Hisense A7N [A7, A75N] TV Review

The Hisense A7 features a similar design to many other Hisense models, with a metal back enclosure, plastic housing for the inputs, and a set of plastic feet. It's simple, but it's a functional design that looks good enough.

The TV uses two plastic feet that don't take up a lot of space. They lift the TV about three inches, so most soundbars fit underneath without blocking the screen.

Footprint of the 65-inch stand: 39" x 11.8".

The top section of the TV is metallic, and the section that houses the inputs is made of plastic. Most of the inputs are side-facing, but they're pushed toward the middle of the TV, making them a bit of a reach if you're trying to access them while the TV is wall-mounted. However, the HDMI 4, Ethernet, and digital audio out ports located on the back are definitely not easily accessible if you have it wall-mounted. Unfortunately, the TV doesn't come with any clips to help with cable management.

The TV has decent build quality. The metal back is sturdy, but there's quite a bit of flex on the plastic portion housing the inputs. There's also quite a bit of wobble when the TV is pushed, but it does a good job of settling relatively quickly. Overall, the materials used don't feel premium, but there are no serious issues with its assembly or quality.

The Hisense A7 has a good native contrast ratio, so blacks look nice in dark scenes. Unfortunately, it lacks a local dimming feature, so blacks are raised and appear washed out when very bright highlights appear on the screen.

This TV doesn't have a local dimming feature, so there's no blooming around bright objects or subtitles in dark scenes. But as the TV can't brighten highlights without impacting the rest of the image, dark scenes look washed out.

This TV doesn't have a local dimming feature, so it can't adjust the backlight of individual zones to brighten up highlights without impacting the rest of the image. But this means that there's no distracting flicker or brightness changes as bright highlights move between zones, as the TV doesn't have any.

There's no noticeable difference in dark scene performance when the TV is in PC/Game Mode.

Unfortunately, this TV has mediocre peak brightness in HDR. HDR content looks flat and dull overall, as the TV isn't bright enough to bring out specular highlights, and with the lack of a local dimming feature, bright spots don't pop at all.

These measurements are after calibrating the HDR white point with the following settings:

• HDR Picture Mode: Filmmaker Mode
• Brightness: 100
• Contrast: 50
• Black Level: 0
• Dark Detail: Off
• Gamma: ST2084
• Active Contrast: Off
• Dynamic Tone Mapping: Off
• Color Temperature: Warm 1

If you prefer a brighter but less accurate image, here are the results with Dynamic Tone Mapping set to 'On':

• Hallway Lights: 333 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 247 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 246 cd/m²

Switching to PC/Game Mode causes a slight decrease in overall peak brightness.

These measurements are after calibrating the HDR white point with the following settings:

• HDR Picture Mode: HDR Game
• Brightness: 100
• Contrast: 50
• Black Level: 0
• Dark Detail: Off
• Gamma: ST2084
• Active Contrast: Off
• Dynamic Tone Mapping: Off
• Color Temperature: Warm 1

If you prefer a brighter but less accurate image, here are results with Dynamic Tone Mapping set to 'On':

• Hallway Lights: 333 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 242 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 271 cd/m²

The TV has excellent PQ EOTF tracking, but it's decidedly not perfect. Blacks and shadows are raised in all mastered content, but then, for content mastered at 600 and 1000 nits, the TV closely follows the curve until it reaches its peak brightness. With content mastered at 4000 nits the TV is too dark across the entire curve from darker midtones onward, and it gets darker as the content gets brighter. There's a gradual roll-off near the TV's peak brightness with all mastered content, which helps to preserve detail in very bright specular highlights.

The peak brightness of this TV in SDR is just decent. There's no distracting variation in brightness with different scenes, but it's not quite bright enough to overcome glare in a very bright room, although it's certainly bright enough for moderately lit rooms.

These measurements are after calibration with the following settings:

• Picture Mode: Theater
• Brightness: 100
• Contrast: 45
• Gamma: 2.2
• Color Temperature: Warm 1
• Active Contrast: Off

The Hisense A7 has an impressive HDR color gamut. It has fantastic coverage of the commonly used DCI-P3 color space, although with some color mapping accuracy issues. The TV has decent coverage of the wider Rec. 2020 color space, with most of the same color mapping issues, but here highly saturated colors, in particular cyans and greens, are mostly undersaturated and off the mark.

The color volume of this TV is decent. It displays a satisfactory range of colors at many luminance levels, but it struggles with some dark saturated colors due to its lack of local dimming and good, but unexceptional, native contrast.

The Hisense A7 has impressive accuracy in SDR even before calibrating it. Gamma is very close to the 2.2 level for a moderately lit room, and the color temperature is nearly perfect. Color accuracy is great overall, but with minor color mapping issues, moreso with blues, across the entire color range. White balance is also great, although colors are slightly undersaturated in the entire range of grays.

The TV has fantastic SDR accuracy after calibration, and the TV is easy to calibrate. Any issues with white balance are gone, and the color accuracy is outstanding, with only some minor inaccuracies, again moreso with blues, that aren't noticeable to most people.

You can see our full calibration settings here.

The gray uniformity is alright overall, but is particularly disappointing with large areas of bright uniform colors. Here, the sides of the screen are very noticeably darker than the center. The center of the screen is also a bit darker, and there's noticeable dirty screen effect. Uniformity is much better in near-black scenes, but here there's some visible dirty screen effect.

This TV's black uniformity is excellent overall. There's no local dimming feature, so the entire screen is a bit raised and cloudy when bright highlights are on the screen. There are no bright spots, though, and there's no noticeable backlight bleed; just uniform clouding throughout.

Unfortunately, this TV has disappointing off-angle viewing. The image degrades rapidly as you move off-center, as colors fade rapidly and brightness decreases, causing the image to appear washed out. This makes it a poor choice for a wide seating arrangement.

The overall reflection handling of this TV is good, especially when it's dealing with glare from ambient sources of light. When dealing with direct sources of light, such as from lights or windows placed directly opposite the TV, it's satisfactory, but the resulting glare is more noticeable.

The Hisense A7's gradient handling in HDR is alright. There's some distracting banding in darker shades, especially in grays and blues, but it's also a bit distracting in all other darker colors. Bright shades are displayed well, though, with minimal banding.

The TV has poor low-quality content smoothing. It does a fantastic job at preserving details, but unfortunately, it just doesn't smooth out artifacts in low-bitrate content.

The Hisense A7 does a good job at upscaling low-resolution content like DVDs or lower-resolution streams. Details are clear enough, but finer details are hard to make out.

Sharpness processing was calibrated with no over-sharpening for low-resolution content, with the following settings:

• Sharpness: 13
• Super Resolution: On

The TV uses a BGR (Blue-Green-Red) subpixel layout instead of the traditional RGB layout. For video or gaming content, this doesn't cause any issues, but for PC monitor use, it can be a problem as it impacts the text clarity, although not everyone will notice this.

The Hisense A7 has a great response time for minimal blur behind fast-moving objects, but it's slower when coming out of dark states, so there's noticeable black smearing in dark scene transitions.

Unfortunately, the backlight on the Hisense A7 uses pulse width modulation (PWM) to dim the backlight, and there's a low flicker frequency at all backlight levels below the maximum. This low-frequency flicker causes duplications in motion and can cause eye strain if you're sensitive to flicker. The good news is that the backlight is flicker-free when set to max. Since the TV can't get very bright, if flicker bothers you, just make sure that the backlight is at maximum, and you won't have any issues. This backlight behavior is consistent across all picture modes.

This TV doesn't have an optional backlight strobing feature, also known as BFI. Instead, the backlight always flickers at 180Hz with the backlight below max, which helps reduce persistence blur but introduces severe image duplication below max brightness.

The TV has an optional motion interpolation feature to improve the clarity of motion, but it doesn't work very well. Even slower-moving scenes have some noticeable artifacts. The TV really struggles in faster-moving scenes, and at times, the TV stops interpolating altogether.

Due to the TV's quick response time, there's some noticeable stutter when watching movies or TV shows, and it's most apparent in slow panning shots.

The TV removes judder from most sources automatically, without the need for any additional motion settings. Unfortunately, it can't remove judder from 60Hz interlaced sources. Many cable boxes support either 720p or 1080i, so if that's your case, make sure you select 720p instead for a judder-free experience.

The Hisense A7 supports all VRR technologies, which is great for gamers. Still, the refresh rate range is narrow, so its usefulness is limited. It also doesn't support low framerate compensation, so you'll see tearing if your game's frame rate drops below 48Hz.

The TV has incredibly low input lag when set to PC/Game Mode, which ensures a very responsive gaming experience with very little delay between your actions with your controller or mouse and the action on-screen.

There is a weird bug where the input lag is much higher than expected. Rebooting the TV multiple times fixes it, and the input lag numbers subsequently fall within expectations.

The TV supports most common resolutions. It displays chroma 4:4:4 signals properly at all supported resolutions, which is essential for clear text from a desktop PC.

This TV can't take full advantage of the PS5, as it's limited to a 60Hz refresh rate. As such, it's best suited for gamers who prefer the 'Graphics' preset in their games and not competitive gamers who prefer 'Performance' presets with higher frame rates.

This TV can't take full advantage of the Xbox Series X|S. It supports a few advanced features, including HDR and VRR, as well as Dolby Vision gaming, but it's limited to a 60Hz refresh rate. This makes it a better choice for more casual gamers who prefer immersive graphics over higher frame rates.

The TV is limited to HDMI 2.0 bandwidth on all four HDMI ports, but it does support both Dolby Vision and HDR10+.

The TV supports eARC, which lets you pass high-quality, uncompressed audio to a compatible receiver or soundbar through an HDMI cable. It supports all major audio formats, so you don't have to worry about compatibility with external sources.

The TV has a barely adequate frequency response. Like most TVs, the bass is pretty much non-existent. At least dialogue is clear at moderate listening levels, but the sound becomes increasingly unbalanced as you raise the volume. This is unfortunate since the speakers don't get very loud, so it's best suited for a quiet environment.

The distortion performance of this TV is decent overall. There's a bit of distortion at moderate listening levels, but you get more of it as you raise the volume.

The Hisense A7 uses version 12 of the popular Google TV operating system. The interface is very smooth and easy to use.

Unfortunately, like almost all TVs on the market, the smart interface contains ads, and you can't disable them.

The TV has a fantastic selection of apps, so finding your favorite content is easy. You can also cast content from your phone onto the TV or play videos directly from a USB stick.

The included remote is simple, with no number buttons and six buttons for quick access to popular streaming apps. It has a built-in mic for voice control, and you can use voice commands to change inputs or launch apps, but you can't use it to change settings on the TV.

There's a single button on the bottom center of the TV that you can use to switch inputs and power the TV on/off.

• Remote
• 2x AAA batteries
• Power cable
• User manual