Review: TCL 27C2A Pro

The TCL 272A Pro can make an impression in testing, but in practice its shortcomings become more apparent, and it falls just as short of shining.

The TCL 27C2A Pro is a mini LED gaming monitor designed to compete with some of the hottest 4K gaming monitors on the market. This panel offers 4K with quantum pixels and dual mode that can switch resolution on the fly, just like some other high-end monitors. The TCL 27C2A Pro promises a lot, but its $999 price tag raises a lot of questions.

The TCL 27C2A Pro is a fairly tame monitor with a white and black color scheme that seems to follow the Alienware or Samsung endorsement. Aside from some RGB lighting, it's not too flashy, but not super pretty either.

The display squeezes into a 27-inch 4K panel that runs at 160Hz native or 320Hz when switched to 1080p. This kind of dual-mode technology is appearing more and more in 4K monitors, and it's great to see that it gives them more flexibility to serve as platforms for AAA titles with great graphics assets as well as competitive eSports games where speed is almost everything. The panel features quantum dots and a Mini LED backlight with over 2300 dimming zones (2304 to be exact). This gives it a rated coverage of 98% of the DCI-P3 color space and a rated maximum brightness of 2000 nits - which we'll get to later.

The TCL 27C2A Pro may have an MSRP of $999, but a little about the monitor's build feels like it should always have. This model is built on the earlier non-professional 27C2A model, which was cheaper and had lower low-light areas and lower peak brightness. But this more expensive model built on the bones of a cheap display makes it feel cheap as a result.

The base and back of the monitor are covered with weak plastic. Although, TCL has colorful and relatively bright RGB lights on the back of the monitor, which at least makes it more fun.

The monitor has an adjustable stand that gives you all the height, swivel, tilt and swivel adjustment you'd expect from a high-end monitor, but it's horribly wobbly. Every move to do my duty is transmitted through the stand. Fortunately, the monitor can be mounted on a VESA mount.

Instead of having a solid hole through the base for cable routing, the back of the base has a small rubber band that slides down to form a small loop that cables can pass through, but it doesn't look too neat in practice. The monitor also uses an external power brick, which you'll need to find space for on or under your desk.

The monitor gets at least a few things right in its design. It includes DisplayPort and two HDMI ports. It also offers a USB-C connection that can input video and output up to 90W of power to the connected device. All ports can handle the display at up to 4K/160Hz, although you'll need to make sure you have cables that can handle it too.

The monitor uses a joystick for control, which makes navigation easy. The joystick sits front and center under the display, so it's easy to reach.

The TCL 27C2A Pro also includes speakers, but that should be a given in any monitor at this price. This ensures that you always have an audio output option, even when you don't have dedicated headphones or speakers available, so that's a plus.

The TCL 27C2A Pro is a decent gaming monitor, but it falls short of greatness. It's sharp and smooth, but not sharper or smoother than others on the block. Its ability to light up can be useful, especially with its decent anti-glare properties, but that's where it ends. Even then, sometimes the monitor just wants to go very dark.

When I tried to watch Dune, every dark scene was too dark, making it hard to see anything despite the monitor's very bright capabilities. The same thing happened while watching Avatar 2, while most of the film was bright and lovely, the final night of action turned incredibly dark. A few hours of Assassin's Creed Shadows went well enough, but when I accidentally turned off all the lights in a tower during a fight, I suddenly found it hard to see what was on the screen to get through the fight. With local dimming, even small bright elements can almost disappear on the screen. My mouse cursor hovering over a black screen dims noticeably, and the starfields look terrible.

The TCL 27C2A Pro performs quickly when displaying bright and colorful content. Hades 2 sings, runs with precise fidelity and smoothness. There aren't enough ghosts to bother you in this game, and the color simply shines off the monitor. There are still some annoying artifacts caused by local dimming, such as some elements (such as the coin counter) appearing dark in the dark part of the screen, but these are usually subtle and hardly noticeable.

As things get darker or rely more on contrast for impact, the shortcomings of MiniLED technology next to OLED become apparent. In areas of strong contrast, such as a black and white box next to each other, where local darkness overlaps with one of the areas, fog will appear, dimming part of what should be bright white. White text on a black background can look faint and uneven. It's rough for subtitles. In bright scenes, the Mini LED backlight can certainly deliver, but black pixels close to bright elements increase so that the actual contrast in that area falls back to normal IPS levels. Finally, the visual quality is simply too situational.

Next to the OLED display, the differences really stand out. The entire picture on the TCL 27C2A Pro is simply smoothed out. The small details that appear on the OLED in many cases do not have that effect on the TCL 27C2A Pro, and this is because the contrast is neutralized right where the details should be emphasized, because of the light that shines. This can make things look a little clean.

Then there's the issue of dual mode settings. 4K/160Hz mode looks good, but the monitor can downscale to 1080p/320Hz for faster images. I saw this kind of technology in action on the Asus ROG Swift OLED PG27UCWM and it worked perfectly. Well, dropping the resolution that much always hurts you a bit, but the TCL 27C2A Pro looks very smooth, even decent-sized text looks almost blurry. It wasn't very dramatic during the climax of the battle in Hades 2, but it was more annoying when we stopped to enjoy the scenery or read the dialogue.

However, the TCL 27C2A Pro can deliver impressive numbers when tested with a colorimeter. I measured its color gamut at 100% of sRGB and 99% of DCI-P3 color spaces. This is what you should expect from a quantum dot color. The monitor's brightness defaults to 50 percent, which averages out to 167.8 nits, but if you dial it up to maximum brightness, it increases to 570 nits. However, the wide color gamut and brightness do not guarantee excellent visual performance in all conditions.

At full brightness, it achieved a contrast ratio of 5,930:1, which sounds great on paper, but the use of local low-light areas, even though there are more than 2,300 of them, means that contrast is somewhat dependent on where it's measured. Further testing revealed that the monitor had reached 8150:1, most likely due to a small change in the placement of the colorimeter. With bright squares in each corner, I even measured perfect black in the center of the display, giving it infinite contrast. But if I move the colorimeter closer to the corners, suddenly the black pixels can bleed a few tenths of a note. With a 6x4 checkerboard, the monitor manages a contrast ratio of 2038:1. HDR whites measure 693 nits and blacks measure 0.34 nits.

HDR has many advantages for monitors. It continues to cover a wide 99% of the DCI-P3 color space alongside a comfortable white point of 6500K and can easily blast light from a large enough area. Both a 10% window and a full white screen are just over 2000 nits. This is where the advantage over OLED lies, as OLED monitors are lucky to get half that for a 10% window and a quarter of that for a full white screen. Even a 1% window reached 975 nits. That said, smaller HDR highlights (for example, muzzle flares or stars) either lack brightness or increase the brightness of surrounding pixels.

The speakers on the monitor are kind of boxy and awkward. They offer decent sound for casual listening, but don't sound great for music or gaming, especially when it comes to surround sound. After playing with them for a while, they really started to grate on my ears. So, trust me, use a gaming headset.

TCL lists the 27C2A Pro on Amazon for $999, which is frankly a lot. However, the monitor sometimes goes on sale, so you should be able to get it much cheaper. And really, you shouldn't get it unless you can get a huge discount.

Mark Knapp is a freelance writer for IGN covering all things electronics and gaming hardware. He has over 10 years of experience in the tech industry with bylines at PCMag, Reviewed, CNET, and more. Find Mark on Twitter @Techn0Mark or BlueSky at @Techn0Mark.

The TCL27C2A Pro delivers impressive numbers here and there, but it's not good enough. Its brightness is respectable, but I can't say it looks any better than the OLED alternatives - which are plentiful at this price point. And in dark scenes, it often looks awful, casting the entire image in darkness and failing to remove small HDR highlights. Given its shortcomings, I'd really only recommend this monitor if you exclusively play bright games and need high, reliable brightness levels that OLED can't give you.