TCL’s 2024 TVs Are Here (and One of Them Costs $27,000)
TCL’s next line of smart TVs is here, with improved processing, generally lower prices compared to the competition, but also – for some reason – a $27,000 115-inch model that needs to either be installed or hosted on a special floor stand.
TCL TVs focus on non-OLED technologies, mainly quantum dot and micro-LED, but also feature a unique “game accelerator” feature that can double frame rates at the expense of resolution when needed.
TCL S-Class TVs 2024
Value is perhaps TCL’s biggest trick, and the S-Class represents the company’s most affordable displays yet. The 2024 720p S2 and 1080p S3 TVs all use basic LED panels with “enhanced phosphors” and no post-processing AI, but the higher-end S4 is now called the S5.
It’s a strange flexibility, similar to the joke that “World War III is so big that we’ll just skip straight to World War IV.” You don’t get quantum dots or micro-LEDs with the upgrade, but there is a new backlight that makes the TV brighter and promises a “wider color gamut.” More importantly, the S5 is powered by the company’s AiPQ processor.
This chip is part of what provides higher brightness here and can also adjust contrast and image clarity. In a demo of a rival, similarly priced Sony TV, a nature documentary on the S5 showed more detail in the fur, although colors did appear artificially warm in one scene. TCL promised me that users will be able to customize the chip’s settings to their liking.
The AiPQ chip includes a gaming accelerator on the S-Class for the first time, allowing the normally 60Hz TV to halve 4K resolution to play games at up to 120fps. Other smart features, including different HDR settings and two different features to enhance dialogue in shows, are also new.
The S5 starts at $350, and screen sizes range from 43 to 85 inches.
TCL QLED TVs 2024
The Q-Class is where TCL is placing most of its marketing, promising OLED images for a fraction of the price. There are two tricks here, and the first is QLED. This is where the company takes a regular LED panel and places a layer of nanocrystals on top of it, filtering blue light into other colors to expand the color gamut . This is not unique to TCL, but companies have dealt with it to varying degrees of success. At worst, you lose the contrast that OLED TVs are famous for, and colors can look artificially inflated.
TCL has struggled with this in the past, but the company has gone back to the drawing board with processing, retooling its AiPQ chip for more natural results and adding new backlighting like on the S5.
The company’s Q65 TV is now said to be 28% brighter, and the 85- and 98-inch versions of the TV have a 120Hz panel. This also means they can support gameplay at up to 240fps using the game accelerator (again, at halved resolution). This is a particularly neat trick that, unfortunately, will only be available to players connecting their PCs to a TV (no home console supports 240fps gameplay yet).
Above the Q65 is the Q68, which adds full local dimming. This allows the TV’s backlight to individually darken certain parts of the screen, providing OLED-like contrast.
The Q65 starts at $500 and comes in sizes from 43 to 98 inches, while the Q68 starts at $699 and comes in sizes from 55 to 85 inches.
2024 TCL Mini LED TVs
Finally, there’s Mini-LED, TCL’s most expensive option. There are two models here – the QM7 and QM8, with the QM8 in its top-end version measuring up to an absurd 115 inches.
The technology here actually works on the same principle as Apple’s MacBook, and is as close to OLED as possible without actually being OLED. Mini-LED technology essentially breaks your TV’s backlight into thousands of individual zones, creating a deeper local dimming effect for better contrast. Quantum dot technology is still in play here.
Specifically, the QM7 has over 1,500 local dimming zones, while the QM8 has over 5,000.
Mini-LED also has one advantage over OLED: it can get much brighter without any additional help. The QM7 promises a 20% increase in brightness over its predecessor and a peak brightness of 2,400 nits. QM8 can reach 5000 nits. OLED TVs can struggle in direct sunlight, but that shouldn’t be a problem here.
In addition to reducing eye strain, it can also improve image quality. In a demo I saw on Sony and Samsung OLED TVs, a scene from the movie Gravity showed a large degree of stars in the background on the TCL mini-LEDs, revealing more of the image. OLEDs, on the other hand, “squashed the black,” meaning they accidentally misinterpreted some of the dimmer stars as empty voids.
This is helped in part by TCL’s processor improvements, which also allow the gaming accelerator to be used on these TVs, again for 240fps images at the cost of halving the resolution. Other bonuses include new HDR modes, enhanced IMAX certification, and built-in Onkyo 2.1 speakers with a built-in subwoofer.
Exclusive to the QM8 are an anti-glare screen, Onkyo 2.1.1 speaker system (meaning it can also beam audio up), Wi-Fi 6 support, and a NextGen TV antenna for 4K over-the-air broadcasts.
The QM7 starts at $1,099 and comes in sizes from 55 to 98 inches. The QM8 starts at $1,999 and comes in sizes from 65 to 115 inches.
The 115-inch model isn’t quite available yet, but considering it costs $27,000, you’ll probably still want to save some time.