New QLED in Town
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.
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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
