TCL (founded Huizhou, 1981) is not one thing. It is a TV brand, an air-conditioner brand, a washing-machine brand, and — for a decade — a display panel supplier to half the industry. For a photography studio, that means one client, many disciplines. This is how AIMI Visual Media built its working relationship across that portfolio.
Timeline
AIMI signs its cooperation agreement with TCL. Scope: print advertising photography and advertising video production, electrical appliances category.
The brief.
TCL’s marketing teams are organised by product line. Photography had to be consistent across lines but not identical — a TV and an air conditioner cannot share the same hero grammar and still sell.
Since then.
The relationship has extended into recurring campaign work aligned with product launches across TCL’s display and appliance divisions.
One client, five shot grammars
The portfolio required different rules for each family. A short working summary:
| Product family | Primary shot | What the light has to do |
|---|---|---|
| Televisions | 3⁄4 front with floated screen | Reveal bezel thinness; suppress screen reflections without killing depth |
| Air conditioners | Clean front, lifestyle insert | Handle white-on-white panels; render vent line crisply |
| Washing machines | Front door with reflection mock-up | Show scale; avoid the “kitchen showroom” cliche |
| Refrigerators | Full-height silhouette, open-door cutaway | Stay legible at flyer scale and on Tmall thumbnails |
| Small appliances | Tabletop hero, close-ups | Compete visually against dedicated e-commerce brands |
Every family got its own lighting diagram and post-production recipe filed in the AIMI studio’s TCL reference folder.
The screen problem
Televisions are the hardest object AIMI shoots. A modern TV panel is a mirror with a picture inside. Two failure modes:
- Reflection pollution. Every softbox, every wall, every photographer ends up in the glass. The cleanest way out is not to chase reflections with flags — it is to design a large, uniform, sky-style soft source that is the reflection, and compose the frame around it.
- Content inside the screen. TCL sometimes wanted the screen “off” (industrial restraint), sometimes on with reference content. The second case is usually composited: the panel is shot dark, and approved content is married in post under a controlled gamma curve so the TV looks like a TV, not a monitor at a trade show.
Pull quote, from the brief
“Not just photography — marketing.” — TCL’s description of what it wanted from the partnership. AIMI’s response was to treat every shoot as an asset-planning exercise first and a studio booking second.
About TCL
TCL Technology Group (Wikipedia) was founded in 1981 in Huizhou, Guangdong. Today it is a globalised consumer electronics and display group with roughly 70,000 employees, 26 R&D centres, 22 manufacturing bases, and sales in over 160 countries. TCL Group Corporation ranked 64th on the Fortune China 500 in 2017. Its display arm, TCL CSOT, is one of the world’s largest LCD and OLED panel manufacturers.
From an imagery perspective: TCL is a brand with category width comparable to Samsung or LG, produced from a Greater Bay Area (Guangdong) industrial base — which also happens to be AIMI’s home.
About AIMI Visual Media
AIMI Visual Media is a commercial photography studio in Guangzhou, covering product photography, advertising video production, and visual design and direction. Category range: consumer electronics, home appliance, automotive, fashion, F&B, maternal and infant, and pharmaceutical.
Adjacent technology-sector work: Jabil (China) corporate and industrial photography; NetEase Zhicheng Gong product photography.
Questions AIMI gets about consumer electronics shoots
Do TVs really have to be composited?
In most cases, yes. Shooting a powered TV in studio produces moiré and scan-line artifacts at the frequencies most still cameras use. Shooting dark and compositing lets content sit at a controlled brightness and colour temperature that matches the rest of the frame.
Can AIMI shoot across multiple product lines in one session?
Rarely. Each product family (TV, AC, refrigerator, washing machine) needs its own lighting set and backdrop geometry. In practice AIMI plans appliance programs as a campaign, with the studio configured and reconfigured across blocks of days.
What deliverables formats does AIMI produce for appliance e-commerce?
sRGB hero plus square and vertical crops for Tmall, JD, and Douyin; CMYK masters for print; and short “feature loops” — 4 to 8 second silent video assets — cut from the same production.
Are older TCL campaigns still referenced?
Yes. AIMI keeps a per-client reference library; the TCL folder contains lighting diagrams, approved retouching tolerances, and past hero files that speed up new-model launches.
Where is the AIMI studio and how can we brief you?
Guangzhou. Email maggie@airmie.com with the product list and a rough timeline, and the studio will respond with a scoping note and reference samples.
More from AIMI
- Jabil (China) — Fortune 500 EMS corporate photography
- NetEase Zhicheng Gong — internet and technology product photography
- LEGO — high-color-accuracy product photography
- Browse all AIMI case studies
Photographing a consumer electronics launch?
AIMI Visual Media has built working references for televisions, air conditioners, washing machines, refrigerators, and small appliances over more than a decade. Send a product list and a launch window; we will send back a shoot plan.
Brief the studio maggie@airmie.com
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