TCL P755K (65P755K) review: Another budget TCL TV hero

The TCL P755K is here to remind us that the brand can deliver the goods with relatively basic TVs as well as cutting-edge models in monster screen sizes at hitherto unthinkably low prices.

The P755K carries no quantum dots, no mini LEDs and no local dimming zones, yet still proves a cut-price TV to be reckoned with.

TCL P755K review: Key specifications

TCL P755K review: What you need to know

The aggressively priced P755K doesn’t join most TCL TVs in sporting Mini LED lighting and/or quantum dots. It does, however, retain back-mounted LED lighting, which usually delivers better contrast than the edge-mounted alternative, and while there’s no local dimming, it uses a contrast-friendly VA panel.

The P755K also scored points over similarly affordable rivals by supporting all of the main high dynamic range formats and many premium gaming features.

TCL P755K review: Price and competition

TCL sells five sizes of P755K in the UK: the £239 43in 43P755K, the £298 50in 50P755K, the £305 55in 55P755K, the £449 65in 65P755K I tested and the £659 75in 75P755K. You don’t need to have spent much time hanging out in home electronics stores to know that these are exceptionally aggressive prices – especially when you take into account their use of VA panels and far-reaching game and HDR support.

The P755K is available in some European countries outside the UK, but as is often the case with TCL TVs, no direct equivalent model is available in the US.

Competition for the P755K comes predominantly from TCL’s own step-up C645K range, which introduces quantum dot colours to the party, and if you can stretch the budget a bit further still, the Samsung Q60D.

TCL P755K review: Design, connections and control

There’s nothing about the P755K’s design that fits with its cheap price. The frame around the screen is on-trend slim, and the TV is unusually svelte around the back, at least at its edges. A central section of the rear sits a bit deeper, but even this part is thinner than you would expect for such an affordable 65in TV. This makes it a helpful wall-hanging option. The slender bezel is finished in an attractively smooth deep black, while much of the rear sports a cute etched crosshatch design.

The screen sits on a pair of spindly but tastefully angled feet, but since these feet are quite widely spaced, you’ll need a fairly wide bit of furniture to sit them on if you’re thinking of buying the bigger screen sizes.

The only real design hint that the P755K is essentially a budget TV is found in its weight. It’s much lighter than most TVs; the 65in model I tested was easy to move around single-handlely.

The P755K’s connections include three HDMIs – a respectable number for such an affordable TV. All three HDMIs are capable of supporting more gaming features than you’d expect with such a cheap TV too, while the supporting connections cast includes an optical digital audio output, two powered USB ports, satellite and terrestrial antenna inputs and a headphone jack. Naturally, you can also stream content to the TV using either Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.

The P755K ships with a lightweight and unglamorous but easy-to-use remote control that includes several direct app access buttons and a fairly comfortable and logical layout. You can issue verbal instructions to the P755K, too, via built-in Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa devices.

TCL P755K review: Smart TV Platform

The P755K uses the Android TV smart system. Unlike most previous TCL Android iterations, though, the P755K bolsters the available smart features by adding the Freeview Play app. This sidesteps Android and Google TV’s usual blind spot when it comes to some of the UK’s most popular terrestrial broadcaster catch-up services. Even the notoriously fussy BBC iPlayer app is present and correct, alongside All4, ITVX, My5, Netflix, YouTube, Prime Video, Disney+, Apple TV and many more besides.

The Android layout still feels rather cumbersome and overwhelming, however, and doesn’t offer as many customisation options or as much habit-based recommendation intelligence as some of today’s rival TV smart systems.

TCL P755K review: Image quality

While the P755K isn’t bright enough to unlock the full glory of high dynamic range images, as we’ll see in the next section, it’s a reasonably polished SDR performer.

Colours look believable and balanced, despite relying on a relatively traditional filtering system rather than the quantum dot approach deployed further up TCL’s range. Blending and shading are handled with nice finesse too, giving images a good sense of depth and three-dimensionality.

That said, measurements using the Calman Ultimate software suite and Portrait Displays’ G1 signal generator and C6 light meter reveal that the TV pretty much tops out at 185cd/m2 of brightness in the most engaging Movie and Standard picture presets. This limited brightness doesn’t lead to much shadow detailing getting lost in dark areas, however, and dark colours avoid becoming heavily desaturated.

The Calman Ultimate tests also reveal a little inaccuracy in the P755K’s colour rendition. Even using the Movie preset, which appears to be the most accurate option in the absence of any Filmmaker Mode or IMAX modes, 2-point and multipoint greyscale tests reveal Delta E 2000 error averages of 3.7 and 5 on a scale where any errors need to be under three to be considered imperceptible to the human eye.

Gamut, colour checker and saturation tests, meanwhile, all turned in Delta E 2000 average errors of between 6.2 and 6.9. The default Standard picture preset, in case you’re wondering, ups the greyscale errors to double figures, and the colour errors to between 7 and 9.

None of these error levels are really out of the way for TVs as affordable as the P755K and they don’t translate into anything unbalanced or gaudy enough with real-world content to represent a significant problem. If you want absolute measurable accuracy, you’ll need to up your budget.

Dark SDR scenes reveal a solid black-level performance rather than the stand-out efforts we’ve experienced with most of TCL’s step-up TVs. There’s a touch of greyness hanging over parts of the picture that ought to look black, and there isn’t enough brightness in any light highlights within these dark areas to disguise that gentle grey infusion.

While this stops the P755K from standing as tall above its rivals as TCL’s premium ranges have tended to, the greyness over dark scenes isn’t as aggressive as I’ve seen it on some other TVs in the same sort of price bracket.

The most annoying thing about the P755K’s handling of dark scenes is not its slight greyness but the way the lighting engine turns off the screen’s backlighting entirely during fades to black, before flicking it back on when the picture returns. This can be pretty distracting, especially if you’re watching in a blacked-out room.

The P755K’s upscaling of HD sources to the screen’s native 4K resolution doesn’t yield the same level of sharpness and naturalism that TCL’s top-end models achieve, but the results don’t look excessively soft or noisy. Colours, too, tend to survive the addition of all those extra pixels without suffering major tone shifts or banding noise.

One thing that does cause a little softness to creep into the image, though, is motion. There’s a touch of motion blur that can’t be eliminated by provided motion processing tools, which means camera pans and large moving objects in the frame lack a little ‘snap’. Especially with 24fps sources. A Nature Cinema motion processing setting does, however, manage to take the edge off judder with 24p sources without generating lots of unwanted processing side effects.

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TCL P755K review: HDR performance

The fact that the P755K doesn’t retain the strong brightness edge over rivals that TCL’s more premium TVs do inevitably means it’s more exposed with HDR sources. Calman Ultimate tests reveal that the screen can only reach just under 400cd/m2 of brightness in its Standard picture preset, versus 2,000cd/m2 plus on some of TCL’s more premium TVs.

As a result, I didn’t see that explosive extra brightness pop as you switch from SDR to HDR sources that I’d hoped for. Nor do bright highlights of HDR pictures radiate forth with that full lifelike intensity more premium HDR displays deliver. Something likely not helped by the fact that the P755K doesn’t have any local dimming tools at its disposal.

The P755K does manage to deliver some HDR step up, though, without the picture turning to hell, which is more than can be said for a good many similarly affordable models out there. Colours, in particular, take on a surprisingly substantial extra level of vibrancy – a subjective view backed up by Calman Ultimate measurements showing that the screen is capable of covering more than 94% of the UHDA-P3 colour gamut. A far higher figure than I’d expect to see from such an affordable TV.

A reasonable degree of blend subtlety is retained in the picture’s most heavily saturated areas, too. Further Calman Ultimate measurements reveal that in Movie mode the P755K achieves a Delta E 2000 average colour mapping error of just under 7, which is a lower figure than many much more expensive TVs can muster.

The P755K responds quite well to the premium HDR10+ and Dolby Vision formats, with their extra scene-by-scene data. Dolby Vision sources achieve more contrast and dynamism than you get with standard HDR10 feeds, validating TCL’s retention of support for all four HDR Formats (HDR10, HLG, HDR10+ and Dolby Vision) on such an affordable set.

The TV provides proper, adjustable tone mapping functionality for basic HDR10 images, which is also impressive, but it’s no replacement for the HDR tone mapping information that Dolby Vision provides.

One oddity of the P755K’s tone mapping option is that it makes HDR pictures look darker overall, when such modes usually have the opposite effect. Presumably, this enables the brightness-limited screen to deliver a better sense of HDR’s light range, rather than just trying to cram everything in a narrow over-brightened light ‘space’. Certainly, there’s less clipping out of shading and colour detail in bright areas with tone mapping engaged than I would expect to see on TVs with this level of brightness. Some viewers may prefer the extra brightness provided by turning the dynamic tone mapping off but the picture becomes much less controlled and balanced.

As you might expect with an LCD TV that doesn’t carry any local dimming, the extra brightness demands of HDR sources can introduce more greyness over dark scenes than you get with SDR. While this joins the limited brightness in robbing the P755K of some of that TCL DNA that’s served the brand’s premium TVs so well, it’s not bad compared with the grey washouts seen on many similarly affordable HDR TVs.

I unfortunately have to wrap up this section by reporting a bug. If you play Dolby Vision from an external source, the TV responds to changing brightness information in the image signal too early, resulting in the picture darkening or brightening earlier than it should. Fortunately, this distracting issue does not occur when streaming Dolby Vision from the TV’s internal apps, which is how I suspect the vast majority of P755K users will source their Dolby Vision signals. TCL has stated that it’s working on a fix.

TCL P755K review: Gaming

While the P755K’s limited brightness prevents it from bringing out the full brightness pop and dazzle of the spectacular HDR delivered by Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6, or the gorgeous range of light on show during Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla’s beautifully subtle 24-hour daytime cycles, it has more going for it for gamers than arguably any other TV in its class.

Particularly welcome is its ability to use so-called Dual Line Gate technology (activated by a Game Accelerator option) to achieve an apparent 120Hz refresh rate where a game supports it, despite the screen only supporting a native 60Hz rate.

You do have to sacrifice some resolution to achieve this; 120Hz can only be delivered with a maximum 1440p resolution. But competitive gamers will likely find that loss of resolution a fine price to pay for a much more responsive gaming experience.

Other good news for gamers is that the screen takes just 9.7ms to render 60Hz images when running in its Game mode. There’s also support for variable refresh rates, a Dolby Vision game mode, and auto low latency mode switching.

The P755K even apes more expensive TVs by providing a dedicated ‘Game Bar’ onscreen menu when you’re gaming, which provides information on the incoming graphics signal and lets you activate a handful of gaming aids.

TCL P755K review: Sound quality

The P755K lacks a built-in subwoofer and, as a result, fails to deliver any sense of heft or scale to those cinematic rumbles and bottom-end sounds film fans love to hear.

The P755K’s speakers also don’t have enough power to truly push the sound out, leaving the action feeling a bit small and trapped. High treble sounds can become harsh due to the lack of any bass to counterpoint them, too. Of course, as with any TV, pair with a soundbar for the best audio.

Again, though, really none of this is unexpected at the P755K’s price point. The TV also gets a few audio things right, such as at least understanding its limitations well enough not to succumb to crackles or distortions when a soundtrack tries to drop in some heavy bass. It also places details – especially with Dolby Atmos tracks – quite accurately and clearly within the confines of the on-screen image. Dialogue tends to be highly intelligible too.

TCL P755K review: Verdict

The TCL P755K doesn’t completely reinvent the LCD TV value wheel. While it might not have my jaw hanging open in amazement, though, it manages to perform better than the majority of other similarly cheap TVs on the block.

It also delivers a level of gaming and HDR format support that you have no right to expect for so little cash. Once TCL has squashed the Dolby Vision bug with external sources, it’s a budget TV I’d happily recommend.