TCL Q9BK (98Q9BK) review: From regular TV to replacement wall, this range has it all

It’s becoming quite hard to keep track of all of TCL’s great-value LCD TVs over the past year, but the new Q9BK range (C765K in Europe) manages to stand out from the crowd. When it comes to great-value LCD TVs, the occasional rare miss aside, TCL is on a roll.

Whether it’s the TV’s extreme brightness, crazy number of local dimming zones, use of Mini LED lighting, advanced gaming chops, typically aggressive prices or, at the upper end of the range, the presence of screen sizes so big they no longer even feel like TVs, there’s something in the Q9BK range to attract just about anyone.

TCL Q9BK review: Key specifications

TCL Q9BK review: What you need to know

The Q9BK range is exclusive to the UK – though C765K models available elsewhere in Europe boast pretty much the same specification.

The TV sits near the top of TCL’s current lineup, falling a few hundred local dimming zones and just over 1,000 nits of brightness short of the C855K. It still delivers a mightily impressive core specification that includes Mini LED lighting, 2,000+ nits of brightness, 1,000+ local dimming zones and a Quantum Dot colour system. The range is also distinguished by extending to 98in at its upper end, and by catering for all the latest and greatest gaming features – including 144Hz refresh rates.

TCL Q9BK review: Price and competition

The Q9BK comes in five different screen sizes in the UK: 55in (£800), 65in (£850), 75in (£1,250), 85in (£1,600) and the £3,250 98in hero model I was sent for testing.

These prices are very competitive for such well-specified TVs. The 85in and 98in models, in particular, are extremely aggressively priced by the standards of such massive, high-spec screens.

The closest rival would be Hisense’s U8N, which combines Mini LED technology with a heavy-duty local dimming system, high brightness and quantum dots at broadly similar prices across the range. Samsung’s QN90D range uses Mini LED lighting and quantum dot too, but their brightness tops out a little lower, at just over 2,000 nits, and pricing is higher, with the 65in model, for instance, costing around £1,499.

TCL Q9BK review: Design, connections and control

The Q9BK’s design is decent without doing anything to stand out. The frame around its screen is reasonably trim without achieving the near invisibility found with some of today’s premium TVs, and the set sticks out further around the back than some of today’s skinny supermodels. Build quality is good, though, and the rear panel carries a striking cross-hatch pattern to entertain those peculiar souls who care what the back of their TVs looks like.

At first glance, the Q9BK’s connections look impressive. Four HDMIs lead the way, backed up by a USB 2.0 port, an optical digital audio output, a LAN port and a headphone jack. Only two of the HDMIs, though, support HDMI 2.1 gaming features, and only one supports the TV’s maximum 144Hz refresh rate. There’s Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless support too, of course, which includes Apple Airplay and Miracast compatibility.

The Q9BK can be controlled either by verbal instructions courtesy of built-in Google Assistant support, or via a provided remote control. This handset feels a little plasticky, and its sculpting is pretty bland, but it’s comfortable enough to hold, and its button layout puts most key controls pretty easily to hand.

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TCL Q9BK review: Smart TV platform

The Q9BK brings in Google TV for its smarts – complete with the usual mix of pros and cons. On the upside there’s extensive app support and advanced Android smart device connectivity, while on the downside the interface can be buggy, updates can be long-winded and the interface doesn’t seem as clever or efficient at promoting content based on your viewing habits as the best rival smart platforms.

TCL has managed to bring Freeview Play onboard alongside Google TV for the Q9BK, though, meaning that, unlike TCL’s previous TV generation, you now get a full roster of the UK’s key terrestrial broadcaster streaming services.

TCL Q9BK review: Image quality

TCL can be a bit hit-and-miss with its picture presets generally, but with SDR content in particular, the Q9BK delivers a winning combination of dramatic/spectacular options and good old-fashioned accuracy.

While I wouldn’t recommend that most people use the Vivid preset, the Standard preset still leans into the screen’s bold capabilities, ramping up the brightness and, especially, colour saturations beyond SDR’s industry-standard values without the resulting image looking unbalanced, gaudy or excessively unnatural.

Tests using Portrait Displays’ Calman Ultimate software, G1 signal generator and C6 HDR5000 colorimeter revealed consistent greyscale and colour Delta E errors of between 9 and 10 in the Q9BK’s Standard preset, where you need a score of below three to be imperceptible to the human eye. But this isn’t crazily far off for a default setting that’s designed to both exploit the TV’s capabilities and give you an image that stands up against typical levels of daytime light pollution.

There’s plenty of nuance in the Standard mode’s quantum dot colour handling, and the Q9BK’s high dimming zone count does an excellent job of delivering impressively deep black colours without crushing out the subtle details that ensure dark parts of the picture don’t look flat or hollow.

While the Q9BK isn’t the greatest upscaler, it’s good enough to deliver HD source images that look clean and naturally toned, if not especially crisp, in Standard mode. Motion, even with 24p film sources, looks reasonably natural too, with minimal blurring and a fairly authentic sense of judder.

If you’re in the mood for a lights-down proper movie night, switching to the Movie picture preset gives you a less bright, less heavily saturated but for the most part impressively accurate image. Calman measurements of the Movie mode for greyscale and multiple colour tests, including luminance sweeps and colour point checkers, all deliver delta E error averages well below anything the human eye could detect.

The only little niggle with the Movie mode is that it can’t resist infusing images with a little too much brightness, leaving some dark shots looking a touch over-exposed. Overall, though, the range of pictures the Q9BK can provide with SDR sources is effective at offering something to suit all tastes and viewing circumstances.

TCL Q9BK review: HDR image quality

Good though the Q9BK is with SDR, it’s built very much to shine – literally – with HDR. And for the most part, that’s exactly what it does.

The brightness is pretty breathtaking. The brightest highlights of HDR images look blisteringly intense – regardless of whether they appear against a backdrop of general brightness or general darkness. This is confirmed by Calman Ultimate tests that record a peak brightness of around 2,100cd/m2 on a 10% test window – a huge number for such a competitively priced TV.

The consistency of the Q9BK’s brightness peaks, even when they’re having to work on a really small bright element, also provides a brilliant illustration of how effective TCL’s Mini LED lighting and local dimming controls are. Especially during mostly dark scenes, where you might expect to see either quite strong backlight haloing around bright highlights, or the dimming engine having to substantially darken highlights to keep haloing to a minimum.

The Q9BK’s high brightness holds up with HDR images that fill the whole screen with intense light, too, in a way you won’t get with any current OLED TV. An HDR feat that becomes particularly spectacular when witnessed on the 98in Q9BK I tested.

The Q9BK’s quantum dot colour system is potent enough to keep saturations looking punchy and convincing through almost the picture’s entire brightness range, managing to present almost 95% of the UHDA-P3 colour spectrum currently used for most HDR mastering. What’s more, the quantum dots are addressed with enough subtlety to ensure that objects in the image look richly textured and three-dimensional, while the image as a whole enjoys plenty of depth to go with its eye-catching colour, contrast and brightness.

Judder feels a bit stronger with 24p movies in HDR mode than it does with SDR sources. If you find yourself bothered by it when motion processing is turned off, switching the processing on and setting the judder and blur smoothing elements to a relatively low level can subdue the judder’s hard-edged feel.

Calman Ultimate tests reveal that the Q9BK isn’t capable of hitting the same levels of accuracy in its Movie HDR preset as it does in SDR Movie mode. This is hardly unusual, though, and for the most part, I found myself applauding the choices TCL has made when it came to giving you a massively impactful HDR effect without losing sight of the sort of subtle details and relative weighting that makes pictures convincing.

It’s worth saying, too, that while none of the Q9BK’s HDR settings are especially accurate, they do offer plenty of genuine variety in how HDR looks. Standard mode aggressively maps HDR10 content to the full extent of the TV’s considerable capabilities to spectacular effect, without overcooking things like the Vivid mode does.

There can be slight clipping (loss of shading detail) in the brightest areas of colour and, especially, white, but you’ll usually be too busy gawping and drooling over the rest of the picture to notice.

The Movie HDR mode is far less exuberant but quite effectively renders more of the actual full light range of an HDR picture, reducing clipping and, in being less ‘showy’, creating a more subtle and consistent experience.

The much heavier demands HDR places on LED backlighting systems do reveal a degree of compromise in the Q9BK’s system that initially feels surprising for a TV with so many local dimming zones and Mini LEDs. Mostly dark HDR shots that contain a few bright highlights can look a touch smoky and hazy, while black levels, even in the Standard mode become slightly grey. The longer I watched the Q9BK, though, the more I understood where TCL was coming from with its backlight decisions. It seems to want to use all the zones available to it to deliver the best balance between black levels and backlight consistency, balancing the two things out so that localised areas of blooming and clouding, which tend to be more distracting than a touch of greyness in dark areas, are minimised. 

Samsung’s more expensive Mini LED TVs, by comparison, also recognise the threat to immersion posed by strong backlight blooming but choose to tackle it by dimming down small bright highlights. This results in deeper, more OLED-like black levels and slightly more shadow detailing, but less brightness consistency.

The only flaw in Q9BK’s backlight logic is that it can cause dark scenes, even in the Movie mode, to look a little brighter than they should, causing parts of the picture and some attendant background noise to emerge from where they should have been hidden in darkness.

If you’re specifically thinking of buying the 98in Q9BK, I’d say this epic screen size stretches 4K to a point where it can look slightly soft at times. As with the small SDR niggles, though, the Q9BK’s well-intentioned HDR compromises ultimately don’t amount to much, especially in the context of the range’s aggressive pricing.

One last important point to make about the Q9BK’s HDR performance is that, unlike many rivals, it supports all four of the main HDR formats: HDR10, HLG, HDR10+ and Dolby Vision. So it can always take in the best version of any content you feed it and responds very well to the extra scene-by-scene picture data you get with the HDR10+ and Dolby Vision formats.

To test the TCL Q9BK we used Portrait Displays Calman colour calibration software.

TCL Q9BK review: Gaming

In a perfect world, the Q9BK would support the full range of cutting-edge gaming features (4K at 120Hz refresh rates in particular) across all four of its HDMI ports, rather than just two. In reality, though, not many people will be lucky enough to have three cutting-edge gaming devices, and it’s quite impressive to find features like a Dolby Vision game mode, 144Hz support and a dedicated Game onscreen on such an affordable TV.

The brightness, vibrancy and strong contrast of the Q9BK’s pictures prove a good fit for today’s HDR graphics, too, while their high frame rate support combines with an input lag time of just 17.4ms at 60Hz (which essentially halves with 120Hz sources). This gives you a very fluid, responsive experience that leaves you with precious little room to blame the TV for your gaming fails.

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TCL Q9BK review: Sound quality

The Q9BK’s sound is almost as potent as its pictures. Its Onkyo-designed 2.1-channel speaker system is powerful enough to cast sound far and wide across your living room, doing film soundtracks the favour of creating an audio world beyond the confines of the picture.

There’s even a mild sense of height to the Q9BK’s wall of sound, helping it get at least some benefit from the overhead effects associated with Dolby Atmos mixes. The Q9BK does a good job generally of placing subtle effects in more or less the right place in a sound mix – especially, again, if that mix is a Dolby Atmos soundtrack. 

The large circular subwoofer on the TV’s rear, meanwhile, pumps out a healthy amount of low-frequency sound to help ground action scenes and prevent treble details from sounding too shrill, bright or isolated. The bass doesn’t sound quite as refined as the crisp, clean sound from the main speakers, but it seldom succumbs to truly distracting distortions.

The speakers are powerful enough to move through plenty of gears as action or horror scenes build, too, though things can start to sound a little congested and constrained with the very densest soundtrack moments. Dialogue – especially male voices – can lose a little clarity and neutrality when the going gets tough. Once again, though, the Q9BK’s audio can be considered more than good enough for such aggressively priced TVs. And of course, you can increase sound quality by linking up a soundbar.

TCL Q9BK review: Verdict

The Q9BK is another hugely enjoyable chip off the old (well, actually quite new but already well-established) TCL block. It delivers the now familiar TCL characteristics of exceptionally bright, vibrant but also contrast-rich pictures and punchy, powerful sound at eye-catching prices.

The TV also benefits from TCL’s eagerness to please gamers as well as movie fans, and the extreme range of screen sizes available means there’s something for pretty much anyone. Even people wanting to set up a big-screen home cinema system that’s capable of doing more justice to HDR than any projector can.