Hisense U7K  TV Review

From the front, the TV has a premium design that looks great. It has thin bezels on three sides, with a thicker, but still thin, bottom bezel. The feet are slim and don't take up much space. From the back, the TV has visible screws around its border, which look a bit cheap overall.

The TV comes with a pair of adjustable metallic feet that support it well, although there's still some wobble front to back.

Footprint of the 65-inch stand in the wide position: 46.1" x 12.3". In the narrow position, the 65-inch stand has a footprint of 27.6" x 12.3". In either position, the feet lift the TV about 3.3" above the table, so most soundbars fit in front without blocking the screen. Some longer soundbars don't fit between the feet when they're set in the narrow position.

The back has a flat metallic top part and a thicker plastic housing on the bottom half. There's a built-in subwoofer on the bottom section. Most of the inputs are side-facing and aren't set into the TV, so they're easy to access unless you have the TV mounted flush against the wall. There are clips built into the feet to help with cable management.

The TV has decent build quality. There's a bit of flex in the plastic portion of the back, but this isn't uncommon and won't cause any issues. The feet are sturdy and support the TV well, but there's some wobble front to back. More worrisome, it creaks when it wobbles, which is slightly concerning. Our unit also has 10 dead pixels, or possible dirt stuck under the panel, around the top of the screen—they aren't visible from a normal viewing distance, but it speaks to less than stellar quality control.

The Hisense U75K Series has a fantastic contrast ratio with local dimming enabled, leading to deep blacks in a dark room, even when bright highlights are shown on the screen. With local dimming disabled, the TV's contrast ratio is good, but blacks are raised and appear washed out when bright highlights are present. If you want a similar TV with even better contrast, check out the Sharp AQUOS XLED FV1.

The Hisense U7K has decent blooming performance. There's some visible blooming around bright highlights or in dark areas when they're next to brighter ones.

Overall, the TV's processing keeps up well with fast-moving objects. Still, the leading edge of bright, moving objects is noticeably dimmer, and fast-moving objects leave a visible trail.

Switching to Game Mode doesn't result in any noticeable difference in dark scene performance.

The Hisense U7K has very good peak brightness in HDR. Bright highlights stand out well, delivering an impactful HDR experience. If you'd prefer a brighter TV, check out the TCL QM7/QM751G QLED instead.

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

• HDR Picture Mode: HDR Theater
• Brightness: 100
• Gamma: ST2084
• Local Dimming: High
• Color Temperature: Warm 1
• Dynamic Tone Mapping: Off

If you want better HDR brightness, check out the newer Hisense U7N [U7, U75N].

The TV's HDR brightness in Game Mode is very good. There's no noticeable difference in peak brightness from 'HDR Theater' mode.

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

• HDR Picture Mode: HDR Game
• Brightness: 100
• Gamma: ST2084
• Local Dimming: High
• Color Temperature: Warm 1
• Dynamic Tone Mapping: Off

The TV has decent PQ EOTF tracking, but all scenes appear brighter than the content creator's intent. There's a smooth roll-off as content approaches the its peak brightness, more so with content mastered at 4000 nits, ensuring that fine details are preserved.

It has impressive peak brightness in SDR and easily overcomes glare in a bright room. The TV maintains its brightness well across different scenes, although smaller highlights aren't as bright as bigger ones.

These measurements are after calibration with the following settings:

• Picture Mode: Theater Night
• Brightness: 100
• Color Temperature: Warm 1
• Local Dimming: High
• Gamma: 2.2
• Active Contrast: Off

The Hisense U7K TV has an excellent HDR color gamut. It has fantastic coverage of the commonly used DCI-P3 color space, although there are small tone mapping errors with most colors. It also has good coverage of the wider Rec. 2020 color space, but again, with frequent tone mapping errors with most colors.

The TV has great color volume. It displays a wide range of colors at all luminance levels, and dark saturated colors are displayed well thanks to the TV's excellent contrast.

The Hisense U75K has excellent pre-calibration accuracy. Gamma is close to the 2.2 target for a moderately lit room, and the white balance is great, with minor accuracy errors in bright whites and mid-grays. Color accuracy is excellent, although saturated blues have noticeable tone mapping errors. The color temperature is fantastic; neither too warm nor too cold.

The TV has incredible accuracy after calibration. It's a bit tricky to calibrate, as you need to calibrate it at a lower stimulus than usual; otherwise, the calibration settings don't stick. Plus, changing settings at a lower stimulus affects higher settings significantly. For example, if you change the blue levels on an 80% white stimulus, it affects the blue levels at the 85% and 90% white stimulus. Still, it already has excellent accuracy before calibration, so you don't need to calibrate it too much, if at all, for an accurate image.

See our full calibration settings.

The TV has decent gray uniformity. There's some vignetting in the corners, and the right side of the screen has a green tint, while the left side veers towards pink. These uniformity issues are noticeable in large areas of bright, uniform color, like when watching sports or browsing the web. There's visible banding in near-black scenes, with a greenish tint towards the right side of the screen.

The TV has fantastic black uniformity. With local dimming disabled, there's a bit of backlight bleed, especially visible in the upper right corner of the screen, but it isn't too distracting. Enabling local dimming almost completely eliminates the backlight bleed.

The TV has an inadequate viewing angle. The image fades and looks washed out as you move even slightly off-center. This makes it a poor choice for a wide seating arrangement, as anyone sitting off-center sees a degraded image. If you have a wide seating arrangement, an option with a wide viewing angle, like the Vizio Quantum Pro QLED, is a better choice.

The TV's reflection handling is fantastic. Its finish reduces the impact of reflections enough that it can easily handle even very bright rooms.

The TV has decent HDR gradient handling. There's some banding in dark grays, reds, and greens, as well as in bright blues. Other color gradients have minimal banding.

This Hisense U7K has very good low-quality content smoothing. It's great at avoiding macro-blocking in dark scenes and preserves fine details well.

The Hisense U7K's upscaling capabilities are good. The resulting image looks sharp overall, with some, but not excessive, blurring. Fine details are preserved well, and text is easy to read.

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

• Super Resolution: On
• Sharpness: 10

The TV uses a BGR (blue-green-red) subpixel layout. For multimedia usage, this doesn't cause any issues, but it causes text clarity issues when you use this TV as a PC monitor. There are easy workarounds for these issues, however.

The TV has an excellent response time at 4k @ 60Hz, but the Hisense's response time tuning is different when the TV's refresh rate is below and above 100Hz: it's more aggressive above 100Hz, leading to a faster overall response time but with more overshoot errors. This doesn't cause any issues when running at a fixed refresh rate, but with VRR enabled, the TV's response time behavior rapidly changes as the TV's refresh rate hovers around 100Hz, which is very noticeable. You can see the two response time behaviors here:

• Below 100
• Above 100

Like most TVs on the market, this TV uses pulse width modulation (PWM) to dim the backlight. It flickers at 4000Hz in all picture modes and at every brightness level, but it isn't noticeable.

The TV has an optional backlight strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion (BFI). This feature is meant to reduce persistence blur and improve the appearance of motion. It works on the Hisense at both 60Hz and 120Hz, leading to a sharp image, but at the cost of some image duplication.

The TV has an optional motion interpolation feature to interpolate content up to 120 fps. It works decently well with slower content, like slow panning shots, but there's a lot of artifacting the moment the action ramps up.

The TV's good response time results in an adequate overall stutter performance. There's some noticeable stutter in slow-panning shots in 24p content, like movies.

The TV automatically removes judder from any source, ensuring a smooth movie-watching experience.

The Hisense U7K supports all three variable refresh rate (VRR) technologies, and its VRR range caps out at 144Hz. It can also do 1080p @ 240Hz, but not with VRR enabled. With VRR enabled, the TV sets itself to 72Hz with resolution halving when you attempt to run it at 1080p @ 240Hz.

When the TV is connected to a PC using an AMD graphics card, it disables HDR when the FreeSync toggle is enabled in the TV's Game Settings menu. For VRR and HDR to work simultaneously, FreeSync needs to be disabled on the TV, although this disables VRR for sources that only use FreeSync for VRR, such as older AMD graphic cards.

The input lag is incredibly low in Game Mode, resulting in a responsive gaming or desktop experience. The TV also outputs proper chroma 4:4:4 when in Game Mode, so you can have clear text and the fastest possible input lag when using this TV as a PC monitor.

The TV can't do 1080p @ 240Hz when VRR is enabled: it instead locks itself to 72Hz with resolution halving. With VRR disabled, the TV does proper 1080p @ 240Hz, with a measured input lag of 3.4ms.

Note: These numbers were measured with the 'High Refresh Rate' mode disabled except at 1080p @ 240Hz, as it locks itself to 'On' at that refresh rate. Enabling the setting at refresh rates lower than 240Hz noticeably increases input lag.

The TV supports up to 4k @ 144Hz on HDMI ports 3 and 4. The TV does proper 1080p @ 240Hz on HDMI ports 3 and 4, but only with VRR disabled.

The TV supports chroma 4:4:4 at 4k @ 144Hz with Game Mode enabled, so you can simultaneously have the sharpest text and lowest input lag.

The Hisense U7K takes full advantage of the PS5, with 4k @ 120Hz support on HDMI ports 3 and 4 and variable refresh rate (VRR) support.

The TV can also take full advantage of the Xbox Series X|S consoles, with 4k @ 120Hz support on HDMI ports 3 and 4, as well as variable refresh rate (VRR) support with both AMD FreeSync and HDMI Forum VRR. Like the Hisense U8/U8K, it can do Dolby Vision at 4k @ 120Hz.

The TV has HDMI 2.1 bandwidth on HDMI ports 3 and 4, with both supporting up to 4k @ 144Hz. Unfortunately, HDMI 3 is the eARC port, so you lose one HDMI 2.1 port when you plug in a soundbar. It has an ATSC 3.0 TV tuner, so it streams 4k content over-the-air. Its wireless tuner supports the Wi-Fi 6E standard, so it can use the 6GHz spectrum with compatible devices.

The TV supports eARC and can pass advanced DTS and Dolby formats from a connected source to your soundbar or sound system without reducing audio quality.

The frequency response of the built-in speakers is okay overall. There's very little bass, although it's alright for a TV. Dialogue is clear and easy to understand, but there's a pretty significant dip in the mid-to-high treble range. However, it isn't very noticeable in most content.

This TV has decent distortion performance. There's some audible total harmonic distortion, but mainly at high volume levels; it isn't noticeable at moderate volume.

The Hisense U7K uses version 12 of Google's popular Google TV OS. It's relatively easy to use and especially fast and smooth, with a large selection of apps.

Like most TVs on the market, this one has ads throughout the interface, and you can't disable them.

The TV has a great selection of streaming apps, with every popular streaming app being present. The interface is very smooth and pleasant to use.

Like most modern remotes, the included remote lacks a numpad, but there are quick-access buttons to popular streaming services. It also has a built-in mic, as does the TV itself, for hands-free voice control, giving you access to Google Assistant and Alexa. You can ask the TV to search for content, open apps, ask for the time or the weather, and switch inputs.

There's a button underneath the center of the TV to turn the TV on/off and switch inputs. There's a switch seen on the right side of the above photo to turn off the mic built into the TV if you're concerned about privacy.

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