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TCL’s next line of smart TVs is here, with improved processing, generally lower price tags compared to the competition, but also—for some reason—a $27,000 115-inch model that either needs to be mounted or placed on a special floor stand.
TCL’s TVs focus on non-OLED technologies, chiefly quantum dots and micro-LED, but also come with a unique “game accelerator” feature that can optionally double frame rates at the cost of resolution.
TCL’s 2024 S-Class TVs
Value might be TCL’s biggest trick, and the S-Class represents the company’s most affordable displays. 2024’s 720p S2 and 1080p S3 TVs all use basic LED panels with “enhanced phosphors” and no post-processing AI, but the higher-end S4 is now the S5.
It’s a weird flex, akin to that joke about “World War 3 being so big we’re just going to skip straight to World War 4.” You don’t get quantum dot or micro-LED for your upgrade, but there’s a new backlight that ups the TV’s brightness and the promise of an “enhanced color gamut.” More importantly, the S5 comes with the company’s AiPQ processor.
That chip is part of what enables the higher brightness here, and it can also adjust the image for contrast and clarity. In a demo against a competing Sony TV of a similar price point, a nature documentary on the S5 showed greater details in fur, although colors did appear artificially warm during one scene. TCL promised me users can tweak the chip’s settings to their liking.
The AiPQ chip enables game accelerator on the S-Class for the first time, allowing the usually 60Hz TV to cut its 4K resolution in half to play games at up to 120 frames per second. Other smart functions, including various HDR settings and two different features for boosting dialogue in shows, are also new.
The S5 starts at $350 and ranges in size from 43 up to 85 inches.
TCL’s 2024 QLED TVs
The Q-Class is where TCL places the bulk of its marketing, promising OLED-like visuals at a fraction of the price. There are two tricks here, and the first is QLED. This is when the company takes a regular LED panel and places a layer of nanocrystals over it, filtering blue light into other colors to expand the color gamut. It’s not unique to TCL, but companies pull it off to varying degrees of success. In the worst-case scenarios, you lose the contrast OLED TVs are known for, and colors can appear artificially inflated.
TCL has struggled with this in the past, but the company has gone back to the drawing board with its processing, retooling its AiPQ chip for more natural results and adding in a new backlight like on the S5.
The company’s Q65 TV is now quoted as 28% brighter, while the 85- and 98-inch versions of the TV have a 120Hz panel. That also means they can support up to 240 fps gameplay using game accelerator (again, with the resolution cut in half), an especially neat trick that will unfortunately only be usable by players who hook up their PCs to the TV (no home console supports 240 fps gameplay yet).
Above the Q65 is the Q68, which adds in full array local dimming. This allows the TV’s backlight to dim certain parts of the screen individually, allowing for OLED-like contrast.
The Q65 starts at $500 and ranges in size from 43 to 98 inches, while the Q68 starts at $699 and comes in sizes from 55 to 85 inches.
TCL’s 2024 Mini-LED TVs
Finally, there’s Mini-LED, the most premium of TCL’s options. There are two models here—the QM7 and the QM8, with the QM8 stretching up to a ludicrous 115 inches on its highest-end version.
The technology here actually works on the same principle as Apple’s MacBooks, and is about the closest you can get to OLED without actually being OLED. Mini-LED tech essentially breaks your TV’s backlight down into thousands of individual zones, creating a deeper local dimming effect for better contrast. Quantum dot tech is also still in effect here.
Specifically, the QM7 comes with over 1,500 local dimming zones, while the QM8 has over 5,000.
Mini-LED also has one benefit over OLED, in that it can get much brighter without any extra help. The QM7 promises a 20% increase in brightness over its predecessor, for a 2,400 nits peak. The QM8 can reach up to 5,000 nits. OLED TVs can have difficulty in direct sunlight, but that shouldn’t be a problem here.
In addition to reducing eye strain, this can also help picture. In a demo I saw against Sony and Samsung OLED TVs, a scene from the movie Gravity showed a greater degree of stars in the background on TCL’s Mini-LEDs, revealing more of the picture. The OLEDs, by contrast, “crushed the blacks,” meaning they accidentally misinterpreted some of the dimmer stars as just being empty void.
This is aided in part by TCL’s processor improvements, which also enable game accelerator on these TVs, again for a 240 fps picture at the cost of a halved resolution. Other bonuses include new HDR modes, IMAX Enhanced Certification, and built-in Onkyo 2.1 speakers with a built-in subwoofer.
Exclusive to the QM8 are an anti-glare screen, an Onkyo 2.1.1 speaker system (meaning it can also shoot sound upwards), Wi-Fi 6 support and a NextGen tv antenna for 4K over-the-air broadcasts.
The QM7 starts at $1,099 and ranges from 55 to 98 inches. The QM8 starts at $1,999 and can be anywhere from 65 to 115 inches.
The 115-inch model isn’t quite available yet, but given that it costs $27,000, you’ll probably want time to save up, anyway.
