TCL 65C8K

Having very firmly established itself over the past couple of years as the up-and-coming TV brand to watch, TCL has decided to really push the boat out for the latest version of the C8 TVs that have been particularly instrumental in creating this impression. 

Despite costing a very-reasonable-in-the-circumstances £1599, the new (on sale from August 2025) 65in 65C8K combines such eye-catching features as a phenomenal claimed peak brightness of 4500 nits, miniLED lighting, a local dimming light control engine operating across a massive 1680 separate zones, a new and multi-facetted halo-control technology, and even a new sound system designed with no less than Bang & Olufsen.

It sounds too good to be true - but happily, it isn’t. In fact, the 65C8K’s new bag of tricks helps it deliver a winning blend of spectacle and balance that makes it TCL’s most compelling TV so far.

Picture quality

While my own measurements found the 65C8K peaking at more like 4100 nits rather than the claimed 4500, nevertheless the first thing that strikes me about the 65C8K’s pictures is how intensely bright they are. This is especially obvious in the small, ultra-light highlights of aggressively mastered high dynamic range images - but overall it carries even more weight in the general ‘average’ brightness most HDR images enjoy. Bright daylight HDR shots that fill the whole screen with light enjoy an intensity and vividness that’s rare in the current TV world - and is simply never seen in the otherwise-lovely OLED TV arena. 

There’s nothing uncontrolled about this extreme brightness, either. The brightest areas retain lots of subtle detail rather than looking clipped or bleached, and TCL’s latest dynamic tone mapping system for optimising HDR10 sources to the screen’s capabilities is much more well rounded, balanced and immersive than the brand’s previous efforts.

What’s even more impressive, given this is an LCD TV, is how much intensity the 65C8K manages to retain with bright highlights of dark scenes. Even the small area of white text (“Bel Air, 1926”) against an otherwise fully black backdrop that opens Damien Chazelle’s Babylon on 4K Blu-ray looks intense, punchy and stable, without any sign of the text being dimmed to stop it causing general greyness or light blooming/haloing in the surrounding darkness. Last year’s C855 range suppressed the light haloes associated with local dimming LCD TVs very well, but the 65C8K’s new ‘Halo Control’ system takes things to a whole other level. 

In fact, the general depth and richness of black backdrops, and the most impenetrable corners of dark scenes, is consistently outstanding for a mid-priced 65in TV. There’s way less low-contrast greyness in play here than you see with most LCD TVs - and the intense, believable black colours are delivered with excellent stability, too. The image’s baseline brightness doesn’t noticeably jump up or down during cuts between dark and bright shots, and the control of those 1680 dimming zones is so intelligent and subtle that distracting mid-shot zone adjustments are practically non-existent. Even when a mostly dark shot contains bright objects that move around the screen. 

TCL hasn’t cheated, either, by ‘crushing’ subtle shadow details out of the picture to make it easier for the backlight system to avoid blooming. On the contrary, shadow detail in most picture presets is excellent.

Detail in general is outstanding, in fact. The tiniest textures and most subtle details of native 4K images are all rendered with total authority and precision, creating an intensely direct, realistic, almost 3D experience that doesn’t look forced or noisy. Provided, that is, that you’ve turned off the TV’s motion and, ironically, noise-reduction processing options they can both introduce glitching effects and a slightly laggy feel to the picture. 

TCL has upped its upscaling game for 2025, too, with the 65C8K doing a clearly better job of adding genuine detail to HD sources without exaggerating noise or clumping colours. And talking of colours, the 65C8K’s Quantum Dot colour system delivers a rich and varied enough colour palette to keep up with the set’s extreme brightness, avoiding that faded, washed out look you can get with TVs that push brightness without having the colour range to back that brightness up.

There’s noticeably more control and precision in the way the 65C8K paints its colours than I’ve seen on any previous TCL TV too - a crucial improvement that helps images look much more natural and consistent, even in the default ‘Standard’ preset, as well as playing its part in that profound sense of sharpness and detail I mentioned earlier.

While TCL has also delivered a much more effective suite of picture presets than we’ve seen from it before, there are still a few small foibles to report. For instance, the company hasn’t completely isolated the black bars you get above and below very widescreen films and TV shows, so there’s occasionally a hint of clouding in these bars if a very bright object appears right next to them. This is so faint, though, that it seldom draws your eye away from what you’re supposed to be watching unless you actively look for it. Which nobody but a TV reviewer with too much time on their hands should be doing, of course.

The brightness-limited ‘Filmmaker’ mode and, especially, ‘Dolby Vision Dark’ picture presets can occasionally cause some shadow detail to disappear into the blackness during dark scenes, and the mostly wonderfully watchable ‘Standard’ picture preset can cause dark scenes to take on a slightly bluish tone. Motion, at least with 24fps sources, can look slightly soft compared with the extreme sharpness of relatively static images, and the motion processing options provided to sharpen things up and reduce judder can cause unwanted side effects. Some very difficult shots containing real extremes of light and shade can look marginally cloudy compared with how they might look on a good (and more expensive, of course) OLED screen. And very bright HDR shots can reveal a faint shadowy line down around the image’s extreme outer edges. Again, though, this is faint enough to not draw your eye.

Fortunately TCL has equipped the 65C8K with an impressively wide-ranging suite of picture adjustments with which it’s possible to address many of the preset niggles. Turning off motion and noise-reduction processing can deliver a cleaner, sharper image, for instance, while the blue dark scene ‘Standard’ mode issue can be addressed by either turning off the ‘Dynamic Colour’ feature or, better, making the colour temperature warmer. The ‘Dynamic Tone Mapping’ system, meanwhile, includes helpful options for prioritising detail over brightness (or vice versa) when handling brightness peaks. Personally, I’d stick with the ‘detail’ option.

All of this means, in the end, that between the mostly helpful presets and the options provided for tweaking away issues, you almost have to try to make the 65C8K’s pictures look anything less than excellent. 

Sound quality

The 65C8K’s Bang & Olufsen sound system clearly kicks TCL’s TV audio offering up a couple of gears - but not absolutely everything works out quite as intended.

Starting with the good stuff, the 65C8K’s speakers are powerful and sensitive enough to produce a large sound stage from the Dolby Atmos and DTS:X sound formats the TV supports. This sound stage is packed with detail, too, as improved audio processing and the quality of the new speaker arrangement combine to bring out even the faintest of sounds with remarkable clarity. There’s good precision for the most part, too, in how well the 65C8K places effects around its large sound stage. 

Bass is plentiful without becoming excessive, and it reaches deeper than most TVs without causing the TV cabinet to buzz or the rear-mounted subwoofers to phut or distort. Voices are always clear and intelligible, too.

While the 65C8K’s power helps its sound expand through a growing action or horror scene to a point, though, the sound can fall back in on itself with the most extreme crescendos. Voices can sometimes sound a little detached from the onscreen action too, while peak treble sounds can sound a bit shrill at loud volumes. Sound management can sometimes put too much emphasis - occasionally WAY too much emphasis - on what should only be ambient sounds. 

Overall, the new relationship with B&O has clearly yielded some great benefits for TCL’s TV sound. But there’s still room for improvement if the relationship continues into future years.  

Living with the TCL 65C8K

The 65C8K enjoys a fairly premium design, thanks to its robust build quality, impressively slender metallic screen frame, and attractive brushed metal pedestal-style desktop stand. The screen is a little thicker around the back than some might like, but I personally have no problem with this if it helps a TV deliver the sort of brightness, contrast and sound clarity the 65C8K enjoys. 

The 65C8K’s smart features are delivered by Google TV. This isn’t the most intuitive smart interface around, but the 65C8K’s version runs quite slickly and stably, and TCL has also overcome Google’s usual blind spot regarding the UK’s main terrestrial broadcasters by ensuring availability of the BBC iPlayer, ITVX, All4 and My5 catch up services. There are no Freeview Play or Freely options, though. All the other big streaming hitters, from Netflix and Prime Video to YouTube, Disney+ and Apple TV+, are present and correct.

The 65C8K has plenty to offer gamers as well as movie fans. Two of its four HDMIs can support frame rates up to 144Hz via its ‘Game Master’ setting, and the TV can automatically switch into its fast-response game mode via HDMI’s Auto Low Latency Mode switching features. It can handle variable refresh rates in the HDMI and AMD FreeSync Premium Pro flavours, provides a low-latency ‘Dolby Vision’ game mode functional up to 120Hz, and the time the screen takes to render game graphics when in its ‘Game Master’ mode is just 5.2ms with 4K/120Hz feeds or 13.1ms with 1080p/60Hz feeds. 

The 65C8K can support all four of the key HDR video formats, meaning it will always take in the best version of any content. And finally its premium panel design allows its pictures to retain good contrast and colour even if watched from quite wide angles.

Conclusion

The 65C8K is a statement TV from TCL that proves just how ready, willing and able the brand is to deliver wholesale performance improvements at speed, even working with premium brands as well-established as Bang & Olufsen in the process - and without harming its reputation for offering great value. The way this set manages to get such great results out of so many new fundamental new features and changes to its core panel design at the first time of asking can only bode extremely well for TCL’s future, too. 

Test Samples

Babylon 4K Blu-ray
Damian Chazelle’s painfully misunderstood epic charting the insane excesses and energy of early Hollywood boasts a phenomenally aggressive and challenging 4K Blu-ray transfer packed with both extremely bright daytime scenes and ultra high-contrast dark ‘party’ (alright, ‘orgy’) scenes. Both of which, especially the daytime stuff, look ridiculously, explosively punchy and compelling for a £1599 65in TV.

It (Chapter One) 4K Blu-ray
This is another film that features unusually extreme bright and dark scenes - and again the 65C8K responds to these extremes very well. Dark scenes enjoy convincing black colours without heavily compromising bright highlights or suffering with aggressive backlight blooming issues, while the deliberately exaggerated brightness and colour of daytime Derry looks convincing and rich.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Xbox Series X
Whether you’re playing the spectacularly fast-paced multiplayer or incredibly richly detailed and aggressively rendered campaign - especially the creepy zombie-packed Emergence level - the latest game in the CoD franchise pushes the 65C8K’s gaming chops hard. But it never comes up short, delivering a slick, crisp and immersive experience at all times.

Having woken us all up to its potential for delivering high quality TV performance at great prices with last year’s C855 series, TCL has gone on a full scale engineering bender for 2025’s C8Ks - and the results are a glorious mix of the spectacular and, if you pick the right preset, the remarkably accurate. Its envelope-pushing pictures play as nicely with games as they do video, too.

With its exceptional sharpness, brightness and backlight controls, the TCL 65C8K deserves to be fed with as much 4K and HDR content as possible. So we’d recommend adding ideally a good quality 4K Blu-ray player such as a Panasonic UB820. It also features great gaming support, so look to add an Xbox Series X and/or a PlayStation 5 console to unlock the fullest range of the 65C8K’s capabilities. 

The Xbox Series X and PS5 are both available with built-in 4K Blu-ray players, of course, and at a push the PS5’s drive is good enough to let the console double up as both your 4K disc and game player. The Panasonic UB820 delivers more features, easier control and better performance, though. The Xbox Series X 4K Blu-ray player is not recommended for use with a high-quality screen like the 65C8K.

Adding a Sky Stream or cable TV service can also open up access to more 4K HDR content, as can subscribing to as many 4K/HDR-capable streaming services as you can afford. Netflix and Apple TV+ deliver particularly good streaming picture quality and Dolby Atmos sound.

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