The paper is concerned with the state estimation problem for a class of time-delayed complex networks with event-triggering communication protocol. A novel event generator function, which is dependent not only on the measurement output but also on a predefined positive constant, is proposed with hope to reduce the communication burden. A new concept of exponentially ultimate boundedness is provided to quantify the estimation performance. By means of the comparison principle, some sufficient conditions are obtained to guarantee that the estimation error is exponentially ultimately bounded, and then the estimator gains are obtained in terms of the solution of certain matrix inequalities. Furthermore, a rigorous proof is proposed to show that the designed triggering condition is free of the Zeno behavior. Finally, a numerical example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed event-based estimator.