TCL 50C6KS

Introduction

There must be something in the TV water at the moment. No sooner have we had our bang-for-your-buck socks blown off by Sharp’s 70-inch 70GK4245K than TCL rocks up with the 50C6KS.

It’s a 50-inch TV that somehow manages to combine Mini LED lighting and local dimming to deliver outstanding picture quality for less than £400. I’ll have what they’re having…

Price

It’s not unheard of for a 50-inch TV to cost less than £399. TVs with Tivo or Roku operating systems are particularly good at hitting this tasty screen size/price ratio.

I can confidently say, though, that I’ve never previously come across any sub-£400 TV, 50-inch or otherwise, that offers the sort of specifications TCL’s 50C6KS does. Mini LEDs? Check. Local dimming? Check. Quantum Dot colour? Check. Google TV smart system? Of course. It’s worth noting that when it first went on sale this TCL was priced at £549 and has dropped quickly in price since.

High value competition for the 50C6KS comes from the aforementioned £479 Sharp 70GK4245K, the surprisingly competent 50-inch £269 Bush 50QT24SB (both these Sharp and Bush options carry TiVo smarts), and the £499 Amazon 50-inch 4-series Fire TV. None of these rivals boast the sort of specifications the 50C6KS does.

Design

• Slim screen frame
• Appealing gloss finish
• Not slim enough to make a great wall hanging option

You can’t help but notice as you’re attaching the 50C6KS to its simple plasticky feet that its build quality is pretty lightweight. There’s a lot of basic plastic going on here.

Happily, though, the judicious application of a black gloss finish to three sides of the screen frame and a glossy silver finish to the bottom edge disguises the TV’s uninspiring build quality very effectively from a regular viewing distance.

Similarly, the set’s slightly chunky rear end by modern TV standards isn’t particularly noticeable from a normal seating position – unless you’ve hung the set on the wall.

The set’s remote control continues the theme of sneakily hiding a fairly flimsy heart by giving the front edge a brushed finish that at first glance gives it a metallic look far removed from the fairly light plastic that it’s really made of.

Connectivity

• Three HDMI ports
• Two USBs
• Bluetooth (5.2) and Wi-Fi

The 50C6KS is reasonably well connected for such an ultra-affordable TV. Its three HDMI inputs should be enough for most households, even if a fourth always feels welcome these days.

Two USBs are on hand for multimedia file playback duties if you’re into that; and there’s an optical digital audio output for anyone not able or willing to use the eARC capabilities provided by the third HDMI.

There’s also out of the box support for Google Cast and Miracast, with TCL additionally ensuring even this budget TV supports AirPlay 2 and Homekit

User Experience

• Google TV smarts
• Voice control system
• Direct streaming service buttons on remote

How easy to use you find the TCL 50C6KS depends largely on how much you get on with Google TV. Personally I’m not its biggest fan, despite it being much more appealing and stable than its Android TV predecessor; there’s still something a bit cluttered and dictatorial about it.

However… it carries a huge amount of streaming services and apps, and TCL has even managed to work round Google TV’s lack of support with some of the catch up services for key UK terrestrial broadcasters. You don’t get Freeview Play, but all the UK apps most Brits will need can be accessed through their individual apps.

The remote control doesn’t feel very premium to hold, but its layout is pretty ergonomic, and it handily provides direct button access to a handful of the most popular video streaming services.

The 50C6KS’s set up menus are relatively lengthy, but they’re pretty straightforward to follow and understand. And the only reason they’re lengthy is that TCL’s TV has more features and allows users more flexibility than most similarly affordable sets do.

Features

• Local dimming system with 160 zones
• Mini LED backlighting
• Quantum Dot colours

This is where the TCL 50C6KS starts to open up a big lead over basically all rivals in the same price bracket. Starting with its core panel configuration.

It’s a startlingly high-powered LCD TV, boasting features such as a Mini LED backlight, local dimming and a Quantum Dot colour engine – all things that would normally only turn up on significantly more expensive TVs.

The Mini LED backlight can help deliver more brightness and finer light control, the local dimming supports localised lighting across a remarkably numerous 160 separately controlled zones, and the Quantum Dot colour system should open up more subtly rendered colours.

The panel also manages to be one of TCL’s new-for-2025 ‘HVA’ designs. These are based on high contrast (versus the IPS alternative) VA types of LCD panel, but support wider viewing angles than regular VA TVs and seek to reinforce VA’s natural contrast advantage by introducing a fleet of ‘halo control’ systems designed to do away with the blooms of light around stand-out bright objects on locally dimmed TVs.

I won’t bore you all by detailing all of these Halo Control measures, but to give you a flavour of the sort of thing TCL has done there are new micro lenses in the TV’s LCD light path which TCL claims deliver a near 20% reduction in haloing versus previous lenses, eight times more optical stability, and massively more uniform backlighting during dark shots.

All the unexpectedly premium hardware tools the 50C6KS uses are controlled by a new generation of TCL’s AiPQ picture processor, which includes among its talents an improved model for recognising source types and optimising the picture accordingly – if you prefer a machine’s effort-free input to those of your own eyes and a bit of manual set up work.

It almost comes as a shock after all these startlingly high-end features to find that the screen only supports up to 60Hz refresh rates, rather than 120Hz. But I guess something had to give somewhere!

The 50C6KS swiftly gets back to the job of doing more than it really should for its money by supporting all four of today’s key high dynamic range formats: HDR10, HLG, HDR10+ and Dolby Vision.

As well as potentially improving picture quality by supplying extra scene-by-scene picture information to compatible TVs, the support for HDR10+ and Dolby Vision helpfully ensures that the TV will automatically play the best version of any content you feed it.

For voice control smarts, there’s the Google Assistant voice recognition and control system,.

Gaming

• Dedicated Game Bar menu
• Just 9.9ms of input lag in game mode
• Dolby Vision Game mode

The earlier point about the 50C6KS being a 60Hz rather than 120Hz panel matters most to gamers. However good it might be overall for gaming – and it is really good – it can’t give you the joys of playing Call or Duty, or whatever your FPS or racing game of preference might be, at the 120Hz refresh rate delivered by PCs and the top Xbox and PlayStation consoles.

The set supports variable refresh rates up to 60Hz to avoid screen tearing with games that don’t feature locked refresh rates. It will also automatically enter its Game picture preset when a game source is detected, and when in this preset it takes only a seriously speedy (by TV rather than monitor standards, anyway) 9.9ms to render incoming graphics.

Its Dolby Vision support extends to a low-latency Dolby Vision game mode, and the TV presents you with a game-specific onscreen menu when in Game mode providing information on the incoming signal and access to one or two useful gaming aids.

Best of all, the picture quality attributes make the 50C6KS a cracker with video also serve up exceptionally crisp, sharp, vibrant and enticing game graphics that made me miss 120Hz much less than expected.

Picture Quality

• Excellent contrast and backlight control
• Outstanding brightness for its price
• Rich Quantum Dot colours

The 50C6KS improves so much on its predecessor that it’s almost hard to believe they’re from the same brand.

The single most important leap forward comes with the 50C6KS’s handling of dark scenes. The new HVA panel replaces the milky and inconsistent look of its predecessor with depths of black tone that wouldn’t look out of place on more expensive LCD TVs.

These exemplary black levels are delivered with fantastically little fuss. By which I mean that the picture both retains excellent amounts of shadow detailing even in the darkest corners, and suffers scarcely ever with the sort of sudden brightness jumps or distracting dimming zone ‘handovers’ that crop up on more high end TVs.

Making this backlight control from the 50C6KS’s Mini LED and local dimming system combo all the more striking is the way it’s delivered without the TV’s processing engine feeling the need to dim the intensity of bright highlights when they appear against a dark backdrop in order to reduce haloing – while still avoiding haloing!

Even though tests with Portrait Displays Calman Ultimate software, G1 signal generator and C6 HDR5000 light meter show TCL’s budget hero able to hit brightness peaks of just over 1000 nits – way more than you would ever dream of getting from an affordable TV.

The net result of all this is a level of contrast from the 50C6KS I’ve never seen before at this price level. The set’s brightness and contrast feed into an HDR performance the like of which has never been seen at this price point before, either – one which can actually cover the entire light range used by the majority of current HDR content, in fact.

The 50C6KS’s colours thrive on the set’s brightness, too, holding on to full saturations (Calman Ultimate tests show coverage of 93.4% of the DCI-P3 HDR colour gamut) in the brightest shots, rather than starting to look bleached out like many budget TVs do when they try to force their brightness beyond a level their colour systems can cope with.

While the 50C6KS is huge on spectacle for its price, for the most part it doesn’t forget that the subtle things in AV life matter too. So as well as taking care to bring out subtle shading details in dark scenes, it also shows a deft touch with subtle colour blends and tonal shifts, avoiding plasticky skin tones and any sort of flat, cartoonish feel.

The 50C6KS’s colours don’t desaturate badly if you have to watch it from a pretty wide angle, either – another excellent way TCL’s TV scores over so many affordable rivals.

Finally in the positive column, the 50C6KS’s pictures are sharp enough to leave you in no doubt it is a native 4K screen, despite its relatively small size. Motion can look just marginally soft at times, and this isn’t fully fixed by any of the provided motion processing tools. But while this is one of very few noticeable limitations of the 50C6KS, it’s still actually much less aggressive a problem than motion tends to be on budget TVs.

Other small image niggles with the 50C6KS find peak bright areas look a little clipped of details unless you nudge TCL’s Dynamic Tone Mapping tool down from its most aggressive brightness setting when watching HDR10 sources.

The Dolby Vision Dark preset tracks a little too dark and as a result sometimes loses subtle details in very dark scenes. I felt movie playback benefitted from introducing a higher ‘warmth’ colour setting than the default levels used by most picture presets, and on rare occasions what should be a smooth blend of colour in an HDR scene can appear with a faint striping effect.

I’d argue, though, that as well as being readily fixable via the TV’s provided settings in many cases, these flaws are only even noticeable because the quality of nearly everything else about the 50C6KS’s pictures is so high. So honestly, if you let any of them put you off the 50C6KS, you’re crazy.

Upscaling

The 50C6KS converts HD and even SD sources to 4K very well for such a cheap TV. The AiPQ processor seems to do a mid-range TV-level job of spotting and removing noise in lower resolution sources before applying its upscaling system.

The millions of pixels it adds in real time are well calculated enough to ensure that watching SD doesn’t feel at all like a chore, while HD at least looks denser and sharper, even if it isn’t quite crisp and clean enough to pass as native 4K.

Sound Quality

• Crisp sound
• Not the biggest bass

Incredibly given how much else the 50C6KS has already done right, it also shames many TVs costing way more in the sound department.

The good news here starts with its ambitious Dolby Atmos but also DTS Virtual X playback capabilities, which it backs up with impressive amounts of crisp, clean detailing from speakers sensitive enough to pick up even the quietest parts of good movie mixes. In fact, I heard small sound effects on the 50C6KS that I’ve previously only heard before on a few flagship TVs.

The speakers and audio processing seldom lose track of the correct weight any audio detail should have, either, making the resulting busy soundstage always seem convincing and balanced.

The soundstage also enjoys impressive scale for such a small and affordable screen, stretching out comfortably past the TV’s boundaries without starting to sound fragile at its extremes, and always placing effects with compelling accuracy. Including placing vocals so that they seem to be coming from the screen, rather than the speakers around the TV’s edges.

Surprisingly the speakers also avoid crumbling into any major distortions even when faced with Hollywood’s most bombastic soundtrack moments, suggesting that despite the strengths I’ve described they’re still actually running comfortably within their potential limits.

A bit more low frequency heft and depth would have been appreciated, especially as it might have helped counter a tendency for the 50C6KS’s sound to withdraw a little as particularly massive soundtrack moments move towards their climax.

Once again, though, I’m guilty here of making a complaint that might be fair with a mid-range or premium TV, but is pretty much nothing by the standards of the affordable TV world.

Should you buy it?

FAQs