LG C5 OLED vs TCL QM8K

On paper the LG C5 and TCL QM8K look close in price, but they win in opposite rooms. The QM8K is a QD-Mini LED set with up to 3,800 local dimming zones, and it's astonishingly bright — independent testing measured it past 4,000 nits (TCL claims up to 5,000 in HDR), several times brighter than the C5. In a sun-filled living room, that brightness plus an anti-glare coating lets highlights punch through daylight in a way no OLED can match. But brightness isn't the whole story. The C5 is a self-emissive OLED: every pixel makes its own light, so blacks are perfect and there's zero blooming, where the TCL's thousands of zones still show faint halos around bright objects on dark backgrounds — and Mini-LED's weaker viewing angles mean the picture fades off-center. The C5 also answers with a sub-0.1ms response time, four HDMI 2.1 ports (the QM8K has notably fewer), G-Sync support, and LG's Alpha 9 Gen8 upscaling. The trade-offs: the C5 has no true anti-glare layer (it leans on a "Bright Room Ready" mode), and OLEDs carry a small long-term burn-in risk the TCL doesn't. Here's how to choose.