TCL 85C805K

Verdict

TCL continues to shake up the TV world with another absolute bargain – and this one’s big enough to have some quarters of the projection world quaking in their boots.

Introduction

You don’t have to be a home cinema genius to understand the appeal of TCL’s 85C805K. It’s an 85-inch screen driven by Mini LED lighting and hundreds of zones of local dimming for the princely sum of just £1,599.

That’s a price that until recently would have been unthinkable for a TV bigger than 75-inches, never mind one with such a premium picture set up. But is it the king-sized bargain it first appears, or are there catches to be found once you look beyond the screen’s sheer epicness?

Availability

The TCL 85C805K is available in the UK for £1,599 at the time of review. As is common with TCL’s global ranging, there’s no listing for the C805K range in either the US or Australia. Australia has a selection of TCL C8 ranges available, but most are less well specified than the C805K despite some of them having seemingly ‘higher’ model numbers.

The £1,599 price is eye-catchingly low for such a massive screen that uses a combination of Mini LED lighting, local dimming and Quantum Dots to make its pictures. For perspective, there are 65-inch TVs out that cost twice as much. So if TCL’s model proves as good as I’m hoping, it has the potential to be the home cinema bargain of the year.

Design

• It’s big – very big
• Well-made and practical central pedestal stand
• Relatively chunky by today’s standards

The TCL 85C805K basically relies on the shock and awe created by the sheer vastness of its screen to disguise the fact that in some ways it’s not exactly the most glamorous TV.

Its main bodywork is dark and made of (admittedly heavy duty) plastic that TCL hasn’t attempted to disguise with any sort of gleaming metallic surface finish. Its frame is reasonably narrow considering the screen acreage it holds, but its rear sticks out more than most of today’s skinny supermodels.

The TV is mounted on a central pedestal stand, making it easy to place its giant screen on even relatively narrow bits of furniture. This stand boasts a healthily robust metallic design, too.

You can also wall mount the TV provided you have a wall able to take its near 40kg weight. No wall mount is provided, but fitting points are provided on the TV’s rear for a third-party mount in the VESA 600×400 format.

The TV is partnered with a long, thin remote control that while a bit plasticky proves comfortable to hold and pretty easy to learn your way round. Especially as there’s a handy bank of direct streaming app buttons on its lower end.

Features

• 85-inch Mini LED screen
• Hundreds of local dimming zones
• Google TV smarts

Using Mini LEDs to illuminate the 85C805K’s screen instantly gives TCL the opportunity to deliver more brightness and localised light control than you get with most TVs. It’s an opportunity it grabs with both hands by partnering a high claimed peak brightness of 1500 nits with local dimming across 880 separately controlled zones.

Both of these figures are significantly higher than I’d expect to see from such an affordable king-sized TV, raising the prospect of an unexpectedly serious high dynamic range experience. Provided that these core picture elements are controlled well – a job that falls to TCL’s own AiPQ engine, which also takes on such extra features as motion control, noise reduction and colour management.

There’s plenty of colour to manage, too, courtesy of the 85C805K’s use of Quantum Dots to produce its colours rather than a basic RGB filter system. The TV’s VA type of LCD panel may mean the intensity of these colours reduces if you watch at an angle, but on the other hand, VA panels tend to produce better contrast than their wider viewing angle IPS rivals. And for the sort of film fan most likely to be keen on an 85-inch TV, the extra contrast is will likely trump some potential viewing angle limitations.

The 85C805K’s premium features extend to its HDR support, which covers all four of the key home entertainment formats of HDR10, HLG, HDR10+ and Dolby Vision. This means the TV will play the best version of any source you play into it; there’s no forcing you to pick between HDR10+ or Dolby Vision like you would have to if you bought a Samsung, LG or Sony TV.

The 85C805K’s smart features are provided by Google TV, which brings with it the usual benefits of a huge app collection, Google Assistant voice control, and improved menu design versus its Android TV predecessor. It also features the usual Google TV brickbats of a rather unfocused, basic and dictatorial (rather than responsive) content recommendation system, and a number of missing key UK catch up apps – including the BBC iPlayer.

TCL does state that it will send a Roku TV stick to anyone who asks for one, but obviously this isn’t as convenient as all the UK services just being built into the TV as standard.

TCL has done a very good job indeed over the past year or two of embracing video gamers, and the 85C805K continues this theme by supporting 4K streams at 120Hz (actually 144Hz), variable refresh rates in the standard HDMI and AMD FreeSync formats, and achieving a very respectable 13.4ms image rendering time if you select the Game picture preset.

Picture Quality

• Epic proportions
• Excellent contrast and brightness
• Rich colours

The 85C805K suffers with precious few of the weaknesses I’d expected to find with such an affordable king-sized TV – and the resulting images are spectacular.

For starters, this TV is bright. While many what might be considered ‘budget’ TVs struggle to get beyond 600 to 700-nit brightness peaks, TCL’s goliath manages to achieve a whopping 1,350 nits from a white HDR window taking up 10% of the screen. This is enough to achieve a startlingly effective and punchy rendition of high dynamic range images – with the results made all the more spectacular by the fact they’re being delivered on such a grand scale.

The 85C805K retains more than 700 nits of this brightness even when it has to show a really bright full-screen HDR image – a figure which compares handsomely with the 400 nits or so that even the most high-end and cutting edge OLED screens can reach in the same circumstances (though those OLEDs can, of course, deliver pixel level light controls).

The impact and dynamism of these full screen HDR images is truly a sight to behold on an 85-inch screen – and something that should send a shudder down the spine of the ultra short throw projector world.

After all, even the brightest UST projectors can’t deliver HDR with nearly as much impact as this TCL TV can, with its direct LED lighting and local dimming controls. Most UST projectors can deliver pictures up to 100- or even 120-inches, but I reckon there are plenty of home cinema fans who may feel this TCL’s startlingly affordable 85-inches of extra vibrancy and brightness are the more practical and ultimately rewarding route to home cinema heaven.

Brightness, however, is clearly far from the only thing that matters for a compelling home cinema picture. In fact, brightness can actually be a problem if it’s not accompanied by good enough light controls to maintain compelling black levels and dark colours alongside all the gleaming stuff.

Here again, though, the 85C805K delivers the goods to a degree you’ve no right to expect for its combination of screen size and cost. Those 880 separate dimming zones – 10 times as many as on some mid-range LCD TVs – help it produce depths of darkness that remain deep and convincing regardless of whether you’re watching a mostly very dark shot or looking into a dark part of a predominantly bright spot.

Even better, unlike some even quite premium rival locally dimmed TVs, the 85C805K doesn’t need to heavily dim down bright elements when they appear against dark backdrops to avoid distracting ‘blooms’ of unwanted light appearing around the bright objects.

The 85C805K’s light controls are good enough to deliver good amounts of subtle shading detail in dark corners, helping dark scenes look almost as three-dimensional and detailed as bright ones. Colours can become marginally desaturated in dark areas, but seldom enough for you to feel distracted by it unless you’re specifically looking for it.

Colours in bright scenes are vibrant but also refined and balanced, as the combination of the screen’s Quantum Dots and solid AiPQ processing help the 85C805K avoid the common affordable TV issue of colour saturations becoming washed out in the brightest HDR areas.

I would suggest avoiding the TV’s Dynamic mode, since this pushes colour saturations so hard they no longer look credible. Otherwise, colour is another area where the 85C805K performs well beyond its price level.

Add to all the above enough dimming zone sophistication to avoid inconsistency and instability when handling slight shifts of both local and overall brightness with dark scenes, and you’ve got a picture that is almost scarily easy to become immersed in. For games as well as films.

This is not to say that TCL’s affordable behemoth is a limitation-free zone. While colours are bold but still balanced, for instance, they can lack a little finesse. Especially with skin tones, which can sometimes look a touch too smooth and monotone. Though I’d take this over the blocking and noise some other similarly value-based TVs can suffer with.

The picture isn’t quite as sharp as some premium big-screen TVs, either – at least with video (rather than gaming) imagery. Some of this is down to the slightly lack of colour finesse I just mentioned, some of it is down to slight motion blur, and some of it is down to the 85C805K’s upscaling of non-4K sources not being quite as powerful and clever at removing noise while adding details as that of some of the TV world’s most premium sets.

But honestly, this is all only to be expected given the 85C805K’s price, really – and while its pictures might not be quite as emphatically crisp as those of some high-end rivals, the slight softness isn’t even close to becoming a serious distraction.

More distracting is the reduction in contrast and colour saturation you see if you watch the 85C805K from much of an angle, and the screen’s tendency to be quite reflective of strong light sources in your room. Both of these issues can be avoided by just sitting as straight on to the screen as you can and keeping the lights low for serious movie nights.

Sound Quality

• 2.0 speaker system designed with Onkyo
• 30W total power output
• Good volume and sound stage projection

While the 85C805K’s built in audio system isn’t as powerful or delivered through as many channels as some of TCL’s more premium models, it still delivers enough scale and power to give its giant pictures more than adequate company.

Designed in conjunction with audio specialist Onkyo, the sound stage spreads comfortably beyond the boundaries of the TV’s physical bodywork while also for a 2.0-channel speaker set up, managing to deliver a noticeable vertical layering effect that helps Dolby Atmos soundtracks sound bigger and cleaner.

There’s enough power behind the sound staging to ensure that neither the outer edges nor the brightest trebles sound thin or vague, while the sound management is clever enough to lock dialogue to the screen even when the rest of a sound mix is being spread far and wide.

The lack of a dedicated bass speaker means low frequencies don’t reach as deep or stand as strong in the mix balance as I’d ideally like them to. Though the mid-range is open and expansive enough to stop even brutally loud action scene crescendos from sounding thin, harsh or congested.

My main complaint about the TCL 85C805K’s sound is that there’s a slightly coarse feeling to it; a slight raggedness, at least at high volumes, that suggests the speakers aren’t particularly refined and are being pushed right to the limit of their capabilities. They seldom push fully past that limit, though, to the point where really stark distortions kick in.

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FAQs

What is Mini LED lighting?

A system of lighting TVs that uses much smaller LEDs than usual, to deliver potential brightness, contrast and energy advantages.

What gaming features does the TCL 85C805K support?

The 85C805K supports 4K at 120Hz, 4K at 144Hz, variable refresh rates, HDR gaming (including a Dolby Vision game mode) and auto low latency mode switching.

What smart system does the TCL 85C805K use?

Google TV – and this is not backed up as it on some other brands by the Freeview Play app to bring onboard a few UK catch up services Google TV does not carry as standard.