TCL 55C805 test: Mini-LED television at a low price and good at everything, or almost

TCL has opted for a VA panel for the C805, like most of its televisions, and we get a vertical array of red-green-blue sub-pixels.

In SDR, the film mode provides excellent color accuracy with a delta E of 2.6, below the bar of 3 beyond which the human eye can perceive colorimetric gradients. The average color temperature, 7070 K, on ​​the other hand is a bit cooler, but nothing serious. Be warned though, disabling local dimming will result in a very cool rendering of 9660 K, far from the reference value we expect in video (6500 K). Gamma is stable, but closer to 2.2 than the 2.4 expected on a TV. So the gray levels will be well reproduced on the screen, although a little too low.

VA panels generally offer very good contrast, and the 55C805 is no exception. We measured 3660:1; So blacks are deeper, when local dimming is activated, which turns off certain areas of the screen when a dark image is displayed. OLED TVs, however, do better thanks to their ability to turn off every pixel on the panel. A notable problem with VA panels is image distortion when viewing the screen from certain angles, and we measured a brightness loss of around 66% at 45°. That’s a lot, and so you have to be in front of the TV to take full advantage of it.

The AiPQ 3.0 processor used by TCL is fairly simple, but it allows the TV to adjust brightness based on ambient light and effectively upscale Full HD content. When it comes to reducing motion blur, the manufacturer’s compensation engine has been improving over the years, even if it remains slightly less precise than competitors. Pushing the compensation too high will show artifacts on the screen, so we recommend setting it low or turning it off completely.