The TV That Stole My Heart: A Review of the 75-Inch Mini LED Model

As I sat down to watch this stunning 75-inch mini LED TV, I couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement and anticipation. With a price tag of $3,000, it's certainly not for the faint of heart, but I was eager to see if it lived up to its promise. And let me tell you, this TV delivers.

One of the first things that struck me about this TV was its HDR capabilities. I've had the chance to test out several other high-end TVs in recent months, and I have to say that this one is among the best I've seen. The HDR patterns I threw at it were met with a level of precision and clarity that I just didn't expect from any TV under $3,000. I ran the Spears and Muscle discs pattern, which is notoriously difficult for TVs to get right, and was blown away by its accuracy.

But what really impressed me about this TV was its ability to maintain consistency even when viewed off-angle. I've seen many TVs struggle with this issue in the past, but here, the TV's Mini LED panel performed admirably, even at extreme viewing angles. This is a major win for anyone who likes to sit back and relax on their couch while watching a movie or playing games.

Of course, no review would be complete without mentioning the picture quality itself. And let me tell you, this TV delivers in spades. The colors are rich and vibrant, with deep blacks that really make the image pop. I was blown away by the level of detail and nuance in everything from the star fields to the film "Gravity". It's clear that this TV is capable of communicating the director's intent with precision and accuracy.

Now, I know what you're thinking: if this TV is so great, why does it have some limitations? Well, for starters, it only has one HDMI 2.1 feature: Auto Low Latency Mode (ALLM). If you're a gamer, this is definitely something to consider, as it can help reduce input lag by up to 20 milliseconds. However, there's a caveat: if you set the dynamic contrast setting high, which gives you the best possible HDR performance and brightness, you'll sacrifice some of that low input lag.

I also want to mention that this TV still has a bit of halo bleed in its black levels, although it's definitely not noticeable unless you're looking very closely. This is a small quibble, however, given the overall level of quality and performance on display here.

In terms of competing TVs, I think it's safe to say that this model gives the Samsung Q90 a run for its money. Both TVs are incredibly good in their own ways, but they also have some key differences. Ultimately, it comes down to personal preference: if you want the absolute best picture quality and HDR capabilities, this TV might be the better choice.

But what really sets this TV apart is its Roku platform built-in. If you're already invested in the Roku ecosystem or just prefer the simplicity of a streamlined streaming experience, this is definitely worth considering.

In conclusion, I'm thoroughly impressed with this 75-inch mini LED TV. It's a game-changer for anyone looking to upgrade their home theater setup, and its HDR capabilities are truly among the best I've seen at this price point. Sure, there are some minor trade-offs and limitations, but overall, this TV is worth every penny. If you can afford it, do go for it – you won't regret it.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: ennot gonna lie some TVs are more fun to review than others and this one is definitely in my top 5 this year hey everybody I'm Caleb Denison for Digital Trends and we are of course reviewing the TCL 8 series mini LED TV kind of a big deal this year you guys enjoyed the unboxing I hope you enjoyed the review but we got some stuff to cover so first of all let's talk about what mini LED is before I jump into the technical stuff if you haven't seen the unboxing a basic setup video for this TV click on the link right up there you definitely want to see that cuz unboxing and setting up this thing is it's really something and then you want to see a little bit of what we have to say about the menu settings we'll touch on that later first mini LED what is it well if you don't know how LCD TVs work you have an LCD panel with a whole bunch of layers in it and then behind that are individual LEDs now lesser TVs might just have them in strips on the sides or top or bottom full array or direct backlit TVs have the LEDs behind the screen some have more of these LEDs than others and then they divide them up into zones so that you can light up a certain section of the image but not necessarily the other this is a great example we want all this area lit up but at the edges we don't we want black because that's what the background is supposed to be mini LED uses the same basic principle except for it shrinks the size of the LEDs way way way down and uses a whole lot more of them in fact we believe there are something like 25,000 just a little over 25,000 LEDs at work behind this screen right now to put that in perspective before that we were looking at hundreds maybe 25,000 and if we break those 25,000 plus LEDs into zones we count 30 by 30 using this little test here comes out to about 900 zones not about 900 it's 900 zones that's a lot so you should have really great control about where the screen lights up and where it doesn't and the other objective is to get rid of that halo effect that's that sort of halo of light that goes around a bright object when it's on a darker background it gradually gets black and stuff there being a sharp line there and all that is in service of trying to get closer to OLED I feel because OLED doesn't have a backlight it's self emissive the pixels light themselves up there is no need for a backlight and there is no worry about halo effect so oh how close does it get let's find out okay test powder time and if you've seen this before you know we're just trying to get this TV to trip up and show us what kind of a halo effect it does have when you're right on axis it's actually quite impressive I'll go ahead and block this out and you'll see yeah there's a little bit of light bleeding out of the the sides and the bottom here but I've seen way way worse and more importantly those white boxes are super bright right now and we're actually the darkest mode that this TV offers now I know a lot of you are wondering about how uniform the screen is we've seen hit or miss results from TCL the 75 inch six years was great the 65 inch six series from last year not so much what I'm seeing here is well frankly the best one I've seen from TCL so far you're gonna have some amount of dirty screen effect no matter what TV you purchase just some are worse than others this is a really great example so I'm highly encouraged there now let's talk about tone mapping or electro optical transfer function e OT f as it's known which doesn't sound sexy but it's actually super important because this has to do with how the TV maps out dark to bright and gets all those individual subsections in there and this looks fantastic but I actually had to update the TV to get it to look this good before the update it was crushing the blacks and stomping on the whites on the right side of the screen but TCL has heard some feedback from other reviewers out there and they've implemented a fix and they say they're actually coming out with another one later anyway I just want to point out this looks super good to me just subjectively speaking and I think that's gonna play out with real-world content as well on our color ramp I've seen worse and I've seen better I mean there's definitely some bars here as it ramps down into the darks I'd like to see that be a little bit smoother it definitely looks good on the brightest end it's just that as it goes down to dark it seems to struggle a little bit again I've seen worse and I've seen better but rarely it does this actually play out importantly when we're watching real-world content unless we've got a huge wash of color on the screen so we'll check that out in a minute as for color accuracy out of the box it really quite good of course we're in the darkest mode and we've got the color temperature set to warm nothing jumps out at me the red seems pretty hot but I think that's just because this is an HDR pattern what I would say is that even though the TV only cost three thousand dollars and I say only because it's 75 inches and it's competing against some of the most expensive TVs out there I would recommend that you get a calibrator to come out and just get it dialed in so that it's just right because it is capable of communicating directors intent and I think it's worth it if you can afford a $3,000 TV yeah throw a few hundred bucks down and get it dialed in just the way you want it we're gonna do some real world stress testing of the back lighting system but with this pattern what I see is yes there's some movement happening here but it's much thinner zones of movement it's more exacting that I've seen in other TVs earlier this year so I've run this pattern from the Spears and muscle discs on lesser TVs and it was an absolute mess this is the best case for mini LED I've seen so far this is a really tough thing to pull off and if you go off angle you can see the mess but on angle it looks really clean so here's a little bit more realistic of a star-filled in the film gravity and I'm just looking for any kind of washout in the star field but I don't get is washout I see pinpoints of light and where we have really intense brightness doesn't seem to bleed over much at all this looks great and this is an even HDR what is an HDR is in the revenant and oh my gosh it is so in HDR the whole thing looks amazing I gave up looking for the scene I wanted settled on this one because it looks fantastic and see the captions they're not causing any bleed down into the letterbox bars so I feel like I should cut to the chase here in terms of pure picture quality this TV looks fantastic I've been watching it for hours and I just I really really enjoy it I would put it right up against the Samsung q90 are right up against it I don't know which TV I would prefer both do things very well both have their own little limitations I feel like this TV is very competitive and when you consider it's 75 inches for $3,000 this kind of picture quality absolutely fantastic is many LED the truth absolutely I think it makes a huge difference now off-angle still got the same problems does it have perfect black levels no it doesn't it still has a little bit of that halo but I mean this is as close as any cue LED TV has ever gotten to reaching something approaching OLED level outside of just pure picture quality though there's a few things I've got to mention one is the only HDMI 2.1 ish feature that this TV offers is Auto low latency mode so if you're a gamer it's automatically gonna go into game mode and reduce input lag which is great but there's a caveat there so the low input lag is good down to about 20 milliseconds right but that's only if you have dynamic contrast set at the low or the medium setting if you set it at high which is going to get you the most HDR punch and the brightest brights and the darkest darks and the best overall color that goes up considerably so it seems like there's a little bit of a trade-off between whether you get the most amazing picture quality or you get super low input lag now I'm with Vincent teo over at HDTV test on this one I think that you either get the super low input lag so that you get a great score and you're highly competitive on first-person shooters or you get the best possible graphics I think you can you know balance that out if you want to two different kinds of people there if you're the kind of person that wants both well it's kind of hard to get with this particular TV outside of that I'm really enthusiastic about this TV I think it's a really great leap for the technology its implementation here it's really stellar I would be proud to own this TV in my home yeah it's big it's 75 inches but it's a glorious 75 inch picture with really incredible HDR performance Roku platform built right in I mean if you've got the scratch get this TV it's fantastic and of course yes we're gonna have to put this against the Samsung q 90 are but I think that when we do what we're gonna find is that again it's just a matter of little tiny trade-offs I mean it's that good of a TV folks thanks as always for watching this TV starting to come out in stores leave me a comment down below are you gonna go see it have you seen it already and it's so what did you think like subscribe hit that notification bell a couple more videos we think you might like and as always visit Digital Trends calm for the latest tech news and reviewsnot gonna lie some TVs are more fun to review than others and this one is definitely in my top 5 this year hey everybody I'm Caleb Denison for Digital Trends and we are of course reviewing the TCL 8 series mini LED TV kind of a big deal this year you guys enjoyed the unboxing I hope you enjoyed the review but we got some stuff to cover so first of all let's talk about what mini LED is before I jump into the technical stuff if you haven't seen the unboxing a basic setup video for this TV click on the link right up there you definitely want to see that cuz unboxing and setting up this thing is it's really something and then you want to see a little bit of what we have to say about the menu settings we'll touch on that later first mini LED what is it well if you don't know how LCD TVs work you have an LCD panel with a whole bunch of layers in it and then behind that are individual LEDs now lesser TVs might just have them in strips on the sides or top or bottom full array or direct backlit TVs have the LEDs behind the screen some have more of these LEDs than others and then they divide them up into zones so that you can light up a certain section of the image but not necessarily the other this is a great example we want all this area lit up but at the edges we don't we want black because that's what the background is supposed to be mini LED uses the same basic principle except for it shrinks the size of the LEDs way way way down and uses a whole lot more of them in fact we believe there are something like 25,000 just a little over 25,000 LEDs at work behind this screen right now to put that in perspective before that we were looking at hundreds maybe 25,000 and if we break those 25,000 plus LEDs into zones we count 30 by 30 using this little test here comes out to about 900 zones not about 900 it's 900 zones that's a lot so you should have really great control about where the screen lights up and where it doesn't and the other objective is to get rid of that halo effect that's that sort of halo of light that goes around a bright object when it's on a darker background it gradually gets black and stuff there being a sharp line there and all that is in service of trying to get closer to OLED I feel because OLED doesn't have a backlight it's self emissive the pixels light themselves up there is no need for a backlight and there is no worry about halo effect so oh how close does it get let's find out okay test powder time and if you've seen this before you know we're just trying to get this TV to trip up and show us what kind of a halo effect it does have when you're right on axis it's actually quite impressive I'll go ahead and block this out and you'll see yeah there's a little bit of light bleeding out of the the sides and the bottom here but I've seen way way worse and more importantly those white boxes are super bright right now and we're actually the darkest mode that this TV offers now I know a lot of you are wondering about how uniform the screen is we've seen hit or miss results from TCL the 75 inch six years was great the 65 inch six series from last year not so much what I'm seeing here is well frankly the best one I've seen from TCL so far you're gonna have some amount of dirty screen effect no matter what TV you purchase just some are worse than others this is a really great example so I'm highly encouraged there now let's talk about tone mapping or electro optical transfer function e OT f as it's known which doesn't sound sexy but it's actually super important because this has to do with how the TV maps out dark to bright and gets all those individual subsections in there and this looks fantastic but I actually had to update the TV to get it to look this good before the update it was crushing the blacks and stomping on the whites on the right side of the screen but TCL has heard some feedback from other reviewers out there and they've implemented a fix and they say they're actually coming out with another one later anyway I just want to point out this looks super good to me just subjectively speaking and I think that's gonna play out with real-world content as well on our color ramp I've seen worse and I've seen better I mean there's definitely some bars here as it ramps down into the darks I'd like to see that be a little bit smoother it definitely looks good on the brightest end it's just that as it goes down to dark it seems to struggle a little bit again I've seen worse and I've seen better but rarely it does this actually play out importantly when we're watching real-world content unless we've got a huge wash of color on the screen so we'll check that out in a minute as for color accuracy out of the box it really quite good of course we're in the darkest mode and we've got the color temperature set to warm nothing jumps out at me the red seems pretty hot but I think that's just because this is an HDR pattern what I would say is that even though the TV only cost three thousand dollars and I say only because it's 75 inches and it's competing against some of the most expensive TVs out there I would recommend that you get a calibrator to come out and just get it dialed in so that it's just right because it is capable of communicating directors intent and I think it's worth it if you can afford a $3,000 TV yeah throw a few hundred bucks down and get it dialed in just the way you want it we're gonna do some real world stress testing of the back lighting system but with this pattern what I see is yes there's some movement happening here but it's much thinner zones of movement it's more exacting that I've seen in other TVs earlier this year so I've run this pattern from the Spears and muscle discs on lesser TVs and it was an absolute mess this is the best case for mini LED I've seen so far this is a really tough thing to pull off and if you go off angle you can see the mess but on angle it looks really clean so here's a little bit more realistic of a star-filled in the film gravity and I'm just looking for any kind of washout in the star field but I don't get is washout I see pinpoints of light and where we have really intense brightness doesn't seem to bleed over much at all this looks great and this is an even HDR what is an HDR is in the revenant and oh my gosh it is so in HDR the whole thing looks amazing I gave up looking for the scene I wanted settled on this one because it looks fantastic and see the captions they're not causing any bleed down into the letterbox bars so I feel like I should cut to the chase here in terms of pure picture quality this TV looks fantastic I've been watching it for hours and I just I really really enjoy it I would put it right up against the Samsung q90 are right up against it I don't know which TV I would prefer both do things very well both have their own little limitations I feel like this TV is very competitive and when you consider it's 75 inches for $3,000 this kind of picture quality absolutely fantastic is many LED the truth absolutely I think it makes a huge difference now off-angle still got the same problems does it have perfect black levels no it doesn't it still has a little bit of that halo but I mean this is as close as any cue LED TV has ever gotten to reaching something approaching OLED level outside of just pure picture quality though there's a few things I've got to mention one is the only HDMI 2.1 ish feature that this TV offers is Auto low latency mode so if you're a gamer it's automatically gonna go into game mode and reduce input lag which is great but there's a caveat there so the low input lag is good down to about 20 milliseconds right but that's only if you have dynamic contrast set at the low or the medium setting if you set it at high which is going to get you the most HDR punch and the brightest brights and the darkest darks and the best overall color that goes up considerably so it seems like there's a little bit of a trade-off between whether you get the most amazing picture quality or you get super low input lag now I'm with Vincent teo over at HDTV test on this one I think that you either get the super low input lag so that you get a great score and you're highly competitive on first-person shooters or you get the best possible graphics I think you can you know balance that out if you want to two different kinds of people there if you're the kind of person that wants both well it's kind of hard to get with this particular TV outside of that I'm really enthusiastic about this TV I think it's a really great leap for the technology its implementation here it's really stellar I would be proud to own this TV in my home yeah it's big it's 75 inches but it's a glorious 75 inch picture with really incredible HDR performance Roku platform built right in I mean if you've got the scratch get this TV it's fantastic and of course yes we're gonna have to put this against the Samsung q 90 are but I think that when we do what we're gonna find is that again it's just a matter of little tiny trade-offs I mean it's that good of a TV folks thanks as always for watching this TV starting to come out in stores leave me a comment down below are you gonna go see it have you seen it already and it's so what did you think like subscribe hit that notification bell a couple more videos we think you might like and as always visit Digital Trends calm for the latest tech news and reviews\n"