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While it’s a shame TCL hasn’t arrived in Europe with the same impressive model as the one released in the US, the 65C815K is a solid choice – especially if you ignore its more extreme instincts.
Tcl 65 Inch 4k Smart Tv Review
Thanks to a winning combination of aggressive pricing and ever-improving performance, TCL has recently emerged from the fray to rival Samsung and LG in terms of the number of TVs it changes each year.
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This success was mainly driven by the American and Asian markets. In Europe, the TCL brand took longer to get off the ground – partly because we weren’t lucky enough to get the same TCL product lines that were commercially and critically successful in America.
This remains the case with the 65C815K, which while a high-end model by TCL’s European standards, doesn’t get the full range of local dimming designs that have been critical to TCL’s success elsewhere. However, this doesn’t mean that the 65C815K can’t continue TCL’s struggles in Europe.
The TCL 65C815K is available in the UK and Australia from a number of retailers, most notably ao.com, and bootskitchenappliances.com in the UK, and thegoodguys.com in Australia. It costs £899 from both UK outlets, and $1,595 from the Australian retailer. It also appears on the TCL website in the EU, so it’s also available in some EU countries.
There are a number of unusual elements to the 65C815K’s design that are quite interesting. First, it has a very clear blue soundbar hanging off its bottom edge. It carries the branding of renowned Japanese audio brand Onkyo, raising hopes that this could be that rarest of things: an affordable TV with a built-in sound system that doesn’t sound terrible.
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The 65C815K is also notable for its screen which is very thin on the outer edges. So much so that you’d be forgiven for thinking it had to be an OLED, not an LCD TV.
The back is suddenly a few inches thicker than those super-thin edges, but even so, this set has a huge amount of extra area. The thicker cover doesn’t just house the processor and display connections; there’s also room for TCL to create a very large rear bass driver – again adorned by the Onkyo logo.
While TV designers usually cringe at hiding speakers as if they’re some kind of dirty secret, I personally have no problem with TCL’s public display of sound quality.
A third uniqueness of the 65C815K’s design is that it rests on three separate legs instead of the usual two. Two of them are directed forward, the third, installed in the middle, is directed back. I’m not convinced that the aesthetic impact of this approach justifies putting a third leg in the setup. At the same time, of course it doesn’t look ugly. It also supports TV build quality which is quite strong with great stability.
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The 65C815K’s main attractions are its use of QLED technology, despite its price tag of just £899, and its Onkyo-designed built-in sound system.
QLED terminology means that it uses quantum dots instead of traditional LCD filters to produce color, opening up the potential of a wider color spectrum. This premium technology is usually only found in 65-inch TVs that cost far more than £899.
Onkyo’s 2.1 sound system delivers 70W of power via two forward-directed drivers, and a large bass radiator at the rear. There’s also built-in Dolby Atmos decoding.
The 65C815K uses edge LED lighting to illuminate the VA-type LCD panel. VA panels promise better contrast than IPS alternatives, but edge lighting typically provides less impressive illumination than LEDs mounted directly behind the screen.
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There’s no real local dimming in the Rand LED lighting system, although the device does feature micro-dimming. This feature actually refers to the way the TV’s processor breaks down the image into small areas so it can more precisely determine the best way to render the final image.
The only other image processing feature that really stands out is Clear Motion, which adds black frames to the image stream to give a more cinematic look to 24p film sources.
Impressively, the 65C815K supports active High Dynamic Range (HDR) formats: HDR10+ and Dolby Vision. Most competing TVs only support one of these formats, or none at all – and as we can see, this dual active HDR support is critical to the 65C815K’s performance.
Connections include three HDMI and two USB, which is reasonable for an £899 65-inch TV. However, there’s no HDMI port that supports the latest gaming features of 4K at 120Hz, variable refresh rates, or automatic low-latency mode switching.
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Of course that doesn’t mean the screen isn’t great for gaming. Not everyone has a PS5, Xbox Series X, or one of Nvidia’s or AMD’s latest high-end PC graphics cards, and the display only takes 16.2 ms to render image data when running in its gaming mode. It’s also currently only premium TVs that tend to support the latest gaming features, so you won’t find support in any of the 65C815K’s competitors for the same price.
One last connection point to note is that the HDMI 65C815K only supports standard ARC systems, not the higher bandwidth eARC which would enable lossless Dolby Atmos passthrough.
TCL has turned to Android TV for its smart TV features. This seems like a pretty reasonable move for a brand that likely won’t have much of a relationship – in Europe at least – with all the major content providers as Google/Android do. The 65C815K’s Android implementation is also good. It runs smoothly, supports Google Chromecast voice recognition and Google Assistant (complete with remote mic), and support for HDR10+ and Dolby Vision means you’ll always get the optimal picture quality any streaming source has to offer. The only major app missing is Apple TV.
The worst example of this mixed bag performance comes from the color. With few sources and settings, the QLED-powered colors are excellent, achieving saturation and volume rarely seen at the 65C815K’s price point. But other times, the color might be better described as ‘off road’.
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Intense colors are best achieved with Dolby Vision and HDR10+ sources. The extra scene-by-scene picture information provided by these two formats seems to aid the Set Rein in its most aggressive color instincts to produce a tone that is as strong as it is believable and balanced. So much so that the images actually look a lot more dynamic and bold than the nice peak rated brightness (for this price level) of around 540 nits you’d expect.
However, without scene-by-scene image data from Dolby Vision and HDR10+ as a guide, the 65C815K’s presets tend to lose the plot. Saturation with industry-standard HDR10 sources, which actually make up the majority of HDR content, is pushed too far, losing subtle shadows and detail in the process. As a result, bright images can look like strange, hand-painted caricatures rather than natural videos.
The peak white parts of the image also lose shadow detail, making it look more like a white hole in the image than the actual part. The skin tone doesn’t look good either; overly saturated tones and a lack of subtlety make people look two-dimensional and unrealistic.
I should emphasize that this color issue only occurs in bright HDR10 scenes/image areas. Dark HDR10 shots and scenes look pretty normal in terms of colors – though, in the end, this only makes the excess in bright scenes all the more striking.
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Luckily, TCL offers some tools to mitigate the worst of its HDR10 playback. My preferred solution was to select Low Power mode, disable Dynamic Contrast, set Micro Dimming to Low, then fiddle with the Saturation, Brightness, and Contrast settings to strike a decent balance between color touches and naturalism.
You can also take a similar approach to the Movie mode settings if you don’t mind colors looking flatter.
However, with both solutions, the brightness will be reduced to around 400 nits if you have done what you need to do to remove all ‘excess’ color.
The 65C815K shows mixed luck with its contrast. Looking at it in a dark room with the out-of-the-box presets, three points of contrast were immediately apparent: two good, one bad.
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On the plus side, the set delivers a decent amount of shadow detail in dark areas. Even if there is a bright object on a dark background, the 65C815K keeps the object bright. It doesn’t dim it as aggressively as, say, Samsung’s non-mini LED TVs.
The problem is that the set’s edge-based lighting system can’t control the light locally, so when you watch a dark scene, especially a dark HDR scene, some areas that are considered dark look brighter than others, even when they shouldn’t. Some of these “cloudy” areas are in the center of the image and are quite large.
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