TCL 8-Series 8K TV

TCL 8-Series 8K TV (price TBD — mid-2020) TCL's new 8-Series 8K TV introduces advanced dimming technology for deep black levels and impressive brightness.

TCL's new flagship 8-Series 8K TV is aiming to take local dimming technology further than it's ever gone before. Local dimming allows a TV to darken and brighten in specific sections across the panel, letting bright parts of an image shine while dark parts remain nice and inky. Dimming can be found on a lot of high-end LCD TVs, but the 8-Series is using a particularly advanced method — one that could give it a nice performance advantage over the competition.

Instead of traditional dimming with standard LEDs, the 8-Series 8K TV uses TCL's new "Vidrian Mini-LED" backlight system. These Mini-LEDs allow the display to have more dimming zones than an LCD with a standard backlight. The 8-Series has around 1,000 zones versus a few hundred on conventional high-end TVs. This gives the 8-Series even greater precision when it comes to brightness and black levels. Though resulting contrast can't quite equal the pixel-level dimming of an OLED, Vidrian Mini-LED technology presents a very promising development, blending great black level performance with the brightness advantages that LCD TVs are known for.

Mini-LED tech is actually already available on TCL's 4K 8-Series TVs, but the new version used on its upcoming 8K TV is even more advanced with more balanced light control. The 8-Series didn't quite stand out as much to us at CES as 8K TVs from Sony and Samsung did, but it still demonstrates a lot of potential — especially if TCL can maintain the competitive pricing it's known for. We'll have to wait a bit longer for details on the cost, but 65-inch and 75-inch 8-Series 8K TV models will go on sale later this year.