Jurin
Established Member
4K Mini LED TV - 65/75 inch TV - C935 - TCL Europe
TCL C93 Series 4K Google TV with Google Assistant and TCL Mini-LED OD5 technology, QLED, 4K HDR Premium 2000, 144Hz Motion Clarity Pro for HDR picture quality.
www.tcl.com
Picked up a 75" C935 and thought I might create an owners and general discussion thread on it.
Links to useful posts in the thread:
- Measurement results after 2pt WB settings
- Measurement results after 2pt + 20pt WB settings
- Contrast ratio measurements (SDR Movie mode mostly)
- Incorrect colour space bug comparison in the internal Youtube-app (& possibly other apps)
- Peak brightness measurements (SDR, with brightness 100%)
- 1G USB dongles work
- Color gamut measurements
- Recommended settings for SDR & HDR
- Local Dimming: High vs. Off demo with the Star Wars crawl
Impression thus far (Firmware V469 an some comparisons to my old Sony XG9505):
Positives:
- Local dimming control when it comes to blooming is verygood (On Local dimming: High). Best I've probably ever seen. No trailing or obvious blooming (on real content, test pattern do show some at off angles). Overall much better than the XG9505 especially on HDR which on the Sony is a hot mess.
- Good native contrast at ~6700:1 D65 with peak at 120cd/m2. Black floor with LD Off 0.018cd/m2
- Very good viewing angles for a VA. Also much better than the XG9505.
- Snappy ui (after proper bootup, can be sluggish at first)
- Very impactful brightness
- Quite good reflection handling. Some rainbow reflections though so avoid light sources directly behind the screen. Better than the XG9505.
- There is PWM but the frequency seems to be pretty high and the amplitude pretty low so it's fairly easy on the eyes. TCL usually has been using a static 960hz so this might be as well. Sadly have no tools to measure it other than my eyes (I'm very sensitive to PWM and motion stutter [read: OLED]) but haven't had any headaches, sore eyes, migraines or other symptoms. This is a huge plus for TCL.
- Motion is very good. Good amount of granularity in the settings. Easy to hit a sweet spot between a proper film look yet no SOE. Better on low framerate content than any OLED imho.
- Color accuracy OTB is mediocre (too red & blue) in Movie mode but minor tweaks to 2pt brings it to acceptable levels of dE (max ~1.3 average .9 in WB). After proper 20pt adjustment it's down to roughly 0.5dE - 0.7dE on average.
- Screen uniformity on my unit is good. No obvious issues in content. Some slight tone difference across the screen and very mild DSE. Left side is cooler than the right. Noticeable in uniform fields but very very rarely in content (mostly just static news tickers etc.)
- Price is fair. Paid 1999e on discount in Finland.
Negatives / Bug list
- Banding. It's obvious the processing doesn't have enough precision to produce clean gradients when compared to the Sony. Especially on darker tones.This is content specific though as most 10 bit content is pretty clean vs. 8 bit (thus also HDR vs. SDR). The decontouring filter doesn't do much to help and causes artefacts noticeable especially on moving faces.
- Update: Might have been a bit quick to judge this based on playing youtube demo material as it uses an incorrect colour space setting. Most likely this is the reason for banding. Banding is much reduced on sources that use the correct color space. More on that later down the list.
- Calibration is not as smooth as it is with the Sony. Partly because there's no Autocal (it's coming according to interview with Marek Maciejewski) and because the WB-adjustment doesn't really seems to have enough precision. +/- 1 can cause significant dE-changes especially on the darker end.
- Overall processing not as good as it is on the Sony. Sharpening has ringing and artefacting, same with the denoise processing. Much harder to get a good quality outcome from poor quality sources vs. the XG9505. It's essential to feed it good quality material.
- Local Dimming: 'High' crushes some shadow detail (in attempt to minimize blooming probably). Local Dimming: 'Low' crushes less but causes the blacks to float.
- Local Dimming: 'High' can cause visible brightness fluctuations between scene cuts with different APL. Mostly affects SDR.
- BUGS. Mostly this seems to be a problem of settings not saving properly. "picture enhancement" features seem to re-enable randomly and the ones you do need to be enabled are suddenly disabled (calibrated WB-settings and local dimming setting)
- Update: Doing a 'Picture reset' and only using the "Per input" mode seems to help a lot here.
- Trying to make sense what the "Apply to all inputs" in PQ settings actually does. What does the TV consider to be an "input" I have no idea as it seems to apply different settings based on the incoming signal vs. not an app or physical HDMI-input. Would be very helpful if the UI clearly stated what the currently used input & signal is in the picture settings menu.
- The internal Youtube app apparently uses an incorrect color space (Defaults to Native) and greatly oversaturates SDR content. HDR looks correct (or the Native color space is close enough to Rec. 2020 for the errors to not be visible).
- There is no way to force a particular colour space so you could manually fix the issue.
- Kodi sometimes initially starts playing in the wrong color space but if you go in to the Color space setting and switch it between Auto -> Native and back to Auto it will snap in to the correct Color space. This is SDR, HDR might perform differently.
- You can use an alternative Youtube app called SmartTubeNext that correctly autodetects the color space
- Dynamic tone mapping over tracks the EOTF = is too bright to be of any use if you care about image accuracy. Although it does mostly give better shadow details.
- Apple Homekit keeps giving notification to setup it even though I've skipped the notification several times. Had to start the setup and disable it in the Homekit app to get rid off it.
- If you switch off the TV Mic (physical switch under the TV) you get bright orange leds blasting at your eyes even though you have the power led setting set to "OFF" and Google Assistant Voice Control is "OFF".
- "Quick start" setting seems to do nothing (unless you shutdown and restart in about a minute). Normal startup takes 30s - 60s.
- After watching HDR content in Movie mode it sometimes doesn't default back to SDR brightness setting when the HDR content stops playing. If you restore it back to where it was it might not save and the next time you start the TV it will be 100% again.
- 2pt, 20pt and color space calibration settings fail to save seemingly randomly for some inputs while it works for others
- Update: Seemed to be related to the overall settings not saving issue. After reset has been mostly fine.
- Happened once: Local dimming seems to enable / disable randomly independent of what setting is actually set. Was wondering why the picture looked so flat.. checked the LD settings. It was high. Switched it to Off and then back to High and LD was working again.
- If you want to occasionally use the internal speakers but mostly use an external sound system via optical you can't easily mute the speakers without having the mute icon on screen all the time. You have to either set it to 1 (where it's mostly inaudible) or menu dive in to the sound settings and disable the internal speakers by selecting optical out only. Please make the mute icon disappear after a few seconds.
- Started shutting off and restarting randomly and did that three times in a row. On the fourth cycle it freezed on the Google TV startup animation and refused to start past that point (waited 30 minutes but nothing). Repeatedly plugged it in and out of the outlet and for some reason 1 in maybe 10 attempts gave a successful startup. Immediately did a factory reset and seems to be fine for now... continued below
- The boot looping started after having entered the 20pt WB settings (applied to all sources on Movie mode) and switched from HDMI to Cable. I repeated the behaviour just now. If you enter 20pt adjustments and try to switch inputs it will crash and reboot. If you happen to have the startup mode set to "previous input" this causes it to crash again and then freeze on bootup. No idea if it's certain values in the 20pt WB that causes this.
- (Update: Did an NVM-reset and factory reset once again. Has not crashed since. Hoping this fixed it.)
Overall this has potential to be a real winner in regards to PQ but for me it all comes down to if I can live with the constant menu hunting, bugs, random restarts and disabling of "image enhancing features" that seems to turn on by themselves. Really do hope TCL can sort out the inconsistencies and deal with the bugs. If you're only going to use an external streamer or other source via HDMI it might save you a lot of trouble. At least you only have to hunt settings for one input
Ask me anything..
Edit 9.9.2022: Updated bug list
Edit 10.9.2022: Updated info on reboot & freeze issue
Edit: 12.9.2022 Updated info on reboot & freeze issues after NVM-reset. Appers to be fixed.
Edit: 13.9.2022 Updated info on settings not saving after NVM-reset. Appers to be fixed.
Edit: 13.9.2022 Updated contrast ratio test results
Edit: 14.9.2022 Updated info on the color space bug (appears to only be YouTube SDR content affected)
Edit: 25.9.2022 Updated info on local dimming etc.
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