Hisense U800GR 8k TV Review

The Hisense U800GR looks much like the Hisense U8G as it has the same textured plastic back, and the feet are similar. It has a stylish overall design, and it should look nice in most home theater setups.

The metal stand has wide-set feet that place the screen high enough off the table so placing a soundbar in front won't block the screen. Sadly, there's noticeable wobble from front to back.

Footprint of the 75" TV: 56.1" W x 16.5" D x 3.3" H (4.1" to the bottom of the screen).

The back of the Hisense U800GR has a textured back panel, and there speakers at the bottom and vents at the top. It also has two clips for cable management to keep your setup tidy.

The Hisense U800GR is thin and doesn't stick out much when wall-mounted. The cable management clips stick out at the bottom, and they seem like they aren't meant to be removed, but the thickness of the TV without them is 2.95" (7.5 cm).

The Hisense U800GR's build quality is good. It's mainly made of plastic, and it feels well-put-together throughout, with no glaring issues. The metal feet feel solid, but there's still wobble from front to back. Sadly, the plastic on the back panel feels cheap and flexes easily, but this isn't an issue once you place the TV on its stand or mount it.

The Hisense U800GR has a great contrast ratio thanks to its VA panel. It displays deep blacks with the local dimming feature enabled, but its native contrast isn't as good as other 4k TVs with VA panels, like the Hisense U8G. However, it's still better than Samsung's 8k TVs like the Samsung QN800A 8k QLED. Keep in mind that contrast may vary between units.

The Hisense U800GR has good SDR peak brightness. It gets bright with small highlights, but it quickly loses its brightness with larger areas due to its Automatic Brightness Limiter, and its real scene peak brightness is only decent. Still, you shouldn't have many issues using it in a well-lit room.

We tested the brightness after calibration in the 'Movie' Picture Mode with the TV Brightness set to 'Brighter', Local Dimming on 'High', Color Temperature set to 'Warm', the Backlight at '100', and the Contrast at '90'. We couldn't get a brighter image with any other setting.

The Hisense U800GR's local dimming feature is decent. It has 180 zones, and overall, it's a decent implementation of local dimming, but it has some drawbacks. It doesn't crush blacks at all, meaning you won't lose details in scenes with small highlights like a star field, and objects transition between the zones well with real content. Sadly, there's noticeable blooming with any bright object on a dark background, especially with subtitles, and these are distracting even with real content. The blooming is the biggest downside of the local dimming, and while the TV looks decent from in front, the blooming becomes more noticeable as you move off-center.

Note: You can see in the real content video, particularly in the last scene with the people jumping, that there are two dead pixels in the center. We refreshed the TV, and they were still there, but they're not always visible, and this varies between units as not all units will have dead pixels.

The local dimming feature in Game Mode looks exactly like outside of it. There aren't noticeable differences.

The Hisense U800GR has alright HDR brightness. It gets brightest with small highlights, which is great as they pop, but the overall real scene brightness won't be enough to deliver a satisfying HDR experience. The EOTF is brighter than the target PQ curve, so most scenes are brighter than they should be until there's a sharp roll-off at its max brightness, causing a loss of details in bright highlights.

We tested it in the 'Dark HDR' Picture Mode with TV Brightness on 'Brighter', Local Dimming on 'High', Color Temperature set to 'Warm', and with Backlight and Contrast both at '100'. We got the brightest results with these settings, and if you find the screen is too dim, then set the Color Temperature to 'Normal'. This doesn't change the peak brightness, but it makes the image appear slightly brighter as you can see in this EOTF.

The Hisense U800's HDR brightness in Game Mode looks the same as outside of it, and there's no noticeable difference. Any difference in the individual results comes down to margin of error. We tested it using the same settings outside of Game Mode, but with the Game Mode setting enabled.

The Hisense U800GR has decent gray uniformity. The edges of the screen are noticeably darker, and there's some dirty screen effect in the center, which could get distracting during sports. Uniformity is better in near-dark scenes, but there's a bit of backlight bleed. You can't see the two dead pixels explained in the Local Dimming section because they're not always visible. Keep in mind that uniformity may vary between units.

The Hisense U800GR has excellent black uniformity. Without local dimming, the screen looks a bit blue, and there's backlight bleed. The local dimming feature improves the contrast, but there's a lot more blooming around the center cross. Note that uniformity may vary from unit to unit.

Due to the VA panel, the Hisense U800GR has narrow viewing angles, and the image loses accuracy as soon as you move off-center. It's not ideal for wide seating arrangements.

The Hisense 75U800GR has excellent reflection handling. The semi-gloss finish diffuses light well, so even reflections from strong light sources aren't distracting. Combined with its good peak brightness, it performs well in bright rooms.

The Hisense U800GR has good out-of-the-box accuracy. Most colors are fairly accurate, and the color temperature is close to the 6500K target. However, the white balance is slightly off, and the gamma doesn't follow the 2.2 target well as most scenes are too dark, and bright scenes are over-brightened. Keep in mind that accuracy may vary between units.

The Hisense U800GR has fantastic accuracy after calibration. Any remaining white balance and color inaccuracies are hard to spot, except saturated blues are slightly inaccurate. The color temperature is even closer to the target, and the gamma is also improved.

See our recommended settings here. All calibration is done through the Roku app and not directly on the TV.

Unfortunately, the Hisense U800GR doesn't properly upscale 480p content, so it's not a good choice for watching DVDs. The aspect ratio is off, and the image is stretched out. We tried playing with a few settings, but nothing fixed it, and we noticed the same thing with the Hisense U6GR.

Luckily, there aren't any issues with upscaling 720p content from cable boxes.

The Hisense U800GR upscales 1080p content, like from Blu-rays, really well, but there's some minor dithering happening in shadows.

Native 4k content on the Hisense U800GR looks almost as good as 8k content, but there's some dithering that you'll see if you look closely in the shadows. However, not everyone will notice it with most content.

Like with 1080p and 4k content, there's some dithering that you can see if you look closely in the shadows, but other than that, the Hisense U800GR displays native 8k content well. We took a pixel photo so you can see how each pixel is separate from each other. We use this to test for contrast modulation, which is a measurement to see it's a true 8k TV with pixels separate from the next.

The Hisense U800GR has a BGR subpixel layout, which doesn't affect picture quality but can affect how text is displayed when using the TV as a PC monitor. You can read about it here. You can also see the pixel dithering in the blue pixels.

The color gamut is impressive. It has fantastic coverage of the commonly-used DCI P3 color space, but it has more limited coverage of the wider Rec. 2020 color space.

The Hisense 75U800GR has good color volume. Thanks to its fantastic DCI P3 color space coverage, great contrast, and high peak brightness, it displays colors at a wide range of luminance levels in that color space. It's still okay with Rec. 2020, but it doesn't display as many colors.

The Hisense U800GR has amazing gradient handling. There's minimal banding throughout, with only a bit of banding in the dark grays and greens. There's a setting to reduce banding, but it doesn't seem to do much with our test pattern or with real content.

The Hisense U800GR doesn't have any signs of temporary image retention after displaying a high-contrast static image, but this may vary between units.

We don't expect VA panels to experience permanent image retention, as the VA panel in our long-term test appears immune.

The Hisense U800GR has an excellent response time. Motion looks smooth for the most part, but there's some image duplication due to the backlight flicker. The response time in dark transitions is slow, which is typical of VA panels, and leads to some black smearing.

The Hisense U800GR uses pulse width modulation (PWM) to dim its backlight at all brightness levels. However, it flickers at such a high frequency that most people won't notice it.

The Hisense U800GR has an optional backlight strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion. It only flickers at 120Hz, and it creates image duplication with 60Hz content, as you can see in the photo. Note that the BFI scoring is based on the flicker frequencies at which it works and not the actual performance.

There's a motion interpolation feature to interpolate 30 and 60 fps content up to 120 fps. Like most other TVs, it works well with slow-paced scenes, and there aren't any visible issues. However, there are more artifacts with fast-moving objects in action-packed scenes, which could get distracting.

Due to the quick response time, low-frame-rate content appears to stutter because each frame is held on longer. If that bothers you, try enabling the motion interpolation feature.

The Hisense U800GR can remove 24p judder from any source, including native apps and 60p/i sources, and you don't need to adjust any setting. This helps with the appearance of motion in movies.

The Hisense U800GR has variable refresh rate support in the form of native FreeSync. We didn't experience any issues with our AMD RX 6600 graphics card and the Xbox Series X with 1080p and 4k signals, but there was tearing in the pendulum demo with 1440p signals on the RX 6600. However, 1440p VRR doesn't tear in games on the Xbox Series X, meaning the TV supports it, but because our regular pendulum demo tears, we're leaving 1440p VRR as Unknown. Although the NVIDIA Control Panel with our RTX 3070 showed that it supports G-SYNC, there's constant tearing.

The Hisense U800GR has low input lag with most resolutions. Gaming feels responsive with 1080p, 1440p, and 4k signals thanks to its low input lag, but it increases a lot with 8k @ 60Hz signals, so it may not be ideal for some people playing reaction-based games. We remeasured the 8k @ 60Hz input lag a few times and kept getting the same results, consistent with the LG NANO99 8k 2021 and the LG QNED99 8k. Also, we couldn't get proper VRR input lag readings, which we experienced with the TCL 6 Series/R648 2021 8k QLED. We're looking into this issue, and we'll update the review once we fix it.

The Hisense U800GR displays most common resolutions up to 8k @ 60Hz. It also displays proper chroma 4:4:4 with any signal except for 1440p, as text looks fuzzy with 1440p @ 60Hz and 1440p @ 120Hz signals.

The Hisense U800GR supports any common format from the Xbox Series X and PS5, and Dolby Vision works up to 4k @ 60Hz on the Xbox Series X. It has support for Auto Low Latency Mode that automatically switches the TV into Game Mode when you launch a game from a compatible device.

HDMI ports 1 and 2 support the full 48 Gbps bandwidth of HDMI 2.1, which you can see here, and HDMI 3 and 4 support HDMI 2.0 bandwidth. The Hisense 75U800GR isn't advertised to support ATSC 3.0.

The Hisense U800GR has eARC support, which allows you to pass Dolby Atmos and DTS:X signals to a compatible receiver through an HDMI connection. Unlike the Hisense U9DG, its eARC port isn't one of the HDMI 2.1 ports, so you can connect a receiver and still use the other ports to connect gaming consoles.

The Hisense U800GR has an okay frequency response. It gets loud and has a fairly well-balanced sound profile, good enough for listening to dialogue, but it doesn't produce much bass.

The distortion handling is decent. Even at loud listening levels, there isn't too much distortion. However, this depends on the content, and not everyone may hear it.

The built-in Roku TV is user-friendly and navigating through the menus feels smooth. We only experienced one issue where the remote disconnected, and we had to restart the TV a few times to connect again.

There are ads on the home page, and there's no way to disable them. Some users reported seeing pop-up ads while watching live TV on Roku models. We didn't experience that, but let us know if you do.

The Roku app store has a bunch of apps to download, which they call Channels.

The Hisense U800GR comes with the same remote as other Roku TVs, but it has a built-in battery instead of needing rechargeable ones. It has a mic for voice control, which you can ask to open apps, switch inputs, and search for content, but you can't change some settings. It has a Find My Remote function where it makes a noise in case you lose it, and you can use the remote hands-free feature by saying, "Hey Roku." You can use the '1' and '2' buttons to program voice commands, and you can press them to initiate the command instead of saying it every time. It also has an auxiliary input on the side, so you can plug in your earphones and listen directly through those if you don't want to disturb anyone.

There's a single button underneath the center branding of the Hisense U800GR to switch inputs, go to the Home menu, use the Find My Remote function, and turn it On/Off.

• Remote
• Micro-USB charging cable for remote
• User guides

Like other 8k TVs, the Hisense U800GR draws a lot of power at its max consumption level.