New QLED in Town

TCL 75Q825 8-SERIES ROKU LCD ULTRA HDTV

- THOMAS J. NORTON

TCL MADE its mark worldwide over the last few years largely by selling budget sets with built-in Roku streaming. But with its new 8-Series, available in 65- and 75-inch screen sizes ($2,000 and $3,000, respectively), the company has elbowed its way into the high end and managed to do so at a highly competitive price point.

TCL flew me out to its California headquarters in mid-October 2019 to spend a day with its 75Q825 75-inch 8-Series set. While Sound & Vision rarely evaluates a TV outside of our own facilities where we have ample test gear and weeks to obsess over features and performance, the 8-Series sets were still a few weeks away from shipping, with the final firmware not yet completed. But knowing that the 8-Series would be a hot ticket during the upcoming holiday shopping season, we agreed to an offsite review.

FEATURES

TCL’s 8-Series models use mini- LEDs for their full-array local dimming backlight. This shouldn’t be confused with MicroLED, a stratospherically pricey new display technology that uses microscopic LEDs acting directly as the pixels comprising the image, with no LCD panel needed. As with any LED/ LCD set, the TCL’s mini-LEDs still function as the backlight for an LCD panel, but they’re so much smaller than conventional LEDs that TCL has managed to fit 25,000 (!) of them into the 75-inch 8-Series model. TCL calls this configuration Quantum Contrast.

Since the processing needed to independently control 25,000 mini-LED zones on an instantaneous basis isn’t something that can be affordably implemented in a consumer TV, the mini-LEDs are instead arranged into a claimed 1,000 zones, with each zone comprised of 25 mini-LEDs. While the local dimming is thus limited to 1,000 zones (a higher number than what’s found on any other consumer set we know of), the extra mini-LEDs in each zone should offer a significant boost in peak brightness for HDR highlights.