TCL 98Q9BK

Introduction

After years of slow and steady growth in the typical TV screen sizes we home entertainment lovers are prepared to allow into our homes, the past 12 months have suddenly seen sales of 98-inches and more explode.

Why? Because of TVs like TCL’s 98Q9BK. This doesn’t just deliver an epic 98-inches of screen; it also fills those 98-inches with actually good quality pictures for just £3249.

That’s the sort of money some 65-inch TVs still cost. Now turning one of your walls into a TV doesn’t seem so impossible, does it?

Availability

The 98Q9BK is available exclusively in the UK from Costco stores for £3249 – a very aggressive price for such a huge TV.

While you can’t buy a 98Q9BK outside the UK, a model with extremely similar specifications, the 98C765K, is available in other European territories for around €3759.

Design

• Ships with blade-style feet
• VA panel slightly limits viewing angles
• Fairly slender rear for a direct LED TV

The most blindingly obvious thing about the 98Q9BK is how huge it is. The jump in screen acreage from all those 65- and even 75-inch TVs is a sight to behold, fully completing the leap from ‘TV’ to home cinema.

Clearly a TV this large is more than just an imposition on your room decor. Unless your living or theatre room happens to be cavernous, the 98Q9BK becomes pretty much the only thing you see.

While TCL’s big boy ships with a pair of rather basic-looking blade style feet, its surprisingly slender rear for such a huge TV and flat back panel make it quite well suited to wall hanging. Provided your wall, mounting bracket and team you assemble to wall mount it can handle its 55kg weight and general awkward massiveness.

While you’ll struggle to see anything other than its enormous pictures when watching it, TCL has nonetheless gone to the trouble of applying a fairly opulent-looking metallic finish to the TV’s outer edges.

The 98Q9BK uses a VA type of LCD panel, so if you have to watch it from a wide angle you will find its colour saturations and contrast both decreasing slightly. Blooming effects from its otherwise excellent backlight system become more noticeable, too.

This is the way with pretty much all aggressively priced VA panels though, and the 98Q9BK is far from the worst viewing angle offender I’ve seen. Plus, its sheer scale makes it harder for viewers to find themselves at a really substantial angle to the screen.

The screen doesn’t have a light-absorbing filter on it, so while it copes well enough with general ambient light, try not to have a strong light source directly opposite it.

User Experience

• Google TV smarts
• Rather basic remote control
• Voice control support

The 98Q9BK’s interface is built around the Google TV interface, with all the pros and cons associated with that.

On the upside, Google TV is nothing if not rich in content, delivering hundreds of information, gaming and streaming apps and services. Typically, this hefty content list would not include all of the catch up services for the UK’s main terrestrial broadcasters – including the BBC iPlayer.

TCL has worked round this problem by managing to separately carry the Freeview Play service that provides an umbrella interface for all the UK’s main terrestrial TV catch up services.

The 98Q9BK also runs Google TV reasonably slickly, with the menus responding quickly to commands and system crashes being limited to only a couple of instances in the three weeks or so I lived with the TV.

Google TV is also more generally attractive than its Android TV predecessor, feeling at least a bit more like it’s been designed for a TV rather than a smartphone or tablet. I still find the way Google TV presents and organises its content a bit overwhelming and dictatorial, and there isn’t as much scope for customising the home page’s layout as there is with some rival systems.

As usual, the integration of the 98Q9BK’s set up menus into the wider Google TV interface isn’t particularly intuitive. But I guess most people won’t need to delve into the set up menus too often once initial set up is done.

The 98Q9BK’s remote control features plasticky build quality and a large, button-filled design that feels a bit old-school for such a statement product. It does at least carry a mic button, though, so that you can control the TV just by talking to it if that’s your bag. Google Assistant is built in, but it also works with Apple Home devices.

Features

• Handles all four main HDR formats
• High-brightness panel
• Direct LED backlight with local dimming

The 98Q9BK’s 98-inch 4K resolution VA panel can support refresh rates up to 144Hz and is illuminated by a mini LED lighting system backed up by a counted and verified 1000+ dimming zones.

This is an impressive core specification for such an affordable king-sized screen.

It uses this lighting engine to deliver brightness as high as 2100 nits on a 10% HDR test window, too – enough if it’s put to good use by the TV’s HDR system to deliver a potentially seriously punchy and wide-ranging HDR experience. Especially if all those thousand-plus dimming zones enable all that brightness to be accompanied by convincing black tones.

Sticking with the HDR theme, the 98Q9BK can play all four of the main HDR picture formats: HDR10, HLG and the step-up HDR10+ and Dolby Vision formats that add extra scene-by-scene image data to the HDR data stream to help compatible TVs deliver more accurate and dynamic pictures.

A built-in light sensor additionally means the TV can take advantage of the Dolby Vision IQ system, where the premium HDR format can adapt its images to ambient room conditions.

Supporting all four HDR formats means the 98Q9BK can take in the best quality version of any content you send its way. The 98Q9BK uses Quantum Dots to create its colours, too. This should enable it to produce a more vibrant, nuanced and expansive palette of colours than you get with basic RGB filter technology.

Gaming

• Dolby Vision Game mode
• Up to 144Hz support
• VRR support including AMD FreeSync Premium Pro

TCL has been at the forefront of bringing premium gaming features down to more affordable TVs – a trend the 98Q9BK continues.

For starters, the set is capable of handling 144Hz signals if you have a PC capable of outputting such frame rates. Provided that you choose the one HDMI port capable of handling that much data and use the TV’s menus to enable its 144Hz feature. A second HDMI supports 4K up to 120Hz.

The 98Q9BK supports HDR gaming too, including a Dolby Vision Game Mode so that you can game in Dolby’s premium format without having to put up with high lag. In fact, the time the screen takes to render graphics in its Game mode gets down to a very respectable – though not class leading – 17.4ms.

Variable refresh rates are available from 48Hz up, too. In fact, TCL’s giant TV supports the AMD FreeSync Premium Pro standard as well as the basic HDMI VRR format. The TV’s compatibility with HDMI 2.1’s Auto Low Latency Mode (ALLM) feature means it automatically activates its low latency Game mode when a game source is detected, and there’s a dedicated Gaming on screen menu that provides details on the incoming gaming graphics and access to a few gaming aids.

In short, the 98Q9BK does far more than you’ve any right to expect for its money to make gaming on a 98-inch screen every bit as much fun as you might imagine it to be.

Connectivity

• Four HDMIs, two with HDMI 2.1 features
• Two USB ports
• Optical digital audio output

The 98Q9BK is well connected for such an affordable TV giant. There are four HDMI ports, for starters, two with an extensive list of HDMI 2.1 features.

There are also a couple of USB Type A ports for multimedia file playback, an optical digital audio output, a headphone output, and, of course, an RF input to feed the built-in Freeview HD tuner.

Any modern TV worth its salt will also support wireless connectivity. In the case of the Google TV-equipped 98Q9BK you get Google Casting, DLNA, Bluetooth 5.2 and Apple Airplay.

Picture Quality

• Ultra bright, ultra huge pictures
• Godo contrast
• Slightly soft, even with 4K

TCL has pretty much re-written the rulebook over the past couple of years when it comes to the sort of features and performance we can expect from aggressively priced LCD TVs. Can this run of ground-breaking form really extend to a screen as unforgivingly massive as 98-inches, though?

In many ways, yes it can. I was instantly struck by how bright it is. Measurements taken with Portrait Displays’ Calman Ultimate software, G1 signal generator and C6 HDR5000 colorimeter reveal a huge peak light output of 2150 nits on a 10% of screen area test window.

The screen also manages to retain almost 700 nits of light on a 100% HDR test window – and the subjective impact that sort of brightness has when it’s blaring out of a 98-inch screen makes the measured brightness figures feel conservative. You actually feel like you’re in the desert with Mad Max, or exploring the seas and skies of Pandora with the Nav’i.

Far from HDR being exposed as a challenge too far for giant TVs, the 98Q9BK makes you realise that HDR is actually made for big-screen experiences.

Extreme brightness can cause colours to look a bit washed out and/or lots of subtle shading information to flare out of an HDR picture if a TV doesn’t have the colour range to keep all that brightness company.

Here again, the TCL 98Q9BK outperforms expectations. Its Quantum Dot colour system has more than enough range and subtlety at its disposal to keep the brightness suitably vivid company. So you get a vibrant but also natural and nuanced colour palette that helps make HDR images look more realistic. Especially as TCL’s processing is up to the job of marshalling colours into a good mixture of punchy for its Standard preset and surprisingly balanced and nuanced for its Movie mode. 

Calman Ultimate tests reveal that the Movie mode doesn’t track particularly closely to HDR industry standards, despite being the 98Q9BK’s most ostensibly ‘accurate’ preset. Colour Checker and Colour Match tests in Movie mode both reveal DeltaE 2000 average errors substantially outside the three level experts agree is necessary to stop errors from becoming visible to the human eye.

Most people won’t have a professional reference monitor sat alongside their 98Q9BK, though, so unless you have very highly trained eyes you’re more likely to find yourself simply enjoying how good a job the Movie preset does of shifting its focus to trying to render as much of an HDR source’s full light range as the screen can handle.

This means that while the baseline brightness of the Movie mode is a fair bit down on that of the default Standard mode, the Movie preset maintains subtleties of shading and colour in the brightest parts of the picture that tend to be ‘clipped out’ from the Standard setting, which focuses more heavily on HDR’s brighter, richer, shinier elements.

It’s worth noting that even in Movie mode the 98Q9BK still manages to peak at only a fraction under 2000 nits on 10% and 25% HDR test windows.

While I’m on the subject of the 98Q9BK’s different picture presets, and their mostly likeable attempts to satisfy different tastes and needs, I might as well add that with SDR footage the Movie mode actually does get very close to industry standards, recording DeltaE 2000 error levels below 1.5 for all of our colour tests.

The Movie mode’s SDR images look quite a bit brighter than they would if they were 100% focused on the industry standards, I guess. But this actually feels very easy to live with – enjoyable even – when the colour accuracy remains so intact.

Eye-catching and enjoyable as the TCL 98Q9BK’s brightness and colour potency are, especially with HDR, it’s only part of the picture quality equation. Happily, though, the 98Q9BK handles most other parts well, too.

Particularly impressive is how well the TV’s backlight manages to deliver effective black levels and immersive dark scenes despite its high brightness and the unforgiving enormity of its screen. There’s a touch more grey present in dark scenes than you get with TCL’s more high-end TV ranges, but not enough to make such scenes feel flat, hollow or off-colour, and light blooming around stand-out bright objects in the image is impressively faint.

The level of light control isn’t quite as tight as I expected from a TV – even a 98-inch one – that’s using more than 1000 separate local dimming zones. The areas of blooming are so faint that it becomes clear that TCL has opted for a relatively ‘blended’ approach to using all those dimming zones, rather than going for potentially deeper blacks and smaller but more intense areas of blooming.

The more time I spent with the set, the more I felt as if TCL had on balance made the best dimming decision within the context of this 98-inch panel’s overall capabilities.

Aside from the slight infusion of greyness in dark scenes, there are a couple of other issues to mention with the 98Q9BK’s pictures. First, even native 4K images look a little softer than they do both on either smaller TCL TVs and some of the other (more expensive) king-sized TVs I’ve tested.

Second, the combination of the screen’s brightness and size can make judder with 24p sources feel a little strong without using any motion interpolation. But in this case you can improve things by setting the provided judder and blur reduction tools to low-ish influence settings without introducing lots of distracting side effects.

Upscaling 

Despite the 98Q9BK looking a touch soft even with native 4K sources, it’s actually a pretty solid upscaler of HD sources. The results don’t look noisy or processed, and colours don’t appear ‘simplified’ to the point where they become coarse or cartoonish.

Upscaled HD pictures look slightly softer again than native 4K, but arguably that helps disguise the sort of noise and grittiness that often accompanies upscaled images on screens this size.

Standard definition sources are a stretch, honestly – but they’re at least watchable, and precious few king-sized TVs can say much more than that with the same level of source.

Sound Quality

• 2.1 speaker set up
• Integrated subwoofer
• Speakers designed with Onkyo

The 98Q9BK sports a 2.1-channel speaker system designed with audio brand Onkyo – and for the most part the connection with such a renowned audio world partner pays off handsomely.

The sound is both powerful and well dispersed enough to feel as if it belongs with a screen as cinematically huge as 98-inches. There’s nothing brittle or forced about the scale of the audio staging either. Details sound clean without becoming over-bright or harsh, and they’re placed around the screen and surrounding area with reasonable accuracy and dynamism.

Voices usually sound clean without losing context, and there’s enough headroom in the speakers to let them expand their sound quite aggressively when a loud film mix demands it.

The built-in subwoofer is reasonably enthusiastic, without becoming overwhelming or giving in easily to distortions or crackling.

The sub’s sound is a bit raw and basic compared with the other speakers, and while voices are mostly clean some deep male speech can start to become a little muddy and ‘electronic’ sounding.

Overall, though, the 98Q9BK’s sound is good enough to at least tide you over until you can afford to add a good soundbar – and that’s more than fair enough when you’re getting so much TV for so relatively little money.

Should you buy it?