TCL C8L (65C8L) review

The phenomenal bang for your buck offered by TCL’s 2025 C7K left that year’s C8K feeling a little underwhelming in comparison. Especially as, in one or two picture areas, the C7K actually performed slightly better than its costlier sibling, too.

For the 2026 C8L, though, TCL has introduced both its groundbreaking new Super Quantum Dot technology and a significant increase in dimming zones, applied to a new-gen version of the already excellent WHVA LCD panel designs introduced last year.

Price

Given that the C8L is the most premium TCL TV you can buy without trampolining up in price to the ‘technology showcase’ X11L and RM9L models, it generally looks like good value, both in terms of how it lines up against rival premium screens and TCL’s step-down C7L.

Ironically, given that it’s the version we’re looking at here, the one exception to this is the 65-inch set. At £1899 in the UK, it costs a whopping £700 more than the 65-inch C7L at the time of writing, while the price gaps at other sizes are much smaller.

As we’ll see, the 65C8L is still good enough to just about hold its own over the 65C7L, but its unusually large price gap is still something we have to mention.

The 65C8L’s price holds up better against those of rival backlit sets. Sony’s 65-inch Bravia 9 II costs £3499, for instance, while Hisense’s 65-inch UR9 costs £1999 and Samsung’s 65-inch R95H Micro RGB TV costs £3000.

Perhaps a bigger concern is that a 65-inch LG C6 OLED can now be bought for under £2000.

In Australia, the 65-inch C8L will set you back AU$2295, while in the US, where the set is called the QM8L, heavy discounting has already taken the price down to a very appealing $1700.

Design

The C8L isn’t the most instantly glamorous premium TV around. It’s slightly chunky around the back by modern standards, and sits somehow rather heavily on its centrally attached desktop bass. The depth is excused, though, by the fact that it provides room for both a premium direct LED lighting engine and up-firing speakers built into the screen’s top edge.

The stand, meanwhile, benefits from an appealing metallic finish and a neck attachment that lets you hide cabling behind a clip-off/on cover.

The set’s rear tapers back steeply from the screen’s outer edges, too, helping to hide its depth from normal viewing angles, while the frame around the screen is both remarkably slim and features a crisp metallic finish.

All in all, once the TV is in place, its design lets you focus on the pictures it’s producing rather than the technology producing them. Which always counts as a win with us.

The C8L ships with two remote controls. Most people will settle into using the smart metallic silver one with its stripped-back button count and built-in voice mic, but the long, thin full-number button alternative is also easy on the eye and comfortable to hold if, for some reason, you prefer all those extra buttons.

Features

The 65-inch C8L has some impressive numbers to share, starting with a huge claimed peak brightness of 5000 nits, a high local dimming zone count of 2040, and support for almost 100 per cent of the AV world’s most extreme BT.2020 colour spectrum. This is enough in itself to establish the C8L as a cut above the LCD TV norm, but it’s really just the start of this TV’s initial charms.

It also uses, for instance, TCL’s new Super Quantum Dots. These represent a major update on traditional Quantum Dots, with five different layers being squeezed into their tiny form rather than the previous two. This is claimed to result in increased efficiency, stability, brightness, colour range and colour accuracy.

These new SQDs have been integrated into the second-generation version of TCL’s new WHVA LCD panel, which introduces a whole host of advantages, including more efficient and accurate Mini LED lighting for enhanced contrast and brightness, reduced blooming from the local dimming system, extra image clarity courtesy of a reduced ‘throw distance’ from the backlighting to the screen and a faster transient response from the LEDs, plus enhanced shadow-detail handling to stop dark scenes looking hollow or flat.

As the name suggests, WHVA screens are based on VA technology, which is known for giving better contrast than the rival IPS panel technology. The W bit, though, also indicates that this premium take on VA tech from TCL is designed to support wider viewing angles than VA panels customarily do.

TCL has also introduced a mild anti-reflection filter to the C8L, though we might as well say right away that this doesn’t operate on nearly the same reflection-removing level as those on the latest top-end TVs from Samsung and Sony.

The C8L’s hardware attractions are controlled by a new version of TCL’s TSR AiPQ processor specifically optimised for the new SQD WHVA panel.

Gamers, meanwhile, can look forward to input lag of just 10.1ms, 4K/144Hz support, VRR (including in the AMD FreeSync Premium Pro format), support for refresh rates at HD resolution right up to 288Hz via HDMI’s Direct Line Gate system, and ALLM switching when a game source is detected.

All four of the C8L’s HDMI ports can handle 4K/120Hz signals, while other connections comprise a single USB 3.0 port, an optical digital audio output, an Ethernet port and RF inputs for both satellite and (Freeview HD) aerial connections.

Wireless connectivity is also available, of course, in wi-fi, Bluetooth and AirPlay 2 flavours, while the TV’s use of Google TV for its smart operating system adds built-in Chromecast.

On the subject of Google TV, TCL has ensured that, as well as all the key global video streaming services the platform usually supports, the C8L’s interface also carries the key UK terrestrial broadcaster catch-up apps that Google TV doesn’t typically offer.

The C8L supports all four of the main high dynamic range formats, too: HDR10, HLG, HDR10+ and Dolby Vision. So it will play the best version available of any HDR content you feed it.

Last but not least on the C8L’s lengthy list of attractions is its audio system. Designed with Bang & Olufsen, no less, it features 2.1.2 channels, including two up-firing speakers (to aid Dolby Atmos delivery) and dedicated bass drivers. There’s no direct forward-facing ‘soundbar’ along the bottom edge as you get with TCL’s flagship X11L series, though.

Picture quality

Adding more dimming zones and, especially, Super Quantum Dots to the C8L has had a transformative effect on its picture performance compared with its 2025 predecessor.

As we did with last year’s TCL C7K and C8K series, we look at the C8L alongside its step-down sibling – but this time there is no repeat of the peculiar colour inconsistency issue with the C8K, which could sometimes cause some of its colours to actually look less vibrant and natural than those of the cheaper model. On the contrary, the C8L’s colours are even punchier in the TV’s excellent Standard preset than those of the C7L – despite the C7L itself being streets ahead of most of its similarly priced rivals in the colour department.

This doesn’t mean that the C8L’s colours look overblown or inconsistent, though. TCL has seemingly taken great care to ensure that any amplification of colours its TV is delivering in its relatively vibrant presets maintains the tonal balance and overall ‘feel’ of the source content remarkably well.

The C8L’s SQD and processing capabilities ensure, too, that colours retain full saturation even in the brightest HDR picture areas, rather than brighter colours fading away as can happen with lesser TVs. Nor do the brightest, most heavily saturated HDR colour areas become cartoonish thanks to any loss of subtle shading details.

This colour blend finesse feeds into an impressively three-dimensional look to pictures, regardless of whether you’re using the TV’s Standard or as-the-director-intended Filmmaker Mode preset, as well as an outstandingly crisp, detailed look to native 4K images where you feel like you’re appreciating the full and accurate weight of every single pixel.

This sense of depth and detail isn’t just down to the C8L’s new colour engine, though. Its Mini LED plus advanced local dimming backlight system also plays a huge part in the feeling of precision and, in the Filmmaker Mode’s case, accuracy, by being able to deliver not just extreme brightness highlights and remarkably inky black colours, but every imaginable shade in between. That includes the faintest dark colour and grey details; nothing gets lost in the darkness here.

Subtle shadow details are delivered without looking noisy or exaggerated, too, revealing a level of local light control and backlight intelligence that’s still very rare in the LCD TV world.

Given how well the C8L handles the subtlest of dark scene details, it comes as little surprise to find that it also exhibits scarcely any backlight blooming at all around even the most starkly stand-out bright highlights. That’s despite those bright highlights not obviously being dimmed down when they appear against even black backdrops, and the screen’s general brightness being consistently spectacular for a fairly mainstream TV.

The C8L’s intense brightness can be felt in highlights of both Standard and Filmmaker Mode images, and it makes all bright or mid-bright scenes look breathtakingly intense and vivid in Standard mode without the results looking forced.

That isn’t to imply, though, that the Filmmaker Mode looks in any way drab. It is, of course, less bright than the Standard preset, especially with SDR content, in keeping with the relatively dim brightness values used by most of today’s content mastering studios. But Filmmaker Mode actually looks more dynamic with both SDR and HDR than such modes usually do, purely as a result of the screen’s hardware strengths and software support helping to deliver the picture attributes Filmmaker Modes demand.

With motion processing set to Low, the C8L delivers 24fps content with good sharpness, while keeping it free of excessive hardware judder, soap opera effect or general unwanted processing side effects, and the WHVA panel definitely helps the screen retain richer colours and better contrast from wide viewing angles than your average LCD TV.

The C8L’s picture heroics aren’t limited to video playback, either. It’s also an excitingly crisp, bold and responsive gaming display that you can’t help but become immersed in. Even if you’re playing the scary Silent Hill: Townfall and might want to be a bit less immersed…

The C8L’s pictures in both its Standard and Filmmaker Modes combine punchiness with naturalism, consistency and nuance so well that it’s hard to find anything serious to complain about.

However, while viewing angles are good in most ways, blooming becomes much more obvious from angles of around 30 degrees and more. The screen is also quite reflective of bright light sources in your room, even if it suppresses more general ambient light quite well.

The noise reduction features are all a bit over-aggressive and basically unnecessary (so turn them off), and the Natural Cinema motion processing mode that sounds like it should be the best option for film fans… isn’t.

Finally, we can’t help but think that the rather complicated way TCL has integrated its new ‘Eco’ power-saving features into the TV’s menus in its out-of-the-box mode might result in more than a few C8L buyers leaving their new television hobbled with greatly reduced brightness and colour. Hopefully anyone who’s read this review, at least, will take the necessary steps to make sure this unfortunate situation doesn’t happen to them.

Sound quality

The C8L continues to benefit (mostly) from TCL’s working relationship with Bang & Olufsen when it comes to its premium TVs’ sound systems.

The 2.1.2-channel sound system does a particularly good job of crafting a soundstage that extends further beyond the screen’s outer frame than most TVs manage, creating an open, immersive sense of space for movies into which the TV then places specific effects with good positional accuracy.

These effects are very clean and crisp, too, even at loud volumes, which gives the overall tone of the sound an almost hi-fi quality. That’s testament, no doubt, to the physical quality of the B&O speaker design.

There’s plenty of clean and expansive power to go with the detail and large soundstage, too, and bass is handled tastefully, for want of a better word, staying clean, even when Hollywood really hammers the low-frequency knob.

As with last year’s C8K, though, the soundstage presentation can sometimes lose a little coherency as the wrong elements in a mix get too much emphasis, and the sound generally feels like it’s happening more behind the screen than in the room with you, costing it some immediacy and directness.

Dense soundtrack moments ebb in and out at times too, and, finally, while bass is clean, it doesn’t hit quite the sort of depth we feel that it perhaps should be able to with such large low-frequency drivers available to it.

Overall, the C8L’s sound is good by prevailing TV standards, and improves on its predecessor, but it somehow still doesn’t feel like it’s getting the optimal impact from all of its undoubtedly premium audio parts.

Verdict

While the 65-inch model doesn’t represent quite such excellent value as other screen sizes in the C8L range, the addition of Super Quantum Dots and a clearly much improved backlight system still delivers a hard-to-resist upgrade from last year’s mildly disappointing C8K.

SCORES

• Picture 5
• Sound 4
• Features 4

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