The TCL 27C2A Pro is a Mini LED gaming monitor geared to compete with some of the hottest 4K gaming monitors on the market. It offers a 4K panel with quantum dot pixels and a dual-mode that can trade off resolution for speed, much like some other high-end monitors. The TCL 27C2A Pro promises a lot, but its $999 price tag raises a lot of questions.
Design and Features
The TCL 27C2A Pro is a fairly tame monitor with a white-and-black color scheme that seems to chase after either Alienware’s or Samsung’s approval. Other than some RGB lighting, it’s not terribly gaudy, but it’s not incredibly pretty either.
The display squeezes in a 27-inch 4K panel that runs at 160Hz in its native mode or 320Hz when swapped down to 1080p. This kind of dual-mode technology has been popping up on more and more 4K monitors, and it’s great to see as it gives them more flexibility to serve as platforms for AAA titles with gorgeous graphical assets as well as competitive esports games where speed is almost all that matters. The panel features quantum dots and Mini LED backlighting with over 2,300 dimming zones (2,304 to be exact). That gives it a rated 98% coverage of the DCI-P3 color space and rated peak brightness of 2,000 nits — more on that later.
The TCL 27C2A Pro might have a $999 MSRP, but little about the monitor’s constructions feels like it ever should have. It builds on the earlier 27C2A non-pro model, which was cheaper and had fewer dimming zones and a lower peak brightness. But that this more expensive model was built on the bones of a cheap display makes it feel cheap as a result.
The stand and back of the monitor are covered in flimsy plastic. Though, TCL includes some colorful and modestly bright RGB lighting on the back of the monitor that at least makes it look more fun.
The monitor has an adjustable stand that gives you all the height, swivel, tilt, and rotational adjustment you’d expect from a high-end monitor, but it’s terribly jiggly. Any motion to my task transmits up through the stand. Thankfully, the monitor can be placed on a VESA mount.
Rather than having a sturdy, rigid hole through the stand for cable routing, the back of the stand has a little rubber strap that slides down to form a small loop that the cables can go through, but they don’t end up looking super tidy in practice. The monitor also uses an external power brick that you’ll need to find space for on or under your desk.
The monitor gets a couple things right in its design, at least. It includes DisplayPort and two HDMI ports. It also offers a USB-C connection that can handle video input and up to 90W of power output to a connected device. All of the ports can work with the display’s 4K/160Hz peak, though you’ll want to make sure you have cables that can do the job too.
The monitor uses a joystick for controls, which makes navigation easy. The joystick sits front and center underneath the display, so it’s easy to reach.
The TCL 27C2A Pro also includes speakers, but that should be a given in any monitor this expensive. This ensures you always have an option for audio output even when you don’t have headphones or dedicated speakers handy, so it’s a plus.
Gaming and Performance
The TCL 27C2A Pro is a decent monitor for gaming, but it fails to punch up into greatness. It’s sharp and smooth, but not sharper or smoother than others on the block. Its ability to go bright can be handy, especially with its decent anti-glare qualities, but that’s about where its lead ends. Even then, sometimes the monitor just wants to go too dark.
When I tried to watch Dune, every dark scene just sank into too much darkness, leaving it hard to see anything despite the monitor’s very bright capabilities. The same happened while watching Avatar 2, with most of the movie bright and lovely but the final night of action growing incredibly dim. A few hours of Assassin’s Creed Shadows went well enough, but when I accidentally took out all the lights in a tower while fighting, suddenly I could hardly see what was on screen to make it through the combat. With local dimming, small bright elements can just about vanish on the display, too. My mouse cursor moving across a black screen dims considerably, and starfields look awful.
The TCL 27C2A Pro hits its stride when displaying bright and colorful content. Hades 2 sings, rendered in sharp fidelity and running smoothly. There’s not enough ghosting to be a bother in this game, and the color simply glows out of the monitor. There’s still some annoying artifacts from local dimming, such as certain elements (like the coin counter) appearing dim when it’s in an otherwise dark section of the screen, but these are generally subtle and hard to notice.
As things turn darker or rely more on contrast for effect, the MiniLED tech’s shortcomings next to OLED become obvious. In areas of strong contrast, such as a black and white box next to each other, exhibit a haze where the local dimming overlaps with one of the areas, dimming a portion of what should be bright white. White text on a black background can appear dim and unevenly lit. That’s rough for captions. In bright scenes, the Mini LED backlighting can definitely deliver, but black pixels close to bright elements get lifted so the actual contrast in that area will fall back to typical IPS levels. In the end, the visual quality is simply too situational.
Next to an OLED display, the differences really stand out. The whole image on the TCL 27C2A Pro is simply flattened. Little details that pop on OLED don’t have that effect on the TCL 27C2A Pro in many cases, and it’s because the contrast is neutered right where a detail should be emphasized because of the light doing the popping. This can leave things simply looking a little washed out.
Then there’s the matter of the dual-mode settings. The 4K/160Hz mode looks good, but the monitor can drop down to 1080p/320Hz for faster visuals. I saw this type of tech in action on the Asus ROG Swift OLED PG27UCWM, and it worked quite well there. Going down in resolution that much is always going to hurt a little, but the TCL 27C2A Pro looked particularly soft, with even decently sized text almost appearing blurry. It wasn’t too dramatic in the throes of battle in Hades 2, but when stopping to enjoy the scenery or read dialogue, it was more of a bother.
The TCL 27C2A Pro is capable of putting up some terribly impressive numbers when tested with a colorimeter, though. I measured its color gamut at 100% of the sRGB and 99% of the DCI-P3 color spaces. That’s just what you should expect from quantum dot color. The monitor defaults to 50% brightness, which hits a modest 167.8 nits, but if you dial it up to max brightness, it soars up to 570 nits. The wide color gamut and brightness don’t guarantee excellent visual performance in all conditions, though.
At full brightness, it achieved a 5,930:1 contrast ratio, which sounds great on paper, but the use of local dimming zones, even if there are over 2,300 of them, means the contrast depends in part on where it’s being measured. A subsequent test saw the monitor reach 8,150:1 likely due simply to a small shift in colorimeter placement. With bright squares in each corner, I even measured perfect black at the center of the display, giving it infinite contrast. But if I move the colorimeter closer to the corners, suddenly black pixels can have a few tenths of a nit bleeding through. With a 6x4 checkboard, the monitor manages a much tamer 2,038:1 contrast ratio with HDR white measuring at 693 nits and black measuring at 0.34 nits.
HDR has a lot of benefits for the monitor. It continues to cover the broad 99% coverage of the DCI-P3 colorspace alongside a comfortable 6500K whitepoint, and it can simply blast light out of a big enough area. Both a 10% window and a full white screen hit a little over 2,000 nits. That’s where its edge over OLED lies, as OLED monitors are lucky to hit half that for a 10% window and a quarter of that for a full white screen. Even a 1% window hit 975 nits. That said, smaller HDR highlights (e.g., muzzle flares or stars) will either lack brightness or lift the brightness of surrounding pixels.
The speakers on the monitor are kind of boxy and unpleasant. They put out respectable volume for casual listening, but won’t sound great for music or games, especially where spatial sound is concerned. After gaming on them for a while, they really started to grate on my ears. So, trust me, use a gaming headset.