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TCL Fires Opening Shot in Australia’s TV War with World-First SQD-Mini LED Flagship

The world’s largest TV manufacturer has landed its most ambitious lineup yet on Australian shores, and the message to rivals is clear: the OLED era may be over.

TCL has unveiled its 2026 television range in Australia, headlined by the X11L, the world’s first SQD-Mini LED flagship TV, a set that the Chinese giant claims obliterates the competition on brightness, colour, and design, just as rival LG’s OLED technology shows signs of strain in the market.

The X11L is no incremental upgrade. Capable of hitting a staggering 10,000 nits peak brightness, currently the highest of any consumer television on the planet, the set is built on TCL’s new Super Quantum Dot (SQD) Mini LED platform, a technology the company is aggressively positioning as the future of home entertainment.

“TCL’s mission has always been to make advanced technology accessible while continuing to push the boundaries of what display products can do,” said Hawk Zhang, TCL Electronics Australia and New Zealand’s Managing Director. “With wider colour gamut, precise colour control, more dimming zones, higher brightness and thinner designs, SQD represents a major upgrade in Mini LED technology and the future of television production.”

The numbers back up the bravado. On the 98-inch model, TCL has engineered an extraordinary 20,736 individual dimming zones, delivering localised contrast control that rivals have struggled to match. A static contrast ratio of 7,000:1 and a low-reflection film coating address one of Mini LED’s long-standing weaknesses, glare, making the X11L a genuine contender in brightly lit Australian living rooms.

Colour performance has been overhauled through TCL’s proprietary “Super Quantum Crystals” technology and a 5nm Ultra Colour Filter, pushing the set to near-total BT.2020 coverage, a 33% improvement over its predecessor flagships, the company claims.

The design breaks new ground too. At just 2cm deep, the X11L’s monolithic flat-back profile makes most Mini LED rivals look bloated by comparison, a feat made possible by the SQD architecture’s reduced depth requirements. The near-borderless display maximises screen real estate, while audio is handled by a Bang & Olufsen co-engineered system featuring a full-width integrated soundbar and side-firing drivers.

Under the hood, TCL’s new TSR AiPQ Processor drives real-time AI scene analysis and upscaling, while the X11L ships as the world’s first television with Google Gemini pre-installed, a significant milestone in the race to embed artificial intelligence directly into the living room. Gamers are also catered for, with a native 144Hz refresh rate, Variable Refresh Rate support, and AMD FreeSync Premium Pro certification.

The X11L’s credentials were already validated on the world stage, first announced at CES 2026, it walked away with the Innovative Display Technology Gold Award at the Global Top Brands Awards, backed by International Data Group and IDC.

Colour performance has been overhauled through TCL’s proprietary “Super Quantum Crystals” technology and a 5nm Ultra Colour Filter, pushing the set to near-total BT.2020 coverage, a 33% improvement over its predecessor flagships, the company claims.

TCL’s dominance in the hardware market is equally hard to ignore. According to research firm Omdia, the company ranked number one globally in shipments of 75-inch-and-above televisions in 2025, number one in Mini LED TV shipments in 2025, and has led global Google TV shipments every year from 2021 to 2025.

The 2026 Australian lineup, the flagship X11L, the C8L SQD-Mini LED, and the C7L SQD-Mini LED, is available now at JB Hi-Fi, The Good Guys, and Harvey Norman. A broader range including the P7LS, P8LS, and C6L models rounds out the full offering.

For consumers, the message is simple: the battle for Australia’s living rooms is intensifying, and TCL has just raised the stakes considerably.