276°
Posted 20 hours ago

TCL C841K 55-inch Television, Mini LED, HDR 2000 nits, Quantum Dot, Full Array Local Dimming, IMAX Enhanced, 144Hz VRR, Dolby Vision & Atoms TV Powered by Google

£109.995£219.99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

While the TCL C641K focuses on delivering impressive visuals, it focuses on audio. It features advanced audio technologies to create a captivating soundstage. The television supports Dolby Atmos, which provides immersive and multi-dimensional audio. This technology enhances the depth and detail of sound, making you feel like you’re right in the middle of the action. The built-in speakers produce clear and well-balanced audio, eliminating the need for external sound systems in most cases. Remote Control There’s also Dolby Vision ‘game’, which works in a slightly different way, the TV set communicating with the game console, communicating its available specs then getting just pre-processed output from the console, thereby minimising latency through the TV. There’s extensive gaming support on this TV. The rear-mounted subwoofer can become a little buzzy under pressure, and it doesn’t deliver rumbles as deep as I’d hoped considering its size. The C81 QLED’s dynamic range is still a cut above the affordable TV norm, however.

The initials stand for The Creative Life and the state-owned Chinese manufacturer typically targets the affordable end of the TV market, though it nevertheless employs some serious technology to rival some of the bigger brands. While Sony is famously coy about quoting specification ‘numbers’ for its TVs, TCL has no such inhibitions, proudly declaring that it believes the 65C845K to be capable of delivering 2000 nits of brightness. This is a remarkable claim in a TV world where we would expect similarly priced TVs to struggle to hit even a quarter of that brightness. Most TVs costing even thousands of pounds more won’t give you quite as much HDR-friendly brightness as TCL is claiming here. On the downside, the sharpness can be impacted when there’s lots of motion in the frame. TCL has provided a decently flexible motion processing system, but using this to get a balance between reducing judder and removing blur without introducing too many unwanted digital side effects isn’t easy. Your best bet is to set both of the judder and blur processing elements to around their three levels. This will keep processing artefacts at bay, but you’ll still spot a little softness during camera pans, and the occasional panning stutter. For a touch more richness and colour punch, go for the Low Power mode with Brightness set to 82; colour saturation to 37; colour temperature to normal; Dynamic Contrast to Off; Micro Dimming to low; and contrast reduced to 94. There will still be a few flare-outs with these settings – but, arguably, they’re rare enough to be tolerable in return for the dramatic vibrancy of the pictures. To remove all flaring glitches with this setting you’ll need to bring brightness down to a point where the set is only outputting around 400 nits – which is more in line with the brightness levels on offer by similarly priced rivals.On the operating system side of things, TCL TVs use the Google TV interface in 2023 (unlike some previous years where Android OS was the main OS system for TCL models in the UK). As well as being a potential function of its direct LED lighting engine, the 65C845K’s chunkiness also provides space for a large rear-mounted subwoofer arrangement that forms part of an Onkyo-designed 2.1 speaker system. The real competitors here are the two Hisense sets we used in the comparisons above. The U7K and U8K offer almost exactly the same features and sound solutions, covering all the available HDR formats and with good gaming credentials that match the TCL. The differences are with the peak brightness and tone mapping and it is here where the C845 betters both of the Hisense models for image detail and brightness. But none of these three models would be suitable for image purists and film fans. However, for gamers and mass market users with bright rooms, all three are worth a demo. The problem is all the more exaggerated by the way images tend to look fine – really good, even – during darker scenes.

A dedicated gaming onscreen menu, meanwhile, provides a helpful combination of signal information and game-specific features that include an Aiming Aid, multiple game picture presets, and the facility to adjust the brightness of dark parts of the picture without overcooking the brightness elsewhere. The first thing that strikes me like a ray of sunshine from the budget TV gloom is how incredibly bright its pictures are. That 2200+ nits of measured brightness feeds fully into real world (rather than test signal) HDR images, making daylight sequences feel like genuine daylight, and bright highlights look like real moons, streetlights, suns, metallic reflections etc have somehow found their way inside your TV. Google TV makes for a familiar and well-organized interface, with easy access to all the key video services and catch-up channels. It aims to be smart at filling its home screen with content from your selected services and did so here with a minimum of the YouTube promotion that has seemed prevalent in the earlier days of Android TV. That said, it didn’t include content from all available services, notably omitting TCL’s own channel of live and on-demand content. Dolby Vision material, however, will trigger TCL’s Dolby Vision modes, four in all, but with Dolby Vision IQ the default; this senses the ambient light conditions and moves to Dolby Vision ‘dark’ if you are in a dark room and Dolby Vision ‘bright’ if you are in a very bright room. The C81 QLED’s sound is mostly impressive for such an affordable TV. The soundbar delivers a large soundstage with a genuine sense of verticality that sits well with the TV’s built-in Dolby Atmos decoding. This doesn’t mean you actually hear overhead effects, but you do get a wall of sound that at least feels as tall as the TV.The C845 covers the majority of the DCI-P3 colour gamut, reaching 95%. However, the colours aren’t as accurate as we’d like, with red, blue and magenta (which is composed of red and blue) all oversaturated compared to their target points. This is probably due to the C845 pushing its brightness to such a high degree, although many will probably like the added pop. With most out of the box niggles with the 65C845K’s pictures fixable via the picture set up menus, the fact that the 65C845K leaves a little wiggle room for much more expensive Mini LED TVs to claim a picture quality advantage, though, in truth barely detracts at all from the simple fact that its pictures are almost stupidly good for its money. Sound Quality The various picture strengths we have talked about so far help to make the C845K an engagingly spectacular gaming TV too. Especially as the game mode delivers a decently low input lag measurement of 15.3ms with 60Hz content. This figure more than halves in 120Hz mode. Google TV also comes with Google Assistant built-in. The TCL TV doesn’t itself react to a ‘Hey Google’ command, but uses the remote control as a microphone extension. Press the Google Voice key on the remote, hold and speak, and you can make useful requests like ‘Switch to HDMI 1’ or ‘Mute’, ‘Unmute’ and so on. Given its video integration, Google answers questions like a Google smart display rather than a smart speaker – and presents similar quirks. The comic book colours of The Flash enjoyed plenty of vibrant punch, while the lightning that surrounds his ‘speed-force’ was seared into my retinas thanks to those dynamic highlights. The more subdued visuals of First Man are still appropriately muted, and the C845 does a great job of handling the scene where the Apollo 11 command module goes into the shadow of the moon – a challenging sequence for any local dimming system.

It is Alexa-compatible, but as a Google TV it’ll clearly work best with Google Assistant, especially as the C845 has this capability built-in, with microphones both on the TV and available on the remote by pressing the key with Google’s meaningless coloured symbols on it. It is, really, hyper-realistic. This suits a show like Formula 1: Drive to Survive well, with all those F1 primary colours – Ferrari’s red, Heineken’s green, McLaren’s, um, papaya…

3D Stereo Enjoyment

The TCL ships in the Standard picture mode, which delivers a very inaccurate picture when compared to the industry standards. There’s a significant excess of blue energy in the greyscale, a gamma with a large dip in the middle, and over-saturated colours that result in average DeltaEs (errors) of 14 for the greyscale and 12 for the colours. The C805 (C755 outside of Europe) is another QD-mini LED TV announced during the Global Flagship Product Launch event and will be available in 50, 55, 65, 75, 85, and 98-inch models. This model is slated to feature 500+ mini LED dimming zones and 1300 nits peak brightness. Voices can on occasion sound as if they’re coming from slightly below the picture rather than from where mouths are moving onscreen, but dialogue sounds clear, clean, distinct and nicely contextualised. We had very few problems achieving a spectacular picture quality from the TCL C835, whether streaming 4K HDR from its own Google apps or playing via HDMI from an AppleTV 4K or UHD Blu-ray player. TCL's claims actually turn out to be conservative, though, as we measured more than 2,300 nits on a white HDR window covering 10 per cent of the screen. That's more - way more - than you get from LCD TVs costing thousands more, and way more than we've seen from any OLED TV. Even the new Micro Lens Array models, like the LG G3.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment