Verdict:
As a living room workhorse with a 65-inch screen and a price tag of around £800 give or take online, this is a bargain TV for normal living room duties. There are no perfect TVs at any price point and you have to compromise with which technology is going to work best for your budget and viewing conditions. This is not a critical movie viewing TV for dark surroundings but used in normal well-lit environments and it will surprise with some of its attributes.
With normal SDR TV and occasional scope movie viewing in a well-lit living room, the TCL C815K offers very good image accuracy, decent skin tones and superb colour reproduction in the Cinema preset. Blacks look decent although there is black crush with shadow detail if you go looking for it. Motion is strong with no obvious issues or motion trailing being visible and correct pulldown is applied to 24fps content. Sports also look decent with just some light dirty screen effect noticeable on bright colours filling large areas of the screen, such as fast camera pans over the green pitch in football games. We didn’t find this particularly noticeable or distracting with our viewing on the C815.
HDR is a little dim on the C815 due to it being an edge-lit LCD, but it still manages a decent stab at film content and in that well-lit living room it looks dynamic and engaging with very good colour reproduction. There are still instances of black crush, but with most HDR and Dolby Vision content the performance is what we would expect at this market position, which is good but not spectacular - you need to pay a little more for FALD and 1000 nits, and even those come with their own issues, like the Hisense U8QF and its local dimming switching off completely with dark scenes.
Overall, the TCL C815K is an honest, edge-lit QLED TV with a huge screen and decent SDR and HDR performance for the price point, which is not much at all. It does have its issues and is not designed for watching movies in the pitch black but used as an everyday workhorse in a well-lit living room it works incredibly well. If you have a need for such a workhorse, large screen size and decent performance with the lights on, the TCL comes recommended.