After truly coming of age in the U.K. with its uniformly great value 2025 TV range, TCL has now revealed full details, including pricing, of arguably the two single most important series in its 2026 range.
The first thing to say about TCL’s new C8L-UK and C7L-UK TVs is that they are both built around TCL’s new generation of Super Quantum Dot panels, which are claimed to deliver 69% more color accuracy and 33% more color range than old-school Quantum Dot panels, rather than the also-new RGB Mini-LED technology making its debut elsewhere in TCL’s range.
These two series also sit in the top half of TCL’s 2026 TV range for the U.K., but maintain the aggressive pricing that’s seen TCL cause such an earthquake in the TV market in recent years.
The C8L-UK range will be available in 55, 65, 75, 85 and 98-inch screen sizes, and will feature the same ultra-thin ZeroBorder design found on the brand’s flagship X11L TVs this year, minimizing the black space usually found between a TV’s active display areas and bezel. This is a result of the WHVA panel technology introduced to great effect in the upper echelons of TCL’s 2025 TV range – a panel revamp that also introduced new technologies designed to reduce motion blur, backlight haloing, and lost shadow detailing in dark scenes while boosting color, brightness and power efficiency.
The C8Ls are claimed to be capable of hitting extremely high brightness peaks of up to 6,000 nits (on the 98-inch and 85-inch models), adding potentially huge color volumes to their expanded color gamuts – gamuts which TCL says stretch right the way to 100% of the ultra-wide BT.2020 color space.
Brightness needs to be well controlled to contribute to good all-round picture quality, of course, so it’s exciting to hear that the the C8L-UK TVs Mini LED backlighting is joined by as many as 4,032 separate local dimming zones. This is another huge number by LCD TV standards that again bodes extremely well for their performance, especially given how effective last year’s C8Ks were with fewer dimming zones to play with.
All that brightness can be applied, too, to all four of the main high dynamic range formats: HDR10, HDR10+, HLG and Dolby Vision. So unlike sets from LG and Samsung, the C8Ls will always take in the best version available of any source you feed them. In fact, it’s now confirmed that the C8L models will support the new Dolby Vision 2 format – albeit potentially not until after receiving a firmware update later in the year.
Gaming support on the C8Ls is impressive too, with native 4K/144Hz support and full HD/288Hz support possible along with variable refresh rates (including AMD FreeSync Premium Pro), automatic low latency mode switching, and a dedicated Game menu that provides features including support for superwide aspect ratios, shadow detail enhancement and genre-specific picture presets.
As with last year’s premium TCL TVs, the C8L-UK’s sound is delivered by a 2.2-channel speaker system designed with premium brand Bang & Olufsen.
Stepping down to the C7L-UK series finds peak brightness on the brightest model halving to 3,000 nits, while the peak number of dimming zones (on the 98-inch set) drops to 2,176. These are still substantial numbers for what are set to be strikingly affordable TVs for an upper mid-range series, though. And the C7L-UKs will still deliver 100% of the BT.2020 color spectrum (even though there’s currently no content around that can take full advantage of it).
The C7L-UKs retain the same level of gaming support that the C8L-UKs enjoy too, and also benefit from 2.2-channel Bang & Olufsen sound systems – albeit ones that don’t offer quite so much power or quite such premium speakers as the C8L-UKs get. It doesn’t look at the moment, though, as if they will get Dolby Vision 2 support.
Key details and pricing for each C8L-UK and C7L-UK screen size are as follows:
The TCL C8L-UK series:
55-inch: £1,199, 1,008 local dimming zones, 3,000 nits peak brightness
65-inch: £1,899, 2,040 local dimming zones, 5,000 nits peak brightness
75-inch: £2,299, 2,584 local dimming zones, 5,500 nits peak brightness
85-inch: £2,999, 3,200 local dimming zones, 6,000 nits peak brightness
98-inch: £3,999, 4,032 local dimming zones, 6,000 nits peak brightness
The TCL C7L-UK Series:
55-inch: £1,099, 800 local dimming zones, 2,700 nits peak brightness
65-inch: £1,299, 1,152 local dimming zones, 3,000 nits peak brightness
75-inch: £1,699, 1,352 local dimming zones, 3,000 nits peak brightness
85-inch: £2,299, 1,624 local dimming zones, 3,000 nits peak brightness
98-inch: £3,299, 2,176 local dimming zones, 3,000 nits peak brightness.
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