TCL C735 QLED TV review – Budgeting for gamers

It wasn’t so long ago that TCL TVs were unheard of by most South Africans. Now they’re almost everywhere – on billboards, in stores, and reviewed by SA tech websites.

Sure, TCL doesn’t hold the same weight as industry verterans Samsung or LG. But more often than not, it offers decent, affordable TVs that continue to go underappreciated. We got to test the TCL C735 QLED, one of TCL’s higher-range models. It sits just under the C835, which we also reviewed.

The C735 falls into the mid-range TV category. It delivers a similar product to that of established brands, but for a lot less money – R13,000 in this case.

Posture is important

Upon opening the box, the price suddenly makes more sense. TCL has opted to spend its budget where it’s most important – the hardware, rather than a fancy façade. Despite the clear bias, it’s pretty good-looking. The panel is light – as plastic usually is – and doesn’t experience much flexibility while managing to maintain the premium feel of a far more expensive television, even if it doesn’t look the part.

We must admit, we weren’t looking forward to setting this one up on our own. It turns out that our worries were unfounded, with the set-up being as simple as screwing the screws into the right holes and sticking the remote’s batteries in the right way. We’d hope this is something you could do on your own.

The stand, once everything’s in place, looks decent enough. It’s desperately missing something, though. Stick a soundbar down there, and it’ll fill the void of empty space beneath the TV. Anything to avoid exposing your poor cable management.

Where TCL’s promises of a bezel-less design are concerned, don’t believe a word of it. The Bezels are still there, clearly, measuring 1mm thick on our 55in model. That’s perfectly okay. We don’t mind a bit of a bezel. Just don’t promise one thing, and turn up to the party with empty, 1mm-sized hands.

A smorgasbord of colour

When it comes to picture quality, the C735 caught us a little off-guard. We saw the R13,000 price and (perhaps unwisely) made some assumptions about the picture quality. How wrong we were. Colour reproduction feels vibrant enough so that you won’t feel any buyer’s remorse – unless you’re really picky about your budget TVs. The C735 handled most lighting situations we threw at it, though it’s best suited in a darker environment.

TCL has (thankfully) opted for a direct-lit LED backlight array in the C735, instead of the more common edge-lit array. This means there are more LED backlights arranged directly (duh) behind the panel instead of a few around the edges. This allows for a uniform amount of light across the panel and a generally brighter picture.

Unfortunately, all that uniform light deals a blow to black levels in dark scenes. It also means the whole panel is illuminated, even if there are parts that shouldn’t be. You’ll notice this when watching ‘cinematic’ letterbox content with black bars above and below. Full array local dimming would help with that, but it also would’ve shot the price up. This particular direct-lit LED backlight only has a peak brightness of 330 nits. That’s a little dim for proper HDR performance, although the C735’s dynamic tone mapping does its best to make up for that – and mostly succeeds.

Unless you’re the owner of the TV, you’ll probably be shunned to the side of the living room, forced to watch from some obscure angle. This is a problem on most low- to mid-range TVs. We expected it to be true here too. But it defied our expectation again. Colour accuracy remains mostly unchanged while viewing from an angle. Definitely not as bad as we were expecting. We’d still suggest claiming the Master Chair (don’t pretend you don’t have one) to get the best experience possible.

Adding a few bells & whistles

The C735 performs its best while gaming. TCL’s inclusion of Variable Refresh Rates (VRR) and auto low-latency mode (ALLM) prove that. It also supports AMD Freesync Premium, if that’s your thing. These features are coupled with a panel that’ll support a refresh rate of up to 144Hz, provided your source can support it.

ALLM is there to get rid of any input lag you might experience, though we can’t say that was ever a problem for us. As much as we’d have liked to have blamed our performance in Rocket League on input lag, we just can’t. That shame lies with us, forever.

Flip the TV over, and you’ll be greeted by four HDMI ports, though not all are equal. The first is sporting HDMI 2.1 smarts and will take a 4K signal and up to 144Hz. The second – 4K 120Hz with the third and fourth offering a paltry 60Hz accompanied by eARC support in the fourth.

All the fixin’s of a decent TV

A decent display isn’t the only mark of a good TV. You must consider all the little extras that go with it. The remote, the UI, sound… everything. Almost all of the C735’s features impressed us to some degree. Although, as is often the case, audio quality is where things started to get a bit murky.

We forewent our soundbar to give the C735’s audio performance a good, proper testing. We noticed the two 10W speakers on the bezel’s bottom, bearing the popular Onkyo name. Despite the branding, we were left rather disappointed. It falls into the category of middle-class, constantly leaving you wanting more.

You’ll notice the overly compressed sound more in particularly epic soundtracks, no matter which of TCL’s six or seven presets you opt for. Take, for example, the ‘voice’ preset. While usually designed to amplify the common frequencies of the human voice, it doesn’t sound like that’s what’s happening here. Especially when you turn the volume up.

There isn’t much to say about the remote. It’s difficult to screw up a remote. Don’t add gyro controls, throw in a few dedicated streaming buttons and make it comfortable to use. We’re glad to say TCL has done exactly that. We do have one complaint – the batteries. Are we living in the 1950s? The scramble to find double-A batteries once a year is becoming increasingly exasperating. Throw us a bone and add USB-C charging. Pretty please?

Google TV is still around, with a quad-core ARM Cortex-A73 processor, 3GB of RAM, and a Mali-G52 MP GPU powering the innards. It’s as great here as it is everywhere, though we did notice some lagging in the homepage menu, often after booting up the TV. Once everything is warmed up, the lag disappears for good. Other than that, we hardly noticed any other performance issues – at least where the TV is concerned.

TCL C735 QLED TV verdict

TCL doesn’t often stray far outside the realm of budget devices, and they’ve continued that tradition here nicely. We hardly have any gripes with the C735 QLED, apart from the sub-standard sound quality (though that’s easily countered with a soundbar) and occasional laggy menus. Everyone will find something to like on the C735 – whether it be the gaming features, 144Hz display or the R13,000 price.