TCL Televisions

Both, and the second does not undo the first. TCL competes on price by manufacturing its own panels and backlights at scale, not by cutting the things that determine picture quality.

What you get for the money is genuinely strong: Mini LED backlights with thousands of dimming zones and very high peak brightness at sizes where the established brands charge considerably more. In a bright room those two specifications matter more than almost anything else, and TCL delivers them at screen sizes that would otherwise be out of reach.

Where the premium brands still tend to lead is in processing polish — motion handling, upscaling of poor sources, and the last few percent of picture accuracy out of the box. Whether that gap is worth the price difference depends on what you watch and how much of it is high quality to begin with.

Both are Mini LED backlights paired with quantum dots. The quantum dots are what convert the backlight's blue light into pure red and green, which is where a modern television's color comes from.

SQD stands for Super Quantum Dot — a reformulated emitter that widens the color gamut further. TCL claims coverage up to 100% of BT.2020, which is the widest standard used in video mastering and one no consumer display fully reaches in practice.

The practical difference is in saturated color: deep reds and greens hold their intensity instead of washing toward orange or yellow at high brightness. It is a real improvement, though a smaller one than the jump from conventional LED to Mini LED in the first place.

They decide how precisely the backlight can be dark in one part of the picture and bright in another.

A Mini LED television lights its panel from behind with thousands of tiny LEDs grouped into zones. More zones means the bright areas can be smaller and more precisely placed — so a streetlight against a night sky stays a streetlight rather than sitting inside a faint gray rectangle. That artifact is called blooming, and zone count is the main thing that controls it — there is a side-by-side illustration of it above.

It matters most with high-contrast content in a dark room: starfields, credits, letterboxed film. In a bright living room watching daytime television, you would struggle to see the difference between a few hundred zones and a few thousand.

Light in the room decides it more than anything else.

A television is far brighter than any projector and holds a good picture with the curtains open, which is why it wins in a living room, a kitchen or anywhere with windows. A projector goes much larger for the money and gives a more cinematic image — but it needs the light controlled to look its best, and in a room you cannot darken it will disappoint at any price.

Size is the other axis. Televisions now reach 98 and even 115 inches, which was projector-only territory a few years ago, though the cost climbs steeply at the top. Past that, projection is still the only sensible route.

If you are weighing the two, our screen size comparator shows what each option gives you from where you actually sit, and the projector and screen page covers the other side of the decision.

Start with the room's light, then the size, then the model.

A bright room rewards brightness and zone count, which pushes you up the range. A dark or well-controlled room needs much less of both, and the money is often better spent on a larger screen or on the sound. Seating distance sets the size — sitting close to a large panel is not the same as sitting far from it, and the screen size comparator does that arithmetic.

The honest version is that the top of the range is not automatically the right answer. Tell us the room, where the seating goes and what you watch, and we will point at one or two models rather than the whole lineup.

Often, but it is worth a conversation before it is worth a bracket.

Two things need checking. The first is the wall itself — masonry, framing and what is behind the finish all change how the mount is fixed, and a large panel on an inadequate fixing is a genuine hazard. The second is heat: a working fireplace can put more of it at the mount height than a television is rated for.

The third issue is comfort rather than safety. Above a mantel is usually higher than the ideal viewing height, which means looking up for the length of a film. A pull-down or articulating mount can bring the screen down and forward, and for many rooms that is the difference between a television people use and one they tolerate.

We have done a number of these — there are examples in our recent projects.

Configuration and optimization are included with every installation. That means picture modes chosen for your room rather than the showroom, HDR behaving properly, motion settings dealt with, and the source devices negotiating the signal they should be rather than whatever the handshake landed on.

Out of the box, most televisions ship in a mode designed to look striking under retail lighting — over-bright, over-saturated, with motion smoothing on. Turning that off and setting it up for the actual room is the single biggest improvement most sets ever get, and it costs nothing but knowing where the settings are.

Full instrumented calibration — measured with reference equipment — is a separate service, priced by scope. On a television in a normal living room it is rarely the right spend; we will say so if that is the case.