TCL 98C7K Review

Price

With Hisense just announcing a 116-inch TV that costs £24,999, the £2,399 ($5,995 in Australia) TCL is asking for its 98-inch 98C7K looks like quite the steal. And actually, the more you delve into its extensive feature count and, especially, the extensive improvements TCL has delivered to its epic new TV’s core hardware, the better value that £2,399 starts to look.

That’s not to say there aren’t other similarly massive king-sized TVs around for the same sort of money. Some of these other budget giants, such as Hisense’s 100E7NQ Pro, have even turned out to be pretty good. As we’ll see, though, the 98C7K really does feel like it’s taking affordable home cinema-sized televisions to a whole new level.

Design

• Fairly slim for such a huge screen
• Very wide-spaced feet
• It’s big, innit?

If you’re one of those people – of which there are many, don’t worry – for whom 75-inches of TV screen feels like an outrageous thing to stick in your living room, then you’d best have your smelling salts handy before locking eyes with the 98-inch 98C7K.

Those extra 23 inches make 75-inch TVs feel like portables, filling your field of vision in a way that really does make you feel like you’re at the cinema.

The epic nature of the 98C7K’s screen is actually exaggerated by how little supporting bodywork there is around it. The screen frame is surprisingly narrow, the feet the screen slots onto are narrow blade-style affairs that become almost invisible when viewing the screen head on, and even the set’s rear panel is unexpectedly svelte for such a huge LED screen.

While TCL has clearly worked hard to keep the 98C7K trim, nothing about it feels flimsy. On the contrary, a new support structure built inside the rear panel makes everything feel ultra rigid and solid – without, mercifully, adding significantly to the screen’s weight.

In keeping with increasingly many other mid-range and premium TVs, the 98C7K carries an archive of built-in digital artworks that you can call up as screen savers when you’re not watching the TV in earnest. This is certainly a trade up from having a 98-inch black hole in your room.

My one bugbear with the 98C7K’s design is how far apart its feet are, meaning you’ll need an immense bit of furniture to place the TV on – unless you settle for the floor, or do away with the feet and fix it to a big wall instead.

Connectivity

• Four HDMI inputs, two with 4K/144Hz and VRR support
• eARC support
• Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.4, plus Miracast screen mirroring

The 98C7K is pretty well connected for its money. There are four HDMI inputs for starters, now pretty much standard for any ambitious TV; joined by an optical digital audio output, an Ethernet port, RF and satellite tuner connections, and a USB 3.0 jack.

The single USB is perhaps a bit stingy, and in a perfect world all four HDMI ports would support the full HDMI 2.1 specification rather than just two. In reality, only the most dedicated and well-heeled gamers are likely to need more than two game-friendly HDMI inputs.

User Experience

• Google TV smart system
• Remote-free voice recognition and control
• Supports for all the main HDR formats

The 98C7K’s smart features are built on the Google TV platform. This can feel a bit overwhelming at times, and isn’t the cleverest system when it comes to curating content you’re likely to want to watch.

The latest Google TV version carried on the 98C7K runs stably, and you can’t accuse it of being short of content. Especially as TCL has onboarded all the main UK terrestrial broadcaster catch up services despite Google TV’s usual blind spot where some of these channel-specific apps are concerned.

You can control and find content on the TV by issuing voice instructions – with or without the remote control to hand – via Google Assistant.

The remote control is a nicely shaped and finished affair with a reasonably logical button layout, while the 98C7K’s set up menus are cleanly presented and well organised. Though they do contain one or two bits of unhelpful jargon.

One final big tick in the user experience box comes from the TV’s ability to play all four of the main high dynamic range formats: HDR10, HLG, HDR10+ and Dolby Vision. This means you can always be sure the TV will be taking in the best version of any content it receives.

Features

• 2048 dimming zones
• Mini LED panel
• Bang & Olufsen sound system

Being a 98-inch TV that costs £2,399 is just the start of the TCL 98C7K’s charms, it turns out. Particularly intriguing is the extent to which its core hardware has been revamped from 2024’s equivalent models.

The CrystGlow HVA panel features liquid crystal molecules that have had polyimide added to them to, its claimed, give them more control over how they handle all the light being emitted by the TV’s Mini LED lighting.

This Mini LED lighting system is divided into 2048 separate local dimming zones – enough to provide even a screen this big with really promisingly localised light control. Which it will likely need given that TCL promises a high peak brightness output for its TV of 3000 nits.

TCL hasn’t just relied on a much-increased dimming zone count in its bid to combine high brightness with good contrast and dark scene consistency. A new suite of technologies under the umbrella name of Halo Control have been introduced to minimise the potential for extraneous light to appear around stand-out bright picture elements or over areas of subtle shadow detailing in very dark scenes.

For instance, there’s a new light emitting chip at the 98C7K’s heart that TCL says produces 27.5% more brightness than its predecessor while simultaneously being more than 30% more energy efficient. A new super-condensed micro lens over the Mini LEDs is claimed to massively improve the focus and stability of the light it handles, too, while a bi-directional, 16-bit light control system is provided to enhance greyscale and colour finesse.

The new panel also supports wider viewing angles than most LCD TVs before colour and contrast start to significantly deteriorate, and a new improved grade of TCL’s AiPQ Pro processor is on hand to marshal the 98C7K’s many improvements.

Inveterate telly tinkerers will be pleased to know that TCL has substantially increased the number and range of picture adjustment features it offers for the 98C7K too, as well as making some of the previously existing ones – especially the dimming control, colour enhancement and dynamic tone mapping fine tuning options – much more effective.

One final big new feature of the 98C7K is its Bang & Olufsen sound system. We’re getting used now to TV manufacturers turning to audio brands for help with their TVs’ sound, but it feels like quite a coup for TCL to have worked with one of the world’s most premium AV brands in designing the 98C7K’s sound.

The collaboration has resulted in a 60W, 6.2.2-channel sound system featuring at its heart what TCL says is a ‘hi-end class’ magnetic drive system with four times as much energy density and three times as much dynamic range as the 98C7K’s predecessor’s speakers.

Gaming

• Frame rate support up to 144Hz
• VRR Support including AMD FreeSync Premium Pro
• Dedicated game menu

Aside from wishing that more than two of the 98C7K’s four HDMI inputs catered for the full gamut of HDMI 2.1 features, the 98C7K still has plenty to offer today’s gamer.

For starters, it can support 4K resolutions at frame rates up to 144Hz – and the frame rate can even be pushed to 288Hz if you’re prepared to drop to HD resolution.

Variable refresh rate support is provided across the frame rate range too, including in the AMD FreeSync Premium Pro format, and auto low latency mode switching will put the TV into its lowest latency picture mode without any manual input from you. In this mode the screen produces incoming graphics in just 13.1ms. 

A dedicated game menu can be called up while gaming providing both information on the incoming graphics and access to a few gaming aids – including support for the super-wide aspect ratios offered by some PC games these days.

All these excellent gaming features culminate in a fantastically fun and immersive gaming experience. The sheer scale of its 98-inch images together with excellent sharpness for such a big screen, ultra-fluid and crisp motion handling, high brightness and great contrast all make it a phenomenal way to experience adventure-style games such as Skyrim and the Assassin’s Creed series.

I guess the size of the screen isn’t well suited to really competitive gaming with online FPS titles – though honestly I personally couldn’t get enough of playing Call Of Duty in 120Hz at such an epic size.

Picture Quality

• Bright, colourful pictures
• Minimal blooming for its size
• Improved Filmmaker Mode

The 98C7K’s picture quality is a revelation for such an affordable king-sized TV.

Starting out with its Standard preset, the first thing that struck me about its images, was how bright and vibrant they are. While I didn’t quite get the full 3000 nits of brightness out of the screen that TCL says it’s capable of, tests using Portrait Display’s Calman Ultimate software, G1 signal generator and C6 HDR5000 light meter recorded peaks of just over 2,900 nits.

And trust me: That’s a serious amount of light when it’s emanating from a 98-inch screen.

Daylight HDR scenes feel like you’ve suddenly got a huge new window onto a real world in one of your living room walls.

Actually, when you also take into account the vibrancy of the colours all the 98C7K’s brightness is feeding into, this new window you’ve added to your wall feel even better than reality, delivering a truly dazzling experience that once experienced is hard to be without – and which is enough to instantly sell the joys of HDR to even the most stubborn of SDR holdouts.

My Calman Ultimate tests show the 98C7K capable of covering more than 97% of the DCI-P3 colour spectrum used in most HDR mastering, as well as an impressive near 80% of the wider BT2020 spectrum that may start to play a part in the future HDR world.

While the 98C7K’s Standard mode pictures are dazzling, though – much more so than those of its predecessor – they’re also full of subtlety, texture and nuance. There’s nothing cartoonish or flat here. High quality, high resolution HDR sources thus feel remarkably solid, three-dimensional and immersive, taking full advantage of the enormous screen they’re being painted on to draw you into the action.

The subtleties of the 98C7K’s pictures together with an excellent revamped Super Resolution sharpness enhancer contribute to a much crisper picture than we experienced on TCL’s equivalent 2024 big-screen models. This sharpness holds up better than previously, too, when there’s motion to handle.

The native panel isn’t as prone to hardware judder or, especially, blurring with 24 frames a second films as I might have expected of such a huge, affordable and bright screen – thoughh if you do feel a little distracted by judder, you can deal with it very effectively with the Low setting of the provided motion processing system.

Maybe the single greatest strength of the 98C7K’s pictures, though, is the way that despite the vibrancy and brightness of its Standard mode pictures, it manages to paint its extravagances against a foundation of outstanding black colours and tones. Outstanding first for how deep and inky they get, without greyness hanging over them, but also for how uniform they look.

Even when a shot contains very intense highlights set against almost black backdrops, those highlights don’t appear surrounded by the sort of circles of grey light that I’d expect to see with an LCD TV as bright and big as this one. The new Halo Control system, it seems, really does work.

The 98C7K’s backlight management isn’t completely perfect. Very occasionally I spotted a sudden brightness fluctuation in the middle of a shot, and there can still be faint traces of clouding around the starkest of bright highlights. But this latter clouding is typically so faint and so stable (in that you can hardly ever make out obvious ‘handovers’ between different dimming zones as bright objects move around the screen) that you will likely only see it if you’re actively looking for it.

TCL’s image management systems sometimes instigate a slightly misty look to highly complex dark images. But again this is subtle enough to seldom feel like any significant distraction – and it actually feels intentionally and sensibly designed to hide the sort of much more distracting haloing such a scene might otherwise generate.

While I suspect many 98C7K buyers will struggle to switch away from the many and varied attractions of the Standard picture mode, TCL has also done a brilliant job of improving the accuracy and naturalism of its Filmmaker Mode.

Despite retaining brightness levels only slightly down on those of the Standard mode, it delivers DeltaE 2000 average errors with Calman Ultimate’s ColorMatch and ColorChecker tests of only 2.57 and 3.29 respectively – below and only marginally above the three average error level considered to be imperceptible to the human eye. This is an outstanding result for any TV, never mind one as big and affordable as the 98C7K.

The Filmmaker Mode doesn’t just measure well, either. The native talents of the 98C7K’s new panel are such that the relatively stripped back image settings and processing of the accuracy-based don’t end up making Filmmaker Mode images feel drab or one-dimensional like they can on more than a few other LCD TVs.

Upscaling

• Crisp upscaling performance

A TV with a 98-inch screen is about as unforgiving a test of upscaling as you can get. Any grittiness, noise, edge doubling, over-sharpening and so on that upscaling systems can notoriously cause will be brutally exposed at this sort of scale.

It’s a relief to find, then, that TCL’s string of improvements for the 98C7K include a significant improvement in how HD and SD are converted to the TV’s 4K resolution. The upscaled images look reasonably crisp rather than overtly soft without anything feeling unnaturally over-sharpened or colour tones suffering tonal ‘slippage’.

Best of all, the upscaling does a strong job of removing noise in HD or SD sources before adding all the necessary extra pixels.

Sound Quality

• Clear treble
• Lacking true bass

The 98C7K’s new B&O-assisted sound system gets lots of things right. In particular it delivers a much more refined, clean and detailed tone than the slightly coarse (if powerful) efforts of its predecessor, with its new main mid-range drivers proving clearly superior to those of the vast majority of mainstream TVs.

Treble details and high-pitched ambient effects are handled with great clarity and without shrillness or thinness, immediately creating a refined and busy movie or TV show soundscape. Details, however small, are well placed in the soundstage, despite the huge gap between the left and right side speakers inevitably created by such a vast screen, and voices tend to sound like they’re coming from the onscreen action rather than around the screen’s edges. Voices also always sound really clean without losing context.

The speakers can go really loud without breaking down into serious distortion or harshness, and their mid-range reach is expansive and dynamic.

The only catch is that the new main speakers fitted into the 98C7K’s rear can’t reach the sort of bass depths that the dedicated subwoofers previously used in premium TCL TVs could. This means that during relatively extreme soundtrack moments the usually clean and well-rounded treble sounds can start to sound too bright and prominent.

While this is something for TCL and B&O to work on for next time, though, it doesn’t stop the 98C7K either still sounding better than most TVs, and delivering a scale of sound that sounds appropriate for its immense pictures.

Should you buy it?