TCL does, and we salute it. One glitch, however – on this new model the negative delay can’t operate with surround soundtracks, only if you switch the whole system to stereo. So it’s less useful than it might be.

And we did experience sync issues when playing via eARC from the HDMI 1 socket, sometimes a distracting audio delay of perhaps 20-25ms. Through the TV’s own sound system, this was not evident, so one might blame the connected system, though this TCL TV was installed in place of a lesser TCL Roku TV, which has never exhibited lip sync delay through the same system.

Verdict

An absolutely superb TV, continuing TCL’s demonstration of what must now be called global leadership in TV technology development and innovation. Mini LED again proves its merits, even more than ever now, with deeper blacks and dark detail against those astonishing nit levels now available for HDR peak performance. Default settings are generally excellent, as well, so most users will enjoy excellent images out of the box, while it can be tuned to perfection by those keen to do so.

Many Sound+Image readers will be buying primarily for this level of picture quality, but TCL stacks the extras high around that: Google TV with its endless apps, gaming features, TCL Channels, and better built-in sound than most, along with a very attractive TV design in itself.

Next year will be interesting: TCL’s display-manufacturing subsidiary CSOT has already got RGB Mini-LED panels on the way, while printable OLED panels at TV dimensions may not be far behind. But meanwhile we don’t reckon you’ll find a better MiniLED TV than this 65C8K Australian edition, and certainly not at this price.

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