I’ll admit it: when I used to think of premium televisions, I’d default to big brands like LG, Samsung, Sony and Panasonic. It’s not that I wasn’t aware of the many alternative brands out there but, in my mind, if you wanted premium pictures, those mainstream brands were the ones to go for. That’s no longer the case.
Increasingly, brands like TCL and Hisense have been taking the fight to the industry giants, often delivering sets that can rival them for color, clarity and brightness for less money. That piqued my curiosity, so when I saw my colleague and TV Hardware Staff Writer James Davidson had given TCL’s 65-inch mini-LED screen 4.5 stars in his TCL C8K review, I decided I had to check it out.
My last TV purchase was firmly from a mainstream brand. I bought the Panasonic HX800 back in 2020 – despite a list price of £899 (around $1,200 / AU$1,810) for the 50-inch version, it was reduced down to around £650 (around $870 / AU$1,310), making it a real steal. Conversely, when I recently picked up the 65-inch TCL C8K (or TCL QM8K as its known in the US), it had a list price of $2,499.99 / £1,599 / AU$2,495, making it much pricier in terms of outlay. However, I’d argue it’s crammed with upgrades that make it worth the extra spend, especially as similar quality would cost me significantly more.
TCL C8K vs Panasonic HX800: bright spark
Naturally, as this was my first time owning a mini-LED TV, the first thing I noticed was that screen. Calling the TCL C8K ‘bright’ hardly does it justice – it’s incandescent. Out of the box, it can hit an HDR peak brightness of 4,500 nits. While that’s with its Boost peak brightness mode enabled, that is impressively bright for a mid-market TV, even beating the 2,086 nits of Samsung’s flagship mini-LED TV for 2025, the QN90F.
Another factor I’d say gives it the edge over my older Panasonic HX800 is its contrast. Thanks to that mini-LED tech, it offers discrete dimming zones totaling 1,680, compared to the HX800’s edge-lit design, while also rocking both HDR10+ and Dolby Vision. As a result, the range between dark and light honestly blew me away – while watching Blue Planet 2, the bold contrast between a cuttlefish’s scintillating zebra stripes took my breath away. Yes, I might get an even bolder contrast from an OLED but possibly not this level of brightness, making the C8K a worthy investment.
Color is also an area in which the C8K shines – quite literally – thanks in no small part to its impressive Quantum Dot colour system. During our testing, the TCL’s color gamut was able to hit 96.8% of the DCI-P3 and 78.8% of the BT.202 color spaces, which is excellent coverage for a TV at this price point.
From my perspective, it feels like a huge upgrade over my five-year-old HX800. While the Panasonic always impressed me with its faithful color that aimed to reproduce filmmakers’ original intent, the C8K is lush and vibrant. When I watched The Green Planet, the shock of hot pink in the underwater forests of Macarenia in Colombia’s Caño Cristales really imprinted itself on my retinas – the TCL offers a lot of moments of eye candy like this.
TCL C8K vs Panasonic HX800: it’s play time
Sound still can often feel like an afterthought for many TV brands, with them offering thin, insubstantial built-in sound for their sets. Fortunately, I’ve been pretty lucky on this front – Panasonic is one of the few manufacturers that ensured its cheaper TVs produced at least decent sound.
And with the C8K, TCL has gone further: developed by premium audio brand Bang & Olufsen, its soundsystem has serious presence and impact. In fact, during late night gaming sessions, it might have a little too much oomph for its own good: it took me quite a long time to find the right combo of settings to lessen the massive thuds and smashes of spells and counters hitting during Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, for example.
Probably the only area where the C8K’s sound lets it down is in when it comes to the width and height of its soundstage. Despite the inclusion of its separate ‘sky channel’ for pumping sound vertically off the ceiling, I honestly could not hear much arriving from outside of the area of the screen. That’s not a huge failing in my book, as getting TVs to recreate convincing spatial audio effects is pretty tricky – while there are options that can smash out convincing Dolby Atmos, like the Panasonic Z95B or Sony Bravia 9, I still wouldn’t say immersive sound is a given on most sets, whether it’s from a challenger or a mainstream brand.
The C8K’s gaming features have also been a significant upgrade for me, as it’s absolutely crammed with them. Given I plug my gaming PC straight into my living room TV, features like 4K@120Hz and VRR make my games run silky smooth, while ALLM reduces how long it takes for any inputs to register on screen. While you’ll get these features from most mainstream brands, the TCL offers them across all four HDMI 2.1 ports, which is not always a guarantee with cheaper TVs. That’s fantastic, as it means if I ever want to pick up a current-gen console, I’ll be able to plug both that and my PC in at the same time without having to constantly swap cables.
TCL C8K vs Panasonic HX800: the smart set
Even compared to the Panasonic HX800, the TCL C8K is crammed full of smarts. However, some of these features aren’t quite as razor sharp as those offered by big-name brands. Unfortunately, I do feel this is one area where economies of scale can favor the mainstream brands like LG and Samsung.
First off, I’d describe the C8K’s upscaling as decent, rather than exceptional. Don’t get me wrong: HD content often looks very palatable, even if it doesn’t quite have the same gorgeous richness as 4K content. But while the HX800 made a surprisingly sophisticated stab at polishing up SD content, the C8K seems to struggle to thread the needle between poorly defined details and over-sharpening edges into cut glass.
Part of the reason for this in my opinion is that mainstream big brands have some serious AI punch to put behind upscaling. Both Panasonic and LG have spent years now honing their upscaling algorithms and it shows – there seems to be far more AI-driven interpolation going on to smooth over gaps in missing data from low-resolution sources. While TCL has done some impressive work elsewhere on boosting color and brightness, to me it seems a little bit behind on the AI arms race.
I’d also say that its operating system can be a bit of a mixed bag. It’s miles ahead of the one I’ve been used to using on the Panasonic HX800 – although that’s partly because comparing TV interfaces from 2020 and 2025 is very much comparing apples and user-unfriendly oranges. Built on the Google TV OS, it allows me to access TV shows from a range of apps on my home screen, resume previous watches and see suggestions, all things that were bafflingly lacking in the older Panasonic OS.
Unfortunately, the version of Google TV packaged up with the C8K still has odd oversights that I find surprising these days. For example, it doesn’t offer full access to the Google Play Store, meaning there were some UK streaming apps I simply couldn’t access, despite the fact their own sites listed them as available on Google TV. Yes, I could sideload these or load them onto a streaming stick but the point of a smart TV interface is to avoid this kind of hassle.
I might have found this less of an inconvenience if it wasn’t for one other issue. During setup, Google TV doesn’t shy away from talking about how seamless its AirPlay connectivity is. So I thought this would give me a handy workaround, allowing me to stream any missing apps directly from my phone. Unfortunately, try as I might I could not get AirPlay to detect the TV as a source – even once it was setup via HomeKit, all the settings were enabled and everything was on the Wi-Fi, I still could not get it to appear in the list of sources, something I’ve never experienced with AirPlay before.
This might be the biggest issue with adopting a challenger brand in my mind. TCL has made truly impressive headway in beefing up things like brightness, bold colors and bassy sound because investing in these areas are the most immediately appreciable ways it can compete with the industry giants. Most of us see a gorgeously bright and vibrant screen in a showroom and we’re blown away by the performance a challenger can eke out for a relatively modest price. By contrast, unimpeachable software and incremental AI improvements represent more marginal gains that may not be the first choice for investment when trying to create premium performance for a competitive price.
Don’t get me wrong: none of this means I don’t love my new TCL C8K. It’s truly stunning, well designed and offers many of the features I’d expect from the biggest brands at a price that’s just that little bit affordable. But the big brands still absolutely have a place in the market.
The best TVs for all budgets
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josh.russell@futurenet.com (Josh Russell)
