TCL 98C7K review

While TCL and fellow China-based brand Hisense aren’t the only companies selling king-sized TVs, they’re certainly working harder than their rivals to make the super-sized screen market their own.

This is an all-out attack in terms of both the sheer range of TV whoppers these brands are producing, and the increasingly aggressive prices they’re attaching to these potential home cinema heroes. With the 98C7K, though, TCL takes the massive-TV world to a whole new bang for your buck level.

A radically revamped panel design and a sound system crafted in collaboration with Bang & Olufsen, all delivered at precious little extra cost over previous models, make the 98C7K one of the most flat-out enjoyable TVs we’ve ever spent time with.

Price

Getting any sort of 98-inch screen for as little as £2399 / AU$5995 would be impressive, but as we’ll see, the 98C7K is far more than just 'A.N. Other' king-sized TV.

That’s not to say there aren’t other similarly massive TVs around for similar or even less money. Hisense’s 2024-released 100-inch E77NQ can currently be had for as little as £1600, for instance. The 98C7K, though, delivers a substantial step up in both features and performance from both that aggressively priced Hisense beast and already-impressive TCL predecessors such as the 98Q9BK.

Delivering such huge pictures for so little money potentially represents a problem for the home entertainment projection market. Especially as the 98C7K delivers high dynamic range pictures with a level of brightness and colour volume that projectors can only dream of.

A final note on model numbers. TCL tells us that its Q7C models are identical to the C7K models, except for the anti-reflective film, which the C7K has but the Q7C doesn't.

Seeing as how such a film can make quite a difference to performance, this review specifically covers the 98-inch C7K and shouldn't be applied to the Q7C.

Design

To a large (literally) extent, the only thing you really notice about the TCL 98C7K’s design is how massive its screen is. It fills both your wall and your field of view, and so dominates the impressively slender frame around it and surprisingly slender blade-style feet beneath it (if you’re not wall-hanging it) that you barely notice either of them. Basically, the 98C7K is all picture – and that’s fine by us.

It’s reasonably trim around the back for such a huge TV, too, making it a compelling wall-hanging option. Provided you’ve got a wall capable of supporting its 55kg weight, of course.

The reasonably trim rear and slender screen frame don’t feel too fragile to support such epic screen acreage, though. Thanks to a robust inner frame that you can actually catch glimpses of through grilles on the screen’s rear, we experienced no worrying flexing or bending while attaching this monster screen’s feet or hoiking it up onto our test benches.

One problem we definitely did get aggravated by while setting the 98C7K up, though, is the distance between its feet. There’s only one placement position for each foot, and these placement points are pretty close to the TV’s bottom corners. This means you’ll need a pretty huge bit of furniture to sit it on, unless you’re happy for it to sit directly on the floor.

The 98C7K is accompanied by an attractive remote control with a brushed metal-effect finish, a nicely balanced elongated design that provides plenty of space for its buttons, and direct access keys for Netflix, Prime Video, YouTube, Disney+ and TCL’s own curated Channels service of streamed content.

Features

The fact that it delivers 98 inches of 4K, high-brightness Mini LED pictures for just £2399 / AU$5995 will be all some home cinema fans need to know about the TCL 98C7K. This really is just the start of its charms, though.

For starters, it uses its Mini LEDs to pump out a claimed 3000 nits of maximum brightness. If this holds up, it should make for a seriously spectacular experience on a screen this immense.

This isn’t brightness without responsibility, though; it’s backed up and enhanced by more than 2000 separately controlled local dimming zones – enough, hopefully, to deliver compelling and convincing blacks and deep tones despite the amount of light the 98C7K is capable of flooding its screen with.

Also on hand to try and get the maximum impact from the brightness and local dimming engine at the 98C7K’s disposal is a cluster of innovations provided under the banner name of Halo Control. As this name pretty straightforwardly suggests, Halo Control is focused on removing or, at least, greatly reducing the blooms of extraneous light that local dimming LCD TVs tend to produce to some extent around bright objects when they appear against dark backdrops.

Halo Control gets involved with pretty much every stage of the 98C7K’s light path, from generation to emission through the screen. Starting with a new more powerful and efficient six-crystal light-emitting chip claimed to deliver a 27.5 per cent increase in brightness and a 30.2 per cent increase in energy efficiency, and a ‘super condensed’ micro lens that’s reckoned to increase the focus and uniformity of the screen’s light as well as increasing optical stability (thanks in particular to the use of new yellowing-resistant materials) by a factor of eight.

A new Micro Optical-Distance (OD) panel design contributes to the huge screen’s slim depth and further minimises haloing by reducing the distance the backlight has to travel. And a near-instantaneous transient response from the backlighting almost eliminates the potential for the light content of one image frame to seep into the next, further improving the accuracy and efficiency of the 98C7K’s light placement.

Bi-directional control of the screen to a virtual 16-bit level is reckoned to deliver 65,000 precise levels of light control, meanwhile, contributing, it’s claimed, to a more vibrant but also more subtle colour performance.

The 98C7K’s so-called CrystGlow Screen sees the liquid crystal layer adopting nanoscale bionic technology, where polyimide is added to the liquid crystal molecules to create a microstructure that more accurately controls the light passing through the screen. And, finally, the screen has been equipped with an anti-glare film to reduce screen reflections.

While its aggressive price for such a huge TV and TCL’s extensive reworking of its core LCD picture technologies grab most of the 98C7K’s headlines, its sound system also has a tale to tell. TCL has worked with no less a premium brand than Bang & Olufsen to design the 98C7K’s 6.2.2-channel, 60W sound system, with its ability to decode both DTS-X and Dolby Atmos soundtracks.

The two main drivers placed on the TV’s rear use high-end magnetic drive system speakers with precise signal control, and are claimed to improve magnetic energy density by a factor of four, dynamic range by a factor of three, and loudness by 20 per cent. So now you know.

The 98C7K’s smart features are delivered by Google TV, complete with its support for the Google Assistant voice control system.

TCL has also gone to the trouble of separately ensuring that its king-sized TV carries the catch-up apps of all of the main UK terrestrial broadcasters, overcoming a key Google blind spot in that respect. Though this ‘extra mile’ for UK buyers doesn’t include support for either Freeview Play or Freely.

It’s not just movie and TV fans who have plenty to be excited about with the 98C7K. Gamers are exceptionally well catered for, too, thanks to such features as ALLM, support for refresh rates up to 144Hz (and even 288Hz in Full HD resolution), VRR (including AMD FreeSync Premium Pro), and just 13.1ms of input lag with 60Hz games when running in Game mode.

A dedicated Game Bar menu screen is available when you’re playing a game source, giving you information on the incoming graphics and access to a few useful gaming aids that include an overlaid target reticle, aspect ratio adjustment and the facility to raise the brightness of just the dark areas of the picture.

It’s slightly disappointing that only two of the four HDMI ports support the full gamut of the TV’s gaming features. Though two full HDMI 2.1-capable ports will likely be enough for most households.

The TCL 98C7K supports the HDR10+ and Dolby Vision premium HDR formats as well as the ‘core’ HDR10 and HLG formats. This essentially means TCL’s giant TV can take in the best version of any source you feed it, whereas Samsung TVs, by comparison, refuse to take in Dolby Vision, while Sony and LG TVs refuse to take in HDR10+.

Picture

Pretty much everything about the 98C7K’s pictures is spectacular. This starts, of course, with their sheer size – we’ve seen a few 98-100-inch TVs now, but the raw cinematic impact of seeing our favourite test movies and TV shows writ so large across our field of view never seems to grow old. Especially if you’re watching a 16:9 or similar aspect ratio title that fills the whole screen.

The 98C7K also, though, emphasises the sheer scale of its viewing experience with some seriously intense brightness. Small HDR highlights such as gleaming eyes, street lights against a night sky, or the sun glinting off metal or glass look as lifelike and bold as we’ve seen them look on even the best ‘regular-sized’ TVs, while bright daylight scenes that flood the whole screen with light maintain much more brightness than the same shots do on even the brightest OLED TVs.

The 98C7K’s new light control engine doesn’t depend, either, on distracting tricks like obvious brightening and dimming of the image during cuts between dark and bright shots, or messy manipulation of local dimming zones within dark shots. Yet at the same time, as promised, TCL’s new Halo Control technology does a remarkably good job of suppressing the impact of unwanted light halos and clouds around stand-out bright objects or over areas of subtle, faint detail in dark shots.

We’re not saying that there’s absolutely no blooming or clouding in the 98C7K’s pictures. But TCL’s manipulation of the set’s dimming zones is smart enough to ensure that such issues are faint enough to barely register even if you’re actively looking for them (which regular viewers won’t be doing). Or else they’re cunningly disguised with some mild generalised clouding.

This latter point might sound alarming to some, but the clouding we’re talking about really is mild and is never significant enough to stop the 98C7K’s contrast looking excellent for such an affordable and huge LCD TV. So, overall, it’s a much more agreeable solution to optimising backlight performance than leaving dark scenes afflicted with aggressively obvious circles of light around stand-out bright objects, as can happen with some, even many, other LCD TVs with local dimming systems.

The 98C7K’s eye-catching brightness feeds into its colours too, tapping into the potential of the screen’s Quantum Dot colour system to deliver a range and volume of colour that would normally only be found on a really top-end LCD TV, rather than one as aggressively priced (for its size) as the 98C7K.

While the 98C7K’s most bold picture presets aren’t afraid to tap into the relative extremes of the panel’s colour capabilities, though, they do so without losing the ability to render the subtleties of shading and blending that help make pictures feel three-dimensional and natural.

Tones also remain in balance with each other even in the punchy Standard preset, with no tone or shade gaining too much prominence.

While many 98C7K owners will be keen to experience the full brightness and colour capabilities of their monster new TV, it also, crucially, manages to adapt itself in its Filmmaker Mode or Movie presets extremely well to the gentler, more subtle, typically less dynamic look content creators tend to work with. In other words, if you are motivated by seeing what content creators want you to see, the 98C7K can do that, too. Without the results feeling flat, hollow or dull as they can with less able screens.

Contributing further to the 98C7K’s excellent colour performance is the fact that it’s built on a foundation of impressively rich, deep, but also neutral black tones. Aside from the occasional moments of gentle clouding deliberately introduced to hide potential blooming, the 98C7K delivers blacks that are deep, rich and completely convincing, without crushing out subtle shadow detail or compromising the screen’s impressive brightness, even where a small bright highlight appears against a nearly black backdrop.

The improvements over TCL’s already-impressive big-screen predecessors continue with the 98C7K’s sharpness. Our main gripe with 2024’s equivalent TCL 98-inch model was that its pictures looked a little soft, even with native 4K. It was almost as if even 4K resolution wasn’t quite enough for such an enormous screen. This no longer feels the case with the 98C7K, though, thanks in part, at least, to a Super Resolution option that does a good job on its Low setting of making the picture feel sharper and denser without exaggerating noise or making the picture look processed.

The clarity holds up nicely when there’s motion in the image, too. High frame rate games look particularly smooth and feel impressively responsive, making it easy for gamers to bask in the glories of the screen’s bold colours, rich contrast, excellent detail and raw size.

We suggest trying the Low setting of the TV’s motion processing with 24p film sources, as this takes the edge off some slight judder that can creep in if there’s no motion processing in play. But if you’re too much of a purist to try this, 24p judder still seldom feels really distracting with motion processing turned off.

With the 98C7K also holding up better (aside from backlight haloing becoming slightly more noticeable) than most when viewed from an angle, it’s hard to find anything really negative to say about its picture quality.

All we could come up with after days of testing was that the Dolby Vision Dark mode can cause the backlight engine to crush a few faint details out of the picture; the dynamic tone mapping system you can apply to HDR10 sources can cause a little detail to be lost in the brightest picture areas; the image’s core brightness can very occasionally suffer a noticeable brightness ‘jump’ in the middle of a shot in the Movie and Filmmaker Mode presets; and, finally, the AI-influenced Intelligent picture preset option TCL provides is a little flawed, leaving skin tones and motion looking a bit forced.

This little list of issues pales against the 98 inches-worth of brilliant but also considered and balanced spectacle that the TCL 98C7K delivers for the vast majority of the time.

Sound

As with the more premium implementation carried by the 65C8K we reviewed recently, the Bang & Olufsen-influenced sound system of the 98C7K delivers striking quality in some areas without fully nailing the full cinematic experience.

In the positive column, the 98C7K’s speakers are capable of pumping out impressive volumes and a soundstage large enough to actually feel commensurate in scale to the epic size of its pictures. In fact, occasionally, the sound spreads so far beyond the screen’s already distant left and right sides that the soundstage almost starts to lose cohesion. But it always just about holds itself together in the end.

Dialogue is well handled, remaining both locked in the centre of the soundstage and also sounding like it’s coming from the images on the screen rather than somewhere behind or below the visuals. Vocal tracks sound clear and crisp, too, without standing out too brightly from the rest of the mix. In fact, the whole soundstage is delivered with an outstanding amount of detail and clarity, without any specific tone sounding overstated, harsh or brittle.

As with TCL’s C8K, though, the 98C7K is too lacking in the bass department to fully make film soundtracks sing. There just isn’t much depth or heft to its low frequency response, leaving action scenes sounding a bit thin, and mid and treble tones sounding slightly too dominant.

To be fair, the 98C7K’s midrange is open and potent enough to avoid collapsing in on itself when pushed hard by a particularly dense soundtrack moment. This isn’t quite enough, though, to make you forget the bass limitations – especially as the set’s half-hearted low frequency efforts can introduce a slightly coarse feeling to the sound during big action moments that stands in stark contrast to the general clarity the speakers typically show.

If you have enough room for a TV this large, you hopefully also have room for a dedicated Dolby Atmos sound system consisting of an AVR and speaker package, but even a capable soundbar (such as the Sonos Arc Ultra) or soundbar system (such as the Samsung HW-Q990F) will be a significant upgrade on the 98C7K’s built-in speakers.

Verdict

Aside from a bit more bass from B&O’s new sound system, it’s hard to see how anyone could really want anything more from TCL’s latest king-sized TV.

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. All for less money than you’d expect to pay for some 65-inch sets.

SCORES

• Picture 5
• Sound 4
• Features 4

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Read our review of the TCL 98Q9BK

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