TCL 98Q9BK review

No sooner have our collective backs recovered from checking out TCL’s ridiculously great value 85-inch 85C805K magnum opus than we’re having to dig out the back braces again to take on an even bigger TCL brute: the 98-inch 98Q9BK. And, if anything, this startlingly affordable whopper proves even more that the cinema-sized TV revolution is well and truly upon us. Whether our vertebrae like it or not.

Price

Not so long ago you’d have expected to pay five figures for a 98-100-inch TV. The TCL 98Q9BK, though, sets UK buyers back the princely sum of £3250 – and that’s despite it being far from basic with either its specifications or features. Suddenly, the current huge surge in the popularity of mega-sized TVs isn’t so hard to understand.

The main king-sized TV competition for the 98Q9BK comes from TCL itself and arch-rival Hisense. The 85-inch TCL 85C805K we loved so much is now, incredibly, available for under £1500, while Hisense’s 100-inch 100E7NQT Pro is a pound under £2k. Note, though, that the 85C805K is actually from TCL’s previous TV generation and so doesn’t sport as many dimming zones or as much brightness as the 98Q9BK, while the Hisense model doesn’t use Mini LED lighting or, again, deliver nearly as much brightness.

The Q9BK range isn’t sold outside the UK. Though a nearly identically specified option, the 98C765K, is available in many European countries.

Design

So instantly, overwhelmingly epic is witnessing the 98Q9BK’s 98-inch screen that it’s tempting to just say ‘it’s massive’ for this section of the review and move on.

If you can tear your eyes away from watching blockbuster films at a blockbuster size for a moment or two, though, you might appreciate that while the 98Q9BK isn’t exactly the world’s most stylish TV, its use of straight, blade-style feet (note that smaller Q9BK models switch to a central plinth-style stand) and a fairly narrow bezel help ensure there’s minimal hardware presence to distract you from the epicness of its images. A vaguely metallic finish to the TV’s side panels adds a slightly premium feel to proceedings, too.

The rear is shallower and more uniform than you might expect of such a huge backlit LCD TV too, making it a reasonably unobtrusive wall mount option (so much as a 98-inch screen can ever be considered unobtrusive, of course).

The 98Q9BK ships with one of TCL’s typical long, thin, rather plasticky remote controls. While a more premium version might have been nice to get with such an epic TV, though, its layout is fairly sensible and it helpfully provides direct access keys to some of the most popular streaming apps.

Features

While its size is obviously the 98Q9BK’s most stand-out feature, it ticks plenty of other home cinema-friendly boxes too: its LCD display uses contrast-rich VA technology rather than the IPS alternative; it’s illuminated by Mini LEDs; and those Mini LEDs are arranged in 1536 independently dimmable zones (yes, we counted them).

TCL claims, too, that the 98Q9BK is capable of outputting as much as 2400 nits of brightness for small HDR highlights. If it gets even close to this with real-world content on such a mammoth screen, the resulting spectacle should be truly something. Especially if those 1536 dimming zones mean the set can serve up some deep blacks alongside the eye-catching brightness.

Helping the 98Q9BK’s colours keep up with its promised brightness is a Quantum Dot array, and the screen sports a mild anti-reflection filter to try and reduce the extent to which bright objects in your room might come between you and a direct connection with what you’re watching.

Connections are about what we’d expect from a reasonably affordable king-sized TV, with four HDMIs being joined by a couple of USBs and the usual wi-fi and Bluetooth wireless options. The wireless options include Miracast, Apple AirPlay 2 and Chromecast, but only two of the HDMIs support 4K/120Hz (and, in fact, 144Hz) gaming feeds.

The Chromecast support comes courtesy of the 98Q9BK’s Google TV smart system. With TCL’s previous TV generation, this use of Google or Android TV smarts would have come with the rider that it doesn’t provide all of the UK’s main terrestrial broadcaster catch-up apps. With the 98Q9BK, though, TCL has managed to add Freeview Play, meaning that it now covers every key video streaming service most UK punters will ever need.

Gaming features beyond the previously mentioned 4K/120Hz and 144Hz support include VRR (including the AMD FreeSync Premium Pro system), a Game Bar menu that provides gaming aids (such as an overlaid target reticle) and information on the gaming signal, plus a 240Hz Game Accelerator system that trades resolution for the appearance of refresh rates that actually go beyond the 98Q9BK’s native 144Hz range.

TCL’s big boy also supports ALLM switching, meaning it can automatically switch into its faster-responding Game preset when a game source is detected. In this mode, input lag (the time the screen takes to render received image data) drops to a very respectable 13.4ms.

It’s great to find, too, a Dolby Vision HDR game mode so you can still enjoy fast response times when gaming in Dolby’s premium high dynamic range format.

The 98Q9BK’s Dolby Vision HDR support is backed up by HDR10+, HDR10 and HLG HDR playback, meaning it covers all four of the main HDR formats and so will always take in the best available version of any content you feed it.

One last feature of note finds TCL turning to the audio gurus at Onkyo for the design of the 98Q9BK’s 2.1-channel sound system, which includes a large rear-mounted subwoofer.

Picture

With the occasional, increasingly rare exception, TCL’s TV division is on a pretty serious roll at the moment, consistently delivering TVs of all sizes that combine aggressive prices with surprisingly (given how cheap they are) high levels of performance. The 98Q9BK keeps these good times going in truly spectacular fashion.

For starters, there’s no overstating just what an impact a 98-inch screen has on your living room. The step up from even 85 inches feels much more than just an extra 13 inches in terms of how much the 98-inch screen fills your field of view (as well as your wall), instantly turning even the Teletubbies into a (rather disturbing) Hollywood blockbuster.

Making that impact all the greater is how bright TCL’s latest TV giant is. Bright highlights of HDR content gleam with the sort of intensity usually reserved for only the most expensive mid-sized TVs. Even more strikingly, the picture retains much more light with HDR images that flood the whole screen with brightness than any other super-sized TV (or any OLED TV period) we’ve tested. Such brightness emerging at the 98Q9BK’s scale is an incredibly satisfying sight for any videophile keen to experience just what HDR is capable of.

Just as importantly, though, the 98Q9BK doesn’t throw its light about irresponsibly, without due regard for all the other elements that go into making a good TV picture. Its local dimming system – and, we’d say, the TCL AiPQ processor driving it – does a mostly very accomplished job of getting the screen to serve up impressively deep and consistent dark colours and black tones alongside all the bright stuff.

Unrelentingly dark scenes are troubled impressively little by low-contrast grey ‘wash’ hanging over them, yet at the same time they remain free of black crush, where subtle shading details can be lost in a TV’s push for convincing black tones.

Scenes that contain a few relatively small but very intense bright highlights set against a mostly dark but also detailed backdrop can cause a slightly cloudy, hazy look to creep into some dark areas. While clearly a result of the 98Q9BK’s local dimming system not quite having enough local light control to fully maintain inky blacks in between spread-out bright highlights, we broadly appreciate the choice TCL appears to have made between driving the local dimming so aggressively that it would surely have resulted in light ‘halos’ around the bright objects and going for a more ‘blended’ backlight zone approach that raises general black levels slightly but doesn’t generate distractingly specific backlight zone activity.

Getting back to the unequivocally good stuff, the 98Q9BK’s Quantum Dot colours are diverse and voluminous enough to take on all the light that’s been thrown at them without thinning out or, except under very extreme circumstances, ‘clipping out’ subtle shading details. There isn’t, though, quite as much general nuance to bold colours as you get with some of the most high-end TVs – a limitation which can leave skin tones sometimes looking a touch plasticky and the occasional vivid expanse of colour looking more cartoonish than the rest of the picture.

This issue perhaps contributes, too, to a slightly soft look to the 98Q9BK’s picture at times. Initially, we thought this might just be what 4K looks like when stretched to 98 inches, but we have seen other similarly large or even larger screens, albeit only in demo conditions, that retain a crisper look.

That isn’t to say, though, that the 98Q9BK’s picture doesn’t still look clean and detailed, because it does. The picture is also still crisp enough to allow us to feel more than satisfied with the screen’s upscaling of HD sources. This doesn’t exaggerate source noise, misjudge colours or add artificial-looking object edging as it goes about adding millions of extra pixels of picture to fill the unforgivingly huge 98-inch screen.

While the 98Q9BK doesn’t carry a Filmmaker Mode preset, it still manages to produce impressively balanced, natural and accurate-looking images in both its HDR and SDR Movie presets. Also, while its Dynamic Tone Mapping system is mostly enjoyable in the way it goes about optimising HDR10 sources to the screen’s capabilities in the TV’s Standard mode, this is definitely a TV that really benefits from being fed a Dolby Vision source, with which even its local dimming engine seems to enjoy a little more refinement.

Our main niggle with the 98Q9BK beyond the slightly cloudy look certain extreme contrast shots can take on is that it can set a slightly too high brightness floor with HDR10 and SDR images across its best picture presets, resulting in you seeing slightly more background detail in dark scenes than you were really supposed to.

Often this doesn’t really matter and you might not notice if you didn’t know exactly how a scene should look. But sometimes it can cause dark scenes to exhibit more noise than they otherwise would.

So that we can finish this section on the high note the 98Q9BK deserves, though, let’s confirm that, as you might hope, gaming on the 98Q9BK is so much fun it feels like it should barely be legal.

Adventure/Exploration/RPG titles take on a whole new level of immersion when you’re exploring life-sized worlds and fighting life-sized enemies. We even get on well with trigger-speed games such as Call Of Duty, with which small screens traditionally give you an edge. That’s partly because of how responsive the 98Q9BK is, and partly because (provided you don’t sit so close to it that your eyes have to move around it too much) its enormity actually makes it easier to spot distant or hiding enemies.

Basically, once you’ve gamed this big and this bright, it’s hard to go back to anything less.

Sound

While images as big as those of the 98Q9BK deserve to be partnered with some sort of external sound system, TCL’s collaboration with Onkyo has resulted in an unexpectedly ‘worthy’ integrated sound system.

The speakers are powerful enough to project their sound a surprising distance beyond the TV’s boundaries, for instance, creating an audio world that’s even bigger than the one you’re seeing on screen.

The handling of this large soundstage, though, is precise enough to place effects within it with decent accuracy and balance, so that nothing starts to feel woolly, dislocated or incoherent. What’s more, while there are no dedicated up-firing drivers or channels in the 98Q9BK, it manages to create a sense of verticality to the sound if you’re listening to a Dolby Atmos soundtrack. This isn’t as precise as the left/right staging, but it’s still a compelling addition to the already epic soundstage.

The subwoofer on the 98Q9BK’s rear sounds a little coarse compared with the TV’s other speakers, meaning dense action movie moments can sound a little compressed or hardened. The sub is at least keen to get involved, though, and only succumbs to mild true distortions under quite extreme Hollywood-sound-mixers-showing-off pressure.

Deep male voices can challenge the low frequency capabilities of the main speakers, too, becoming slightly muddy and hummy from time to time.

Overall, though, the 98Q9BK sound good enough out of the box to not have you immediately ordering at least a soundbar to go with its massive pictures. Which is probably a better result than we had a right to expect with a £3250 98-inch TV.

Verdict

The TCL 98Q9BK joins the brand’s What Hi-Fi? Award-winning 85C805K in redefining the big-screen market. Its pictures aren’t quite as all-round refined as the C805K’s, perhaps. However, its monumental size for what is, under the circumstances, an eye-catchingly affordable price – together with its fierce brightness and surprisingly effective Mini LED/local dimming light controls – officially means that projectors are no longer the only credible big-screen option for the sort of serious but still affordable home theatre set-ups so many of us crave.

SCORES

• Picture 4
• Sound 4
• Features 5

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