Looking for an affordable 55 inch TV? You can definitely put this TCL on your list. The TCL 55C735 is not only excellently equipped, it also shares many image characteristics with the higher positioned C835. Time for an extensive review.
TCL QLED 55C735 (2022)
Price: € 799,-
What: Ultra HD LCD TV
(direct led, quantum dots, global dimming)
Screen size: 55 inches (139 cm)
Connections: 4x HDMI (2x v2.0 (18Gbps), 2x v2.1 (48 Gbps), eARC/ARC, ALLM, VRR, HFR 4K120), 1x composite video + stereo cinch, 1x optical digital out, 1x USB, 1x headphones, 2x antenna, Bluetooth
Extras : HDR10, HLG, HDR10+, Dolby Vision IQ, WiFi (802.11ac) built-in, Google TV (11), AirPlay 2, USB/DLNA media player, DVB-T2/C/S2, CI+ slot
Dimensions: 1,227 x 778 x 316 mm (incl. foot)
Weight: 11.7 kg (incl. feet)
Average usage: SDR 85 Watts / HDR 145 Watts
8 Score 80 
- Pros
- Good contrast
- Excellent calibration in both SSDR and HDR
- Supports Dolby Vision IQ and HDR10+
- Good motion sharpness
- HDMI 2.1 connections with many gaming features
- Smoothly working Google TV environment
- Negatives
- Brightness a bit too low for HDR
- Mediocre audio performance
- Additional login required with TCL account
- Google TV is less easy to personalize
The connections are already a part where you don’t have to make compromises, the C735 got the same set of connections as the C835. This is excellent news for gamers. There are four HDMI connections, two of which provide the full HDMI 2.1 bandwidth (48 Gbps). There is support for ALLM and 4K120. PC gamers can even go a step further, because the C735 also supports 144 Hz refresh rate.
For VRR, the TV is compatible with HDMI VRR and AMD Freesync Premium (24-144 Hz, of which 24-48 Hz with LFC-Low Framerate Compensation). You don’t have to worry about input lag either, in game mode it reaches 8.2 ms (2K120) and 16.6 ms (4K60). Even connecting two game consoles and a soundbar is possible without having to switch connections, because TCL has been smart enough to put the ARC/eARC function on one of the HDMI 2.0 connections. That is not the case with some competitors.
In addition to the four HDMI connections, you also get one USB connection, a composite video and stereo cinch audio input, optical digital output and a headphone output, Ethernet, WiFi and Bluetooth.
Devices in this category are rarely really slim, but this one stands out because the housing for electronics and connections only takes up a small part of the back. This makes the whole look a lot more elegant. The device stands on a central base consisting of two legs connected to a plastic lid. The design seemed nicer to us without that lid.
QLED or Quantum Dot?
Confusion regularly arises about the name of image techniques, even though the exact technique is the same. QLED is a good example of this. As of 2017, Samsung uses this name QLED for their Quantum Dot televisions, but this is actually a marketing term. Other manufacturers that use Quantum Dot displays include Visio, LG, Hisense and TCL. They use both the term Quantum Dot and QLED to indicate the same technique.
In summary: all TVs with the name QLED or Quantum Dot use the same technology.
Well rested
A good user experience relies to a large extent on a fast and smooth working environment. The C735 uses a quad-core ARM Cortex-A73 with 3GB RAM and Mali-G52 GPU, and that chipset delivers the necessary speed for modern convenience. Google TV, in turn, is responsible for an extensive range of content, it provides almost all major streaming services. The platform suggests content grouped by genre, across different streaming platforms. You can find out more about this in our article about Google TV.
A note for TCL, during the installation you must of course log in with a Google account (to use the Google Play store) but also mandatory with a TCL account. We would have preferred to see the latter optional, since it has hardly any added value.
In addition to Chromecast, the C735 also offers Airplay 2, and is Google Stadia Certified. For gamers there is also a ‘Game Bar’, a small menu where you can adjust certain settings and get status info such as FPS and VRR. The single TV tuner is the norm in this category, but keep in mind that you can’t pause or record live TV to a USB drive. TCL considers these functions only useful for devices with a double tuner.
The device comes with two remote controls, the old, somewhat larger version and a new, simpler model. You can almost certainly put the largest one in a drawer right away, unless you absolutely want a physical numeric block. The new remote control works via Bluetooth, so you don’t have to aim. It has a built-in microphone for searches. With buttons for quick settings, the Game Bar or the previous app, it also fits better with a modern usage pattern.
AI on board here too
The C735 also has a lot in common with the C835 for image processing. The upscaling uses the same AI Deep Leaning techniques that excellently restore detail from lower-resolution images. We often found the image very soft, which is a good thing because an image that is too sharp can sometimes no longer be corrected. With the sharpness somewhere between five and ten, the image had a little more spice.
The TCL also provides good deinterlacing and noise reduction. Only in highly compressed video files that show a lot of blocking, the processor can improve little. On the other hand, the C735 does have a very good anti-banding filter, color bands in soft gradients work well with that, and it also helps to improve the moderate MPEG noise reduction.
The motion sharpness is excellent, thanks to the 120 Hz panel and good image processing. Only very fine detail remains hidden in fast-moving images. The slightly blurred border around moving objects is small enough to never disturb. The motion interpolation intervenes quickly if you judder (the irregularly moving film images) but introduces some image artifacts in complex images.
Contrast and color are great
Many mid-range cars use an IPS panel, but TCL sticks to its choice for VA. Not only does that panel have a particularly high contrast, but it also has a very good viewing angle, at least for color. For contrast, the viewing angle remains somewhat limited, those who are not centrally located in front of the screen will see a somewhat lower contrast.
The processor uses global dimming to further improve the contrast, but the improvement is of course not as impressive as the local dimming of the C835. In the settings we found that activating ‘Local contrast’ does give the image a small boost, especially the sharpness, which is also influenced by contrast.
Where you have to accept a compromise is the HDR display. The panel uses quantum dot technology to achieve an excellent 87% P3 color gamut, but has to make do with a fairly low peak brightness of 365 nits (in Filmmaker Mode). With very small light accents in dark images, the global dimming pulls that down to protect the black display.
But good tone mapping can make up for a lot, and TCL shows excellent performance there. For starters, the TV supports Dolby Vision and HDR10+. Those formats already get the best results from the TV. But the processor also succeeds in HDR10 to preserve a lot of color intensity, and to show many shadow nuances and white detail.
It may be clear that with that limited peak brightness you will never see the full impact of an HDR image, but even an image mastered at 4,000 nits looked quite authentic.
Mediocre audio
We had hoped that the Onkyo audio solution would boost the usually very mediocre audio performance in this category. Unfortunately, that turned out not to be the case. The 2x 10 Watt setup cannot convince us.
For average use, the performance is within expectations, but as soon as we set the bar a bit higher, for example with a solid film soundtrack, somewhat harder metal music and a little more volume, the result disappoints. The processor intervenes too tightly, the sound becomes hard and narrow. A soundbar seems to us to be the only solution if you want better performance.
Conclusion
The TCL 55C735 convinces us that with a few concessions you can still buy a lot of image quality for a modest price. What concessions? Mainly the peak brightness, which is too low to really fully show the splendor of HDR images. The C735 is also not the right choice for really good audio, but that can be solved with a soundbar.
On the other hand, there is a whole series of excellent performances. You get excellent contrast, a very wide color range, accurately calibrated Film image modes, a 120 Hz panel with a lot of motion sharpness and a processor that shows convincing results. For HDR you can also count on a Dolby Vision IQ, HDR10 + and the excellent HDR10 tonemapping of the processor to put nice HDR images on the screen within its limitations.
Gamers also get all the necessary features to guarantee a next-gen gaming experience. In short, a very nice overall picture.
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