TCL C845K review: Mini LED for the masses

After years of selling the UK short, TCL finally brings its A game with this great value Mini LED masterclass.

While the US has known for years about TCL's knack for delivering good quality TVs at eye-catchingly low prices, the brand's habit of selling TVs in the UK with completely different and invariably worse specs has left Brits feeling a bit short-changed. Especially since TCL started delivering in other parts of the world on its leadership with Mini LED TV technology.

Happily, though, TCL started to put this territorial imbalance right in 2022, treating the UK to at least two brilliant TV ranges in the shape of its C835K Mini LED and C735K regular LED sets. So it's fair to say I have very high hopes for the C835K's successor, the new C845K. Especially as the 65-inch version I'm looking at here, which again combines Mini LED lighting with local dimming, can be yours for the almost unbelievably small sum of £1,049 / €1,499.

This is the flagship Mini LED TV for TCL in the UK and Europe, but if you're reading this in the US, that honour is bestowed upon the TCL QM8. While the ranges are very similar, there are some regional differences, with extra dimming zones that should give the QM8 the edge in terms of performance. That means if you like what you read here, the QM8 may very well be worth a look too...

While it's possible to find Mini LED TVs that perform better than the TCL 65C845K, those premium rivals will cost you not just hundreds but thousands of pounds more. Pound for pound, the 65C845K punches so far above its weight it’s actually quite hard to believe, making it not just the TV bargain of the year so far, but also gives the more established TV brands something to think about.

From the front, at least, the TCL 65C845K is an attractive TV. The frame around the screen is slim, and the centrally mounted desktop stand is well built, with its foot plate made from very heavy duty metal. The stand is also small enough that the TV can sit on a much narrower piece of furniture than the set itself, which is helpful for a lot of people.

A detachable cover on the stand’s neck enables you to tidy cabling away inside it, too, while multiple stand fixing points on the screen's rear let you raise it an inch or so if you want to create more room for a soundbar.

The build quality of the screen is a touch flimsy and plasticky, though, and the set sticks out more around the back than most. This is pretty typical with LED TVs that use premium backlighting systems, and won’t even be noticeable for most people unless they’ve hung their 65C845K on a wall.

The 65C845K carries four HDMI inputs, and impressively for a £1,049 / €1,499 65-inch Mini LED TV, two of these HDMIs are capable of handling most of the latest and greatest gaming features available form the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and high-end PC graphics cards.

Also supported on the 65C845K's HDMIs is the eARC system for passing lossless Dolby Atmos sound through to compatible soundbars and AV receivers. What's more, TCL has thoughtfully provided the eARC support on one of the two HDMIs that don't support the full suite of gaming features, so you can choose your HDMI inputs wisely.

The only other connections of note are an Ethernet port (though obviously there's built-in Wi-Fi too), a single USB port, Bluetooth support, and an optical digital audio output.

The 65C845K's remote control is a long, thin shape that feels nicely balanced to hold and features a pretty decent layout. The buttons include one for activating the TV's Google Assistant voice control mic, as well as direct Netflix, Prime Video, YouTube and internet browser links.

Without doubt the single biggest feature attraction of the TCL 65C845K is the way it offers Mini LED technology in a 65-inch screen that only costs £1,049 (about $1340). If you're not sure just how remarkable that price is, the 65-inch model from Hisense's mid-range Mini LED U7KQ series costs £1,499, Sony's 65-inch 65X95K Mini LED model costs £2,199, and the 65-inch model from Samsung's mid-range QN90C Mini LED series costs £2,499.

As usual with Mini LED technology, the 65C845K seeks to capitalise on the extra light control afforded by using smaller LEDs by also deploying a local dimming system. This means that different zones of Mini LEDs can output different amounts of light with any given picture frame, and the 65C845K's screen contains no less than 576 separate dimming zones for doing just that. That would represent an impressively high number even on a really high end LCD TV, so again it looks like a pretty remarkable effort for a TV that costs so little.

It's pleasing to find, too, that TCL has built the 65C845K's promising lighting system onto a VA type of panel, rather than a low-contrast IPS one.

The 65C845K's startlingly well specified lighting engine and other notable features such as a motion processing system, HD-to-4K upscaler, colour booster and both MPEG and standard noise reduction routines are controlled by a new third generation of TCL’s AiPQ picture processing engine.

Yet more good news finds the 65C845K supporting all four of the key HDR (high dynamic range) formats: HDR10, HLG and both HDR10+ and Dolby Vision, which add extra scene by scene picture data to the video stream. In fact, the 65C845K even supports the versions of HDR10+ and Dolby Vision that react to room conditions when deciding how to optimise picture playback, so you are well covered here.

The 65C845K's HDMIs, together with its 120Hz panel, support the latest 4K/120Hz, variable refresh rate (including the AMD FreeSync Premium Pro format) and ALLM gaming features, while the set's Game picture mode gets input lag down to a good (though not class-leading) 15.3ms.

Xbox Series X and some PC gamers will also be pleased to find a Dolby Vision Game preset, so you don’t have to put up with a sluggish experience when gaming in DV, while a dedicated Game Bar menu system provides both information on your gaming signal and a couple of game-specific features. This includes a Shadow Enhancement feature that elevates the brightness of dark game areas to make it easier to spot lurking enemies, and an onscreen aiming assistant.

TCL has turned to renowned audio brand Onkyo for the 65C845K’s sound, resulting in a 40W 2.1-channel system capable of playing Dolby Atmos or Dolby Virtual X soundtracks. The .1 bass part of this setup is delivered by a large subwoofer on the TV’s rear that uses a protruding deflector ‘lens’ to help its low frequency sounds emerge more smoothly.

The 65C845K’s smart situation is… complicated. Google TV is built in, but a current fall out between Google and Freeview Play has led TCL to offer to send any 65C845K buyer who requests one a Roku TV Streaming Stick, to ensure they have all of the key UK broadcaster catch-up apps at their disposal. This is a nice gesture for a situation that is out of TCL's hands, but expect a slightly disjointed experience as a result.

The 65C845K's Mini LED lighting and local dimming combination are put to spectacular use - especially when it comes to pure, unadulterated HDR-friendly brightness. TCL claims its flagship UK TV can achieve 2,000 nits of brightness - a massive figure for such an aggressively priced TV.

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.

As you'd hope, these numbers translate into a dazzling display with high dynamic range sources. Bright daylight shots enjoy an intensity right across the screen that actually makes you feel as if a sunny day has somehow crept inside your TV - exactly the effect HDR was designed to deliver. The 65C845K's local dimming system is good enough, meanwhile, to ensure that its remarkable brightness continues with trickier (for LCD TVs) footage that contains a mixture of dark and light content.

Bright highlights that appear against dark backdrops, such as street lights against a night sky, still look extremely punchy and intense despite the challenges posed to any LCD TV technology by such high-contrast images. There's precious little sign of the sometimes quite extreme dimming of stand-out bright objects that crops up on Samsung's much more expensive Mini LED TVs as they try to suppress backlight clouding.

The downside to TCL's approach of pushing brightness so consistently is more backlight clouding than you get with Samsung's latest models. This can spread some distance around stand-out bright objects, even infiltrating the black bars you get above and below wide aspect ratio films. While this sort of clouding spreads further than I'd have hoped from a 576-zone local dimming zone system, though, it's typically fairly faint, and is also soft enough at its outer extremities to avoid the sort or rigid, squared off shapes that can make such blooming more distracting.

Also, although the clouding can make some really dark scenes look slightly 'smoky', it doesn’t stop the 65C845K from producing very good black levels by affordable LCD TV standards. Fade to blacks look pretty much as dark as they do on OLED TVs, and the amount of low-contrast greyness that infiltrates more regular dark scenes is impressively subdued. This means dark scenes retain a good sense of depth and credibility - an especially impressive achievement for the 65C845K's price point given how uniquely bright it is.

That brightness contributes to a pretty jaw-dropping colour performance, too. The 65C845K's Quantum Dot colour system thrives on the vast amounts of light passing through it, producing extremely vibrant tones across the board with HDR sources (which are typically mastered with wide colour gamuts) that would normally only appear on much more expensive TVs.

There’s a reasonable degree of subtlety to the 65C845K's colours too. Not quite as much you get with the very best TVs, it has to be said, but enough to stop pictures from looking cartoonish and unnatural. Or that's the case, at least, provided you either switch to the TV's Movie picture preset, or switch off the TV's Dynamic Colour setting while watching the ultra-bright and vibrant default Standard preset. This will mean colour saturations lose some of their richness, but in the end this is preferable to the gaudiness and plasticky skin tones you can be left with otherwise.

Wrapping up the best bits of the 65C845K's great-value picture performance are excellent 4K sharpness and clarity, good if not spectacular upscaling of HD sources, effective motion handling with 24fps movie sources (set the judder reduction to three or four for best results), a brilliantly aggressive and reasonably responsive gaming performance, and support for slightly wider viewing angles than you normally get with VA panel types.

There are a couple of other picture niggles to report, though, beyond those already touched on. First, the default and (once you've tweaked its OTT colours) most all-round enjoyable Standard picture preset can lose a little subtle shading detail in dark areas. You can get this back if you switch the TV’s local dimming setting from High to Low, but that results in black colours becoming greyer than we felt comfortable with.

The screen’s brightness can also sometimes push a bit too far, causing some of the brightest highlights of HDR images to become faded or lacking in subtle details. The aggressive colours, meanwhile, can make pictures look a little noisy at times - though this can be largely fixed by leaving the picture noise reduction system on (just be careful to never set it higher than its Low level).

Finally, very occasionally a dark scene that features lots of subtle changes in its baseline brightness level can cause the workings of the 65C845K's backlight system to become a touch distracting. In fairness, though, this actually happens less frequently or aggressively than we would have anticipated with such an affordable Mini LED TV.

With so many premium qualities to the 65C845K's picture quality for its money, we could have forgiven TCL if it had treated the TV's sound system as an afterthought. As it happens, though, it actually sounds quite good.

It can go loud enough to continue the cinematic feel created by its pictures, for starters, but still has enough power left over to push sound mixes away from the screen to build a sound stage that's bigger than the 65-inch picture. Details in busy movie mixes appear with good clarity and without sounding thin or harsh, too, and dialogue manages to remain both locked in place on the screen and also consistently clear and well rounded.

Bass from that hefty subwoofer on the TV's rear gets deeper and is more consistently present than most affordable TV sound systems, too. It can start to distort when the going gets really tough, such as with the massive bass drop sounds that are part of the Blade Runner 2049 mix, but typically its contributions are only positive.

One other niggle finds dense Dolby Atmos mix moments sounding a bit fractured, as the sounds being pushed beyond the TV's left and right edges start to feel a bit detached from the onscreen action. The fact that the 65C845K's sound presentation is big enough and powerful enough to even create this problem, though, is arguably a good thing overall for such an affordable TV.

The TCL 65C845K is easily the best value TV of 2023 to date - and it's hard to imagine any other TV coming along in the coming six months that might knock it off that perch.

While its pictures might lack some of the naturalism, balance and refinement of the TV world’s most premium models, it delivers levels of brightness and colour we've simply never seen before at its price point - and thanks to its Mini LED and local dimming technologies, it's able to combine those brightness and colour strengths with startlingly convincing contrast.

It seals its fantastic deal with a built-in sound system good enough to make adding an external sound system for movie nights a luxury rather than a necessity.

There are clearly some compromises to make here - and you should be aware of them if you choose to buy this set - but the fact is, this TV feels like it's pushing new boundaries for affordable TVs. And that is very exciting indeed.

Freelance technology journalist, with a focus on AV. Feel oddly naked unless I'm sat in the middle of a pile of TVs and projectors.