Hisense QD6/QD65NF QLED TV Review

The Hisense QD6 looks similar to other Hisense models from 2024. It's simple but functional, with thin bezels around the top and sides and a thicker bottom bezel.

The TV uses two feet for a stand. The screen sits about three inches above the table, giving you enough clearance for most soundbars.

Footprint of the 65-inch stand: 39.2" x 11.9".

The input housing on the back is made of plastic, while the rest is metallic. Most of the inputs are side-facing, but they're located towards the middle of the TV, making them hard to reach when the TV is wall-mounted. Unfortunately, the TV doesn't come with any accessories for cable management.

The Hisense QD6 feels decently well-built. It isn't made of the most premium materials, but it's acceptably sturdy. There's a bit of flex on the back, but that's pretty typical. The feet hold the TV well, and there are no obvious quality control issues.

The TV has an okay contrast ratio. Its native contrast is great for dark room viewing, but the TV lacks a local dimming feature to improve contrast. As a result, blacks look washed out when highlights are present.

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

The Hisense QD6 doesn't have a local dimming feature, so it doesn't adjust the backlight of individual areas to brighten up highlights without impacting the rest of the image. This means that there are no distracting flickers or brightness changes as bright highlights move across the screen.

Switching to Game Mode makes no noticeable difference in dark scene performance.

The Hisense QD6 has passable HDR brightness. It isn't bright enough to really make specular highlights pop. Even in darker scenes, highlights aren't too impactful because of the TV's limited contrast and lack of local dimming.

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

• HDR Picture Mode: Movie
• Backlight: 100
• Color Temperature: Warm 1
• HDR Tone Mapping: On

All other extra settings were set to 'Off.'

We tested the TV with 'HDR Tone Mapping' set to 'On.' When it's disabled, the results are notably worse, with the image looking dim and washed out in real scenes, so we recommend keeping it enabled for HDR content. For reference, you can see the results with 'HDR Tone Mapping' disabled below:

• Hallway Lights: 334 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 241 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 102 cd/m²

There's no noticeable difference in HDR brightness when the TV is set to Game Mode.

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

• HDR Picture Mode: Game
• Backlight: 100
• Color Temperature: Warm 1
• HDR Tone Mapping: On

All other extra settings were set to 'Off.'

Results with 'HDR Tone Mapping' set to 'Off':

• Hallway Lights: 322 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 233 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 88 cd/m²

As with our HDR Brightness testing, the TV's PQ EOTF tracking is significantly worse with 'HDR Tone Mapping' disabled, with everything appearing underbrightened. With 'HDR Tone Mapping' enabled, however, the TV performs great. Content mastered at every nit level is displayed quite close to the intended brightness, though darker scenes tend to be a tad underbrightened while brighter scenes tend to be a tad overbrightened.

The TV gets decently bright in SDR. It's not ideal for very bright rooms, but it overcomes glare in moderately lit rooms.

These measurements are after calibration with the following settings:

• Picture Mode: Movie
• Backlight: 100
• Contrast: 83
• Mid Luminance Gamma: -1
• Color Temperature: Warm
• All other extra settings set to 'Off'

The Hisense QD6 has a wide color gamut. It has near full coverage of the commonly used DCI-P3 color space, with great accuracy overall. Its coverage of the wider Rec.2020 color space, however, is just okay, and the colors are a lot less accurate.

The TV's color volume is decent. It doesn't display vibrant colors very brightly, and it struggles a bit with dark saturated colors, but it isn't bad overall.

The Hisense QD6 is fairly accurate in SDR before calibration. Most colors are displayed quite accurately, though whites are fairly inaccurate, and brighter reds and blues are somewhat off the mark as well. Its white balance is also quite inaccurate, with most lighter shades of gray and white having too much blue and red and most darker shades of gray having too little red, blue, and green. That said, the overall color temperature is close to our 6500K target. Gamma is off as well, with dark scenes appearing too dark and bright scenes appearing too bright.

After calibration, the TV's accuracy is great, but there are very few calibration settings, making it a challenge to calibrate. The white balance is particularly tricky to fix, so there are still some issues, especially in the darker shades of gray, but it's slightly improved. The color temperature is a smidge closer to target, and color accuracy is improved a bit as well, but the gamma remains mostly off.

See our full calibration settings.

The Hisense QD6 has decent gray uniformity. The edges of the screen are a bit darker than the center, but there isn't too much noticeable dirty screen effect in the middle of the screen. On a very dark or near-black screen, the uniformity is great, but the sides are a bit lighter than the rest of the screen.

The TV has fantastic black uniformity. There are few noticeable uniformity issues, but the whole screen looks a tad blueish, since the TV lacks a local dimming feature.

The Hisense QD6 isn't suitable for very wide seating arrangements, as the image degrades and becomes washed out as you move off-center.

It has good reflection handling. Its semi-gloss screen does an excellent job of reducing the intensity of indirect reflections, but it has a harder time with direct reflections from light sources positioned in front of the screen.

The Hisense QD6 has mediocre HDR gradient handling. There's noticeable banding in almost every shade, and it's particularly bad in lighter blue shades.

While we recommend enabling 'HDR Tone Mapping' for its better HDR Brightness performance, enabling it also results in worse HDR gradient handling. The above results were achieved with 'HDR Tone Mapping' disabled.

The TV has poor low-quality content smoothing. The TV preserves details well, but it barely does any smoothing, so there are still artifacts like macro-blocking present in low bitrate content.

The Hisense QD6 does a poor job of upscaling low-resolution content like DVDs or low-resolution streams. There's a noticeable loss of fine detail, and the image looks soft overall.

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

• Sharpness: 5
• Super Resolution: On

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

The TV uses a KSF phosphor coating to produce red light and a quantum dot color converter to produce green light, as confirmed by the TV's spectral power distribution (SPD).

The Hisense QD6 has an okay response time, but there's some noticeable blur behind fast-moving objects. It's especially sluggish with dark scene transitions.

The TV uses pulse width modulation (PWM) to dim its backlight, which introduces flicker that can bother people who are sensitive to it. It flickers at 180Hz in every picture mode when the backlight is set to '99' or lower. It's only flicker-free when the backlight is at maximum.

The TV doesn't have an optional backlight strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion (BFI), to help reduce persistence blur.

This TV doesn't have a motion interpolation feature.

The Hisense QD6 has some minor stutter when watching movies or TV shows shot at 24 fps, which is most apparent in slow panning shots, but there's almost no stutter with 60 fps content, which is good.

The TV can only remove judder from 24p sources, but it does so automatically without having to enable any settings. Unfortunately, it doesn't remove judder from 60p/60i sources like a cable box.

The Hisense QD6 doesn't support VRR to help reduce screen tearing.

The TV has very low input lag when set to PC or Game Mode, ensuring a very responsive gaming experience with little delay between inputs on your controller and the action on screen.

The TV supports most resolutions up to 4k @ 60Hz, except for 1440p signals. Unfortunately, it scales 1440p content to within a window at 2160p rather than scaling it properly. It's also worth noting that we couldn't get it to scale 480p sources properly when displayed via PC, but it does properly display native 480p sources like a DVD played on a DVD player. It displays proper chroma 4:4:4 when set to PC or Game Mode.

The Hisense QD6 can't take full advantage of the PS5. It supports HDR but doesn't support VRR or 1440p resolutions and is limited to a 60Hz refresh rate.

Likewise, the TV can't take full advantage of the Xbox Series S|X. It supports HDR and Dolby Vision but doesn't support VRR or 1440p resolutions and is limited to a 60Hz refresh rate.

The TV is limited to HDMI 2.0 bandwidth on all three HDMI ports. It supports every HDR format.

The Hisense QD6 supports eARC, which lets you pass high-quality, uncompressed audio to a compatible receiver or soundbar through an HDMI cable. It supports most major audio formats, except for DTS-HD Master Audio. Still, you shouldn't have compatibility issues with most external sources.

The built-in speakers on the Hisense QD6 are okay, but if you really care about audio, you're better off getting a dedicated sound system or a soundbar. Like most TVs, the QD6 just can't produce enough bass for an impactful home theater experience. Otherwise, the frequency response in the mid and treble range is fairly balanced, so dialogue is pretty clear at moderate listening levels. The TV also gets quite loud, but the sound is less balanced at maximum volume.

Distortion isn't bad overall, especially at moderate volume levels, but it gets more noticeable at the TV's max volume.

The Hisense QD6 uses Amazon's Fire TV operating system. It's 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 wide selection of apps, so it's easy to find your favorite content. You can also cast content from your phone onto the TV or play videos directly from a USB stick.

The remote is small and simple, with no numpad and dedicated app buttons for popular streaming services. It has a built-in mic for voice control through Amazon Alexa, which you can use to change inputs, launch apps, or even control other compatible smart home products but not to adjust the TV's settings.

There's a single button on the bottom center of the TV that can be used to switch inputs, change channels or volume, and power the TV on/off.

• Quick setup guide
• Remote
• 2x AAA batteries
• Power cable
• VESA offsets