TCL 8-Series mini-LED 4K HDR Roku TV Review | QLED Redefined By Digital Trends

Not gonna lie: some TVs are more fun to review than others, and this one is definitely in my top 5 this year. Hey everybody, I'm Caleb Denison for Digital Trends, and we are, of course reviewing the TCL 8 series mini LED, TV kind of big deal this year you guys enjoyed the unboxing I hope you enjoyed the review, but we got some stuff to cover. So, first, let's talk about what mini LED is before I jump into the technical stuff. If you haven't seen the unboxing a basic setup, video for this TV click on the link right up there, you definitely want to see that because, unboxing and setting up this thing is it's really something, and then you want to see a little of what we have to say about the menu settings, we'll touch on that later, first mini LED. What is it? Well, if you don't know how LCD TVs work, you have an LCD panel with a bunch of layers in it and then behind that are individual, LEDs now lesser TVs might just have them in strips on the sides or top or bottom full array or direct backlit TVs have the LEDs behind the screen. Some have more of these LEDs than others, and then they divide them up into zones so that you can light up a certain section of the image, but not necessarily the other.

This is a great example. We want all this area lit up, but at the edges we don't. We want black, because that's what the background is supposed to be mini LED uses the same basic principle, except for it shrinks the size of the LEDs way way way down and uses a lot more of them. In fact, we believe there are something like 25,000 just a little over 25,000 LEDs at work behind this screen right now, to put that in perspective, before that, we were looking at hundreds, maybe 25,000, and if we break those 25,000 plus LEDs into zones, we count 30 by 30, using this little test here comes out to about 900 zones, not about 900. It's 900 zones.

That's a lot, so you should have really great control about where the screen lights up and where it doesn't, and the other objective is to get rid of that halo effect. That's that sort of halo of light that goes around a bright object when it's on a darker background. It gradually gets black and stuff there being a sharp line there and all that is in service of trying to get closer to OLED I feel because OLED doesn't have a backlight, it's self missive the pixels light themselves up. There is no need for a backlight and there is no worry about halo effect. So, oh, how close does it get? Let's find out okay test powder time and, if you've seen this before, you know we're just trying to get this TV to trip up and show us what kind of halo effect it does have when you're right on axis, it's actually quite impressive, I'll go ahead and block this out, and you'll see yeah, there's a little of light bleeding out of the sides and the bottom here, but I've seen way.

Worse and more importantly, those white boxes are super bright right now, and we're actually the darkest mode that this TV offers now I know. A lot of you are wondering about how uniform the screen is. We've seen hit or miss results from TCL the 75 inch six years was great. The 65 inch six series from last year, not so much what I'm seeing here is well frankly, the best one I've seen from TCL so far, you're going to have some amount of dirty screen effect, no matter what TV you purchase, just some are worse than others. This is a really great example, so I'm highly encouraged there.

Now, let's talk about tone, mapping or electron optical transfer, function, e OT f, as it's known, which doesn't sound sexy, but it's actually super important, because this has to do with how the TV maps out dark to bright and gets all those individual subsections in there, and this looks fantastic, but I actually had to update the TV to get it to look this good before the update. It was crushing the blacks and stomping on the whites on the right side of the screen, but TCL has heard some feedback from other reviewers out there, and they've implemented a fix, and they say they're actually coming out with another one later anyway. I just want to point out. This looks perfect to me. Just subjectively speaking, and I think that's gonna play out with real-world content as well on our color ramp, I've.

Seen worse, and I've, seen better I mean there's definitely some bars here as it ramps down into the dark I'd like to see that be a little smoother. It definitely looks good on the brightest end. It's just that, as it goes down to dark, it seems to struggle a little again, I've seen worse, and I've seen better, but rarely it does. This actually play out importantly, when we're watching real-world content, unless we've got a huge wash of color on the screen, so we'll check that out in a minute as for color accuracy out of the box, it really quite good, of course, we're in the darkest mode, and we've got the color temperature set to warm nothing jumps out at me. The red seems pretty hot, but I think that's just because this is an HDR pattern.

What I would say is that, even though the TV only cost three thousand dollars and I say only because it's 75 inches, and it's competing against some of the most expensive TVs out there, I would recommend that you get a calibrator to come out and just get it dialed in, so that it's just right, because it is capable of communicating directors, intent and I. Think it's worth it. If you can afford a $3,000, TV yeah throw a few hundred bucks down and get it dialed in just the way you want it. We're going to do some real world stress testing of the back lighting system, but with this pattern, what I see is? Yes, there's some movement happening here, but it's much thinner zones of movement, it's more exacting that I've seen in other TVs earlier this year. So I've run this pattern from the Spears and muscle discs on lesser TVs, and it was an absolute mess.

This is the best case for mini LED I've seen so far. This is a really tough thing to pull off and if you go off angle, you can see the mess, but on angle, it looks spotless. So here's a little more realistic of a star-filled in the film gravity, and I'm, just looking for any kind of washout in the star field, but I don't get is washout. I see pinpoints of light and where we have really intense brightness doesn't seem to bleed over much at all. This looks great and this is an even HDR.

What is an HDR is in the relevant and oh, my gosh. It is so in HDR. The whole thing looks amazing. I gave up looking for the scene. I wanted to be settled on this one, because it looks fantastic and see the captions they're not causing any bleed down into the letterbox bars, so I feel like I, should cut to the chase here in terms of pure picture quality.

This TV looks fantastic, I've been watching it for hours and I, just I really enjoy it. I would put it right up against the Samsung. Q90 are right up against it. I don't know which TV I would prefer both do things very well. Both have their own little limitations.

I feel like this. TV is very competitive and when you consider it's 75 inches for $3,000, this kind of picture quality, absolutely fantastic is many LED. The truth absolutely I think it makes a huge difference. Now. Off-Angle still got the same problems.

Does it have perfect black levels? No, it doesn't. It still has a little of that halo, but I mean this is as close as any cue LED TV has ever gotten to reaching something approaching OLED level outside just pure picture quality, though there's a few things I've got to mention. One is the only HDMI 2.1 is feature that this TV offers is Auto low, latency mode. So if you're a gamer, it's automatically going to go into game mode and reduce input lag, which is great, but there's a caveat there. So the low input lag is good down to about 20 milliseconds right, but that's only if you have dynamic contrast set at the low or the medium setting.

If you set it at high, which is going to get you the most HDR punch and the brightest brights and the darkest dark and the best overall color that goes up considerably. So it seems like there's a little of a trade-off between whether you get the most amazing picture. Quality or you get super low input lag now, I'm with Vincent to over at HDTV test on this one I think that you either get the super low input lag so that you get a great score, and you're highly competitive on first-person shooters, or you get the best possible graphics. I think you can. You know balance that out.

If you want to two different kinds of people there, if you're the kind of person that wants both well it's kind of hard to get with this particular TV outside that I'm really enthusiastic about this TV I think it's a really great leap for the technology, its implementation. Here, it's really stellar I would be proud to own this TV in my home yeah, it's big, it's 75 inches, but it's a glorious, 75 inch picture with really incredible. HDR performance, Roku platform built right in I, mean if you've got the scratch, get this TV, it's fantastic and, of course, yes, we're going to have to put this against the Samsung q.90 are, but I think that when we do what we're going to find is that again it's just a matter of little tiny trade-offs. I mean it's that good of a TV folk, thanks as always for watching this TV starting to come out in stores. Leave me a comment down below.

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