Verdict
TCL’s new flagship TV goes into innovation overdrive to deliver a high-end performance at a mid-range price
-
Spectacularly bright, colourful images -
Excellent local dimming system -
Great price for what’s on offer
-
Only two HDMI inputs deliver full gaming features -
Audio system sometimes loses focus -
No support for Freely or Freeview Play
Key Features
-
Advanced local dimming
The 65C8K carries 1680 individually controlled dimming zones to control the light seen on the screen -
Mini LED lighting
Lighting its screen with much smaller LEDs than regular LCD TVs use gives the 65C8K even more granular control over how it lights its pictures -
Halo Control technology
Refers to a roster of new mainly hardware innovations designed to take on distracting light blooming around bright objects
Introduction
I’ve already been wowed recently by both a 98-inch model from TCL’s new C7K range and a 50-inch model from TCL’s C6KS range – so you can hardly blame me for being excited at the prospect of what TCL’s premium C8K TVs might be able to do.
Especially since these TVs deliver the most extreme version – for the UK, anyway – of TCL’s new CrystGlow WHVA panel design and suite of Halo Control technologies. Can the 65-inch 65C8K live up to the hype?
Price
After many years of critical and commercial success in the US, TCL’s 2023 C845K TVs were the first to really establish the brand as a serious force in Europe, delivering an irresistible combination of strong features and great picture and sound quality for a remarkably aggressive price.
Happily the 65C8K picks up the baton from that pivotal moment in TCL’s history and runs with it, providing a substantial and ambitious leap forward in TCL’s TV technology plus features galore for just £1299.
Similarly well-specified rivals in the same price ballpark are understandably few and far between. Sony’s 65-inch Bravia 5 just about fits the bill, though this model currently costs £200 more than the 65C8K, or there’s the 65-inch version of Philips OLED760 range, which remarkably delivers a 65-inch OLED screen for actually £50 less than the 65C8K.
Design
- ‘ZeroBorder’ frame
- 360-degree design approach
- Centrally mounted plate-style desktop stand
The 65C8K looks and feels like a flagship TV. For starters, while TCL is slightly optimistic in describing its design as ‘ZeroBorder’, the frame around the screen really is impressively thin. And there’s no noticeable ‘inner border’ around the picture within the frame, either. This really does help focus you on the picture rather than the piece of hardware making it.
It’s reasonably trim and flat round the back too, making it a neat wall hanging option. Though it also boasts a 360-design for people who want their TV in the middle of the room for some reason, courtesy of a neat grid pattern etched into its rear panel.
Even the top edge is a stylish affair thanks to its combination of a thick-ish band of metallic silver wrapped around the screen and a horizontal grille-covered deeper section under which the TV’s up-firing speakers lie. Two more meaty circular mid-range drivers are built into the rear, too, and the whole thing sits on a well-built and attractive brushed metal central pedestal stand.
Build quality, finally, is excellent, as my aching back confirms.
Connectivity
- Four HDMIs, two with full 2.1 features
- Optical digital audio output
- Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.4, Apple AirPlay
The 65C8K is decently rather than spectacularly well connected. At first glance it seems to offer everything you would hope for from a premium TV, including four HDMI inputs, a USB 2.0 port, and an optical digital audio output.
It turns out, though, that only two of the four HDMIs are full bandwidth v2.1 ports able to support such gaming features as 4K at 120 and 144Hz. This will likely be enough for most households, but Samsung and LG TVs from the mid-range up offer full bandwidth on all four HDMI inputs these days.
The connections are backed up by the inevitable Wi-Fi and Bluetooth support, plus Google Cast and Apple AirPlay 2.
User Experience
- Google TV smart system
- Google Assistant voice control
- All four HDR formats supported
The 65C8K uses Google TV as its smart platform of choice. This is now bolstered by TCL in the UK, happily, by individually onboarded catch up apps including BBC iPlayer, which Google TV typically has a problem with.
Where there’s Google TV you also find the Google Assistant voice recognition system, with its ability to both control the TV and give you a shortcut way to hunt down content. This can work ‘hands free’ on the 65C8K too, so you can still chat to the TV even if you can’t put your hands on the remote.
The 65C8K’s set up menus are quite long and option-packed, as you would expect of a premium TV. Aside from occasionally lapsing into ‘engineering jargon’, the menus are cleanly enough presented and tidily enough organised to remain accessible to even the most technophobic user.
One last nice usability touch on the 65C8K is its ability to always play the best version of any content it’s presented with without any manual effort required from the viewer, thanks to its universal high dynamic range format support. HDR10, HLG, HDR10+ Adaptive, Dolby Vision IQ… it’s all gravy to the 65C8K.
Features
- WHVA CrystGlow panel, including Halo Control tech
- Google TV smart system
- Bang & Olufsen-designed audio system
As well as covering all the key picture and sound features, the 65C8K goes a bundle on new hardware innovations. This is much more than just the usual annual evolution we usually get in the TV world.
At the heart of everything is a new CrystGlow WHVA panel. This encapsulates a whole roster of different LCD panel elements introduced to improve everything from contrast and brightness to colour, onscreen reflections, viewing angles, clarity and even the TV’s design.
The way the picture pushes right up to the ultra-thin screen frame, for instance, is a result of the new WHVA CrystGlow panel, while a new aerospace-grade aluminium alloy bezel has been introduced to deliver the high build quality that’s so obvious when you’re setting the TV up.
A new anodized ceramic film element together with a new second generation of Gate-On-Array (GOA) technology improves the screen’s light stability by a claimed 40%, while more reflective optical materials are claimed to boost the C8K series’ brightness efficacy by a massive 97%.
A new low-reflectivity film on the screen reduces the intensity of reflections from bright objects in the room; colours retain their saturations when the screen is viewed from a wide angle 40% better than on typical VA-type LCD TVs; and contrast is claimed to have been improved by a factor of five over IPS-type LCD TVs, with TCL quoting a seriously promising native contrast ratio of 7000:1.
A subset of the WHVA CrystGlow features is focused on tackling the distracting backlight blooming/haloing around bright objects so often seen with LCD TVs which, like the 65C8K, use local dimming systems to enhance contrast. For one thing the 65C8K carries an impressive 1680 separately controllable light zones, which immediately reduces the amount of screen area blooming might stray over.
A new super-condensed Micro Lens arrangement works in tandem with a new light-emitting chip in the C8K panels to direct light go only where it’s supposed to go, both increasing the intensity of highlights and reducing haloing and general greyness with dark picture areas. TCL also claims its new hardware can achieve an eye-popping – especially for a £1299 65-inch TV – 4500 nits of brightness.
Colours are bolstered by the use of a Quantum Dot colour system (though this is something TCL has been doing on most of its TVs for a while now), while a splendidly named Dynamic Lighting Bionic Algorithm is reckoned to better optimise lighting details for both SDR and HDR content, providing more intensity to bright highlights and better consistency, subtlety and clarity in darker areas.
Improved transient response is said to virtually eliminate lag in the backlight’s response to picture changes, enhancing clarity and reducing clouding and uniformity errors in dark scenes.
I could go on (and on), but hopefully you’ve got the idea by now. The 65C8K really is a substantially different TV to its predecessor – even though its price is more or less the same.
The many and varied new hardware elements behind the 65C8K’s pictures are controlled by a new more powerful generation of TCL’s AIPQ processor, with new AI processing also extending its tendrils into a new AI Art system that helps you pick your favourite digital artworks to use as screensavers, and a new AI picture mode that recognises different source types and optimises elements of the picture accordingly.
Other picture modes include a Filmmaker Mode designed to deliver artistic intent at the press of a button, and support for the IMAX Enhanced format found on some Marvel films on Disney+ and a handful of 4K Blu-rays.
The last big change the 65C8K introduces over its TCL predecessor comes with its audio system. Out is its previous partnership with Onkyo. In is a startling new collaboration with ultra-premium Danish AV brand Bang & Olufsen.
This has resulted in a completely redesigned 85W multi-channel audio system complete with four independent sound chips, premium speaker designs with high energy voice coils and clarity-enhancing Rare Earth neodymium Iron Boron magnets, plus that previously mentioned up-firing channel for overhead effects placed under the TV’s top edge. Not surprisingly with upfiring speakers in play, the 65C8K can decode and play Dolby Atmos and DTS Virtual-X soundtracks.
Gaming
- 4K/144Hz support, with variable refresh rates
- Special Game Bar menu
- Input lag of 13.1ms in Game Mode
Aside from only supporting its most cutting edge gaming features on two of its four HDMI inputs, the 65C8K is an excellent TV for gaming.
For starters, it can cover frame rates even with 4K resolutions right up to 144Hz – as well as a crazy 288Hz at lower resolutions via TCL’s Game Accelerator system. Variable refresh rates are supported all the way up to these huge frame rate extremes, including in the AMD FreeSync Premium Pro format.
The TV can detect when a game source is received and switch to its fastest responding Game picture mode automatically, and in that mode it takes 13.1ms to render graphics. There’s a Dolby Vision Game mode to ensure you can enjoy low latency gaming in Dolby Vision on PCs or the Xbox Series X, and you can call up a dedicated Game Bar menu when using a game source where you can check up on the details of the incoming gaming signal and call in a few onboard gaming aids, such as a superimposed crosshair and brightened dark scene rendering.
The 65C8K’s game-specific features dovetail beautifully with the talents of its new premium LCD panel technologies to deliver fantastically immersive, responsive, rich and detailed gaming worlds, regardless of what sort of games you’re into.
Picture Quality
- Outstanding brightness and contrast
- Vibrant but balanced and realistic colours
- Filmmaker mode delivers instant and excellent accuracy
Having been royally impressed by 98C7K and 50C6KS TCL TVs, it’s not exactly shocking to find the higher-end 65C8K continuing the brand’s outstanding run of 2025 form.
Basically the 65C8K takes everything that made the 98C7K special and dials it up to another level. Starting with its black level and contrast performance, which is taken to a masterful level for this price point by reducing potential backlight blooming/haloing even more than the 98C7K did. Despite bright highlights being even brighter than they were on that super-sized screen.
While the 65C8K didn’t quite achieve the 4500 nits TCL claimed during my own tests with Portrait Display’s Calman Ultimate software, G1 signal generator and a Klein K10-A light meter, the 65C8K’s brightness did still measure in at a seriously mammoth 4100 nits on a 5% test window in the TV’s Standard preset.
And this held up at pretty much bang on 4000 nits on a 10% window, and still sustained nearly 800 nits even with an HDR window that fills the entire screen.
These really are huge numbers for any TV, never mind one as affordable as the 65C8K – and the intensity of contrast and HDR effect they can achieve is merely underlined by the TV’s outstanding light control ensuring that the brightness of light highlights doesn’t have to be dimmed to suppress backlight haloing.
Even in the TV’s Filmmaker Mode, which delivers some of the most accurate colour measurements for HDR that I’ve ever seen (Delta E 2000 Average errors score at just 1.2 or less across the board with all our Calman Ultimate Grayscale and colour accuracy tests), brightness still hits peaks of 3400 nits on a 10% test window.
The result is arguably the most consistently bright and dynamic Filmmaker Mode I’ve seen on any TV, even the latest premium OLED models – yet as the colour accuracy measurements show, the dynamics don’t feel like they’re costing the picture anything when it comes to subtleties of shading or colour balance.
While its Filmmaker Mode looks unusually spectacular, the spectacle ramps up a few notches further in the TV’s Standard mode. While this does significantly reduce the picture’s accuracy, the mountain of new hardware and improved processing TCL has developed is allowed to let rip while still producing a picture that feels balanced, subtle and three-dimensional, with no real colour or backlight ‘nasties’ to break your immersion.
In other words, regardless of whether you prefer your pictures to really push your TV to its performance extremes or you favour accuracy and artistic intent, the 65C8K has you covered to an extent that makes its £1299 price look very attractive indeed.
I’m not done with the good news yet, either. The mostly (more on this qualification in a moment) outstanding colour and contrast performance holds up remarkably well if you have to watch the screen from an angle, despite the core panel tech being VA rather than IPS, and images looks mesmerisingly sharp, textured and dense. There’s never the slightest doubt that this is a native 4K display.
Motion is expertly handled with 24fps film sources. Even without any motion processing in play judder feels much more natural than I would have expected with such an intensely bright HDR display, but the most subtle and cinematic of TCL’s numerous motion processing options (not including the Medium motion processing the Standard mode defaults to!) manage to refine judder down a little without generating excessive unwanted processing side effects or turning films into soap operas.
My issues with the 65C8K’s pictures are limited and usually fixable. The worst one is that using the default Standard mode settings, while the image’s brightness and dynamic range is huge and expertly controlled, colours can look a touch washed out compared with how they look in the set’s Filmmaker and especially Movie modes – or against the Standard mode of TCL’s latest C7K step down models, come to that.
This little desaturation doesn’t stop pictures still looking spectacular, but I’d recommend using the colour temperature setting to make pictures a little warmer to counter the issue and reduce a slight out-of-the-box blue undertone Standard mode images otherwise have.
The subtlest of shadow details can occasionally disappear into the TV’s excellent black levels, and I’d recommend using the ‘Balanced’ dynamic tone mapping setting over the ‘Brightness’ preference option if you want pictures to retain the best detailing in the brightest parts of the picture.
Finally, brilliant though the 65C8K’s backlight and halo controls are, there can still occasionally be a bit of light leakage into black bars above and below ultra wide screen presentations. But even on the rare times these appear, they’re typically subtle enough not to distract you from the main action you’re supposed to be focusing on.
Upscaling
- Strong upscaling performance
- Not as deft as premium options from others
Not surprisingly given how well its new hardware and processing elements coalesce in every other picture area, the 65C8K proves e a strong upscaler of sub-4K sources.
Detail and sharpness levels are not just maintained but enhanced without any source noise being exaggerated, and colour balances and black levels are successfully retained as the AiPQ processor figures out what the millions of extra pixels it needs to create in real time should look like.
The results aren’t quite as deft, natural and insightful as those of the upscaled pictures from top-tier sets from Sony and Panasonic in particular, perhaps, but it’s a much closer thing than you might expect given the 65C8K’s price.
Sound Quality
- Excellent clarity and detailing
- Can go impressively loud
- Lacks a little bass oomph
TCL’s relatively top-tier TVs have sounded pretty good to me for the past couple of years, honestly – but that hasn’t stopped an ambitious brand wanting to step things up in the audio department for 2025 in much the same fundamental way it’s shaken up its screen hardware.
And if you’re going to shake things up in a positive way, working with one of the AV world’s most respected and premium audio brands, Bang & Olufsen, sure feels like a positive step to make.
In some ways the B&O collaboration delivers some spectacular pay offs. The clarity and accuracy of the detailing the speaker array pulls out of even the densest film soundtracks is up there with the best I’ve heard from an integrated TV speaker system – and the speakers have enough power and headroom not to sound harsh or shrill even with the most peaky of high frequency sounds.
Details are well placed too, especially as the speakers are able to project their sound an enticing distance beyond the screen’s left, right and even top edges without the sound stage starting to sound incoherent. Dialogue also sounds convincing, remaining at the heart of the mix and typically sounding rich in context.
While the almost hi-fi nature of the 65C8K’s sound is something to behold, though, it is a bit lacking in bass. What low frequency there is reasonably clean and lively, but it doesn’t extend down to the sort of deep frequencies a soundstage as otherwise powerful and pristine as this one really needs.
As a result, those beautifully crisp and clear details and treble sounds can sometimes appear over-exposed, while some supposedly background, ambient sounds can end up drawing too much attention to themselves.
Should you buy it?
Its picture quality is phenomenal for its money
A massive reworking of its core panel and significant processing improvements have resulted in a spectacular but also refined picture that punches miles above its price weight.
Only two of its HDMIs support full gaming features
If you’re lucky enough to have more than two cutting edge gaming devices, the provision of only two 4K/144Hz capable HDMIs could be a problem. Though you’d only have to swap the HDMIs over, of course
Final Thoughts
TCL really is on a roll this year. The C8K TVs are currently looking set to be the most premium models for the UK from TCL’s 2025 range, and they affirm their flagship status with a picture quality leap over their predecessors that’s every bit as full-blooded and comprehensive as the leaps we’ve seen in recent days with the step down 98C7K and crazily affordable 50C6KS.
The fact that TCL has managed to deliver so much improvement without significantly ramping up the 65C8K’s price should be as terrifying to many of its rivals as it is gratifying to increasingly hard up home cinema fans.
How We Test
The TCL 65C8K was tested over a period of two weeks in both a blacked out test room and a regular living room environment. It was used extensively during multiple day- and night-time conditions, in each of which it was put through its paces with everything from familiar 4K and HD Blu-rays as well as 4K and HD video streams and regular digital broadcasts.
I also experimented extensively with the TV’s provided picture settings, to make sure we got pictures looking as the TV could make them look.
Extensive gaming tests with both a PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X were carried out too, using a mix of different game types, and finally the 65C8K was tested for both SDR and HDR playback in multiple presets using Portrait Display’s Calman Ultimate software, G1 processor and C6 HDR5000 colorimeter.
- Tested over two weeks
- Tested with real-world content in lab and living room setups
- Benchmarked with Portrait Displays Calman Ultimate Software, G1 signal generator and Klein K10-A colorimeter
- Gaming input lag was measured with a Leo Bodnar signal generator
FAQs
This refers to a new suite of LCD hardware improvements TCL has introduced across many of its 2025 TVs that’s designed to suppress light blooming issues around bright objects.
The 65C8K supports 4K at frame rates up to 144Hz, 288Hz refresh rates at HD resolution, auto game mode switching, and variable refresh rates including the AMD FreeSync Premium Pro system. There’s also a dedicated game menu with incoming signal information, and tools such as a superimposed crosshair, and ultra wide aspect ratio support.
The 65C8 supports HDR10, HLG, Dolby Vision, and HDR10+ – as well as the IQ and Adaptive versions of the latter two formats, which adapt pictures to ambient light conditions.
Test Data
| TCL 65C8K | |
|---|---|
| Input lag (ms) | 13.1 ms |
| Peak brightness (nits) 5% | 4100 nits |
| Peak brightness (nits) 2% | 2200 nits |
| Peak brightness (nits) 100% | 790 nits |
| Set up TV (timed) | 360 Seconds |
Full Specs
| TCL 65C8K Review | |
|---|---|
| UK RRP | £1299 |
| USA RRP | $1699 |
| CA RRP | CA$1999 |
| AUD RRP | AU$2495 |
| Manufacturer | TCL |
| Screen Size | 64.5 inches |
| Size (Dimensions) | 1435 x 368 x 861 MM |
| Size (Dimensions without stand) | 824 x 1435 x 51 MM |
| Weight | 21.1 KG |
| Operating System | Google TV |
| Release Date | 2025 |
| Resolution | 3840 x 2160 |
| HDR | Yes |
| Types of HDR | HDR10, HLG, HDR10+ Adaptive, Dolby Vision |
| Refresh Rate TVs | 48 – 144 Hz |
| Ports | Four HDMI inputs (two with full HDMI 2.1 features), 1 x USB 3.0, Ethernet, RF input, optical digital audio output |
| HDMI (2.1) | eARC, ALLM, VRR, HFR |
| Audio (Power output) | 85 W |
| Connectivity | Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Google Cast, AirPlay 2 |
| Display Technology | Mini LED |
