Hisense U8/U8H TV Review

The TV has a premium design that looks great in any room. It has extremely thin bezels on three sides, and even the bottom bezel is incredibly thin, so it blends well into your surroundings. The feet are slim and don't take up much space.

Update 06/11/2024: Unfortunately, during our investigation of the uniformity issues this TV developed, the panel broke and can't be fixed. It has been permanently removed from this test.

The feet are wide-set and support the TV well. They're very thin, made of premium materials, with just a bit of wobble front to back. The feet can be adjusted in two distinct positions: a wide position and a narrow one.

Footprint of the 65-inch stand in the wide position: 44" x 14.76". In the narrow position, the 65-inch stand has a footprint of 31.3" x 14.76". In either position, the feet lift the TV about 3.4" above the table, so most soundbars fit in front without blocking the screen.

The back of the TV is made of plastic, with a textured horizontal pattern and vents along the top. There's also a built-in subwoofer on the back of the TV near the center. There are clips built-in to the feet to help with cable management. The inputs are on the left-hand side of the TV when facing the front, and they're easy to access even when the TV is wall-mounted.

The Hisense U8H has good build quality. There's a bit of front and back wobble, but the feet support the TV well overall. It's mainly made of a mix of hard plastic and metal, and it looks and feels well-built overall. There's a bit of flex in the back panel, but it doesn't cause any issues.

The TV has fantastic contrast. Blacks are deep in a dark room, and the local dimming feature is extremely effective at boosting bright highlights while maintaining low black levels in bright scenes. It's a noticeable improvement over the Hisense U8G, especially with local dimming enabled, which is nearly twice as effective at boosting contrast.

The TV has great blooming performance, as the small size of its dimming zones minimizes any blooming around bright objects or subtitles in darker scenes. However, there's still noticeable blooming with bright objects on a black, or near black, background.

Overall, the TV's processing keeps up very well with fast-moving objects, and lighting zone transitions aren't very noticeable, with minimal haloing.

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

The Hisense U8H is incredibly bright in HDR. Bright highlights stand out incredibly well, delivering an impactful HDR experience with both games and movies.

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

• HDR Picture Mode: HDR Theater
• Backlight: Max
• Local Dimming: High
• Color Temperature: Warm1

Check out the 2024 Hisense U8/U8N for even better HDR brightness.

The TV's HDR brightness in Game Mode is fantastic. 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
• Backlight: Max
• Contrast: 90
• Local Dimming: High
• Color Temperature: Warm1

The TV tracks the target PQ EOTF extremely well in the 'HDR Theater' Picture Mode with local dimming set to 'High'. There's a slow roll-off as the brightness approaches the TV's peak brightness, so fine details in bright scenes are preserved well. The EOTF in 'FILMMAKER' mode looks nearly the same as the 'HDR Theater' Picture Mode, but that mode locks you out of most settings. Setting Local Dimming to 'Low' results in a less accurate EOTF overall. When FreeSync is active, the TV hard clips when it reaches its peak brightness, as you can see here, leading to a loss of bright detail.

The HDMI Input Optimization setting has an impact on the PQ EOTF tracking. With it set to 'Text Clarity Optimization', there's more noticeable clipping in bright areas of the scene when gaming at 4k @ 120Hz, so the image looks a bit more washed out. The 'Picture Quality Optimization' setting more accurately tracks the PQ EOTF, and HDR games look much better. For the best results, you should only use the 'Text Clarity Optimization' setting when displaying text from a PC, not when gaming or watching media.

Text Clarity Mode	PQ EOTF	In-Game Photo 1	In-Game Photo 2
Text Clarity	PQ-EOTF
Picture Clarity	PQ-EOTF

The brightness and EOTF tracking behave a bit differently depending on the FreeSync setting:

FreeSync Setting	PQ EOTF	In-Game Photo 1	In-Game Photo 2
On	PQ EOTF
Off	N/A

The Hisense U8H gets exceptionally bright in SDR. It's bright enough to overcome glare in any viewing environment, even outdoors in indirect sunlight. It can't get quite as bright with extremely bright scenes that cover close to the entire screen, but it's still bright enough to overcome glare.

These measurements are after calibration with the following settings:

• Picture Mode: Theater Night
• Backlight: Max
• Local Dimming: High
• Color Temperature: Warm1

The TV has an excellent HDR color gamut. It can display almost all the DCI-P3 color space used by most Ultra HD Blu-ray movies. It also has very good coverage of the wider Rec. 2020 color space, which is gaining in popularity, especially in animated films and some nature documentaries.

The Hisense U8H has amazing color volume in HDR. Thanks to its high peak brightness and fantastic contrast ratio, it can display colors well across all luminance levels. Colors are bright and vibrant, and it displays dark, saturated colors well.

The TV has excellent accuracy out of the box. Gamma follows the 2.2 target for a moderately lit room nearly perfectly, and the white balance is great. Color accuracy is excellent, and except for pure blues and whites, there are no noticeable issues. The color temperature is also excellent, neither too warm nor too cold.

The Hisense U8H has incredible accuracy after calibration to the 6500K white point. It's a bit tricky to calibrate, as minor changes to one point would make another look worse, but because it already has fantastic pre-calibration accuracy, you don't need to calibrate it too much for an accurate image.

You can see our full calibration settings here.

The TV has great gray uniformity. There's a bit of vignetting in the corners but very little dirt screen effect in the center. Dark scenes look even better, with the only noticeable issues being slightly brighter corners when compared to the TV's center.

The Hisense U8H has excellent black uniformity. With local dimming disabled, there's some noticeable backlight bleed, especially in the corners, and there are a few bright patches throughout the screen. With local dimming enabled, however, the uniformity is much better. There's a bit of blooming around bright elements of the scene, but it's very minor, thanks to the high native contrast ratio and full-array local dimming feature.

Sadly, the Hisense U8H has a sub-par viewing angle. The image fades and looks washed out as you move even slightly off-center. It makes it a poor choice for a wide seating arrangement, as anyone sitting off-center will see a degraded image. Unlike high-end TVs from other manufacturers, like the Sony X95J or the Samsung QN90B QLED, there's no wide-angle filter to improve the viewing angle.

The TV has excellent reflection handling. The semi-gloss coating significantly reduces the intensity of direct reflections and does a fantastic job with reflections from ambient lighting. Unlike many high-end TVs, there's no rainbow smear with bright lights.

The TV has alright HDR gradient handling. There's very noticeable banding in dark grays and visible banding in the entire range of greens, as well as in dark reds and bright blues. Other color gradients look great.

Unfortunately, this TV's processing with low-quality content is poor. It just doesn't smooth out macro-blocking and pixelization well.

The TV has good upscaling capabilities. Fine details in upscaling content are preserved well, with some, but not excessive, blurring.

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

• Sharpness: 10

Like most TVs on the market, the Hisense U8H TV uses a BGR (Blue-Green-Red) subpixel layout instead of the traditional Red-Green-Blue layout. For video content, it doesn't cause any issues, but if you're planning on using this TV as a PC monitor, this reduces text clarity a bit, although there are easy workarounds for it. You can read more about this here.

The TV has an excellent response time. There's some blur around fast-moving objects, but it's mainly due to persistence blur. Games look great, and it's easy to make out fine details in fast action when watching sports. Unfortunately, like the Hisense U8G, there's noticeable red ghosting in some content.

Unfortunately, like most TVs on the market, it uses pulse width modulation (PWM) to dim the backlight. Thankfully, it flickers at a very high rate at any backlight level, and it's not noticeable unless you're very sensitive to flicker.

The TV has an optional backlight strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion, to reduce persistence blur and improve the appearance of motion. It can flicker at both 60Hz with 60fps content or at 120Hz with 120fps content, ensuring that you don't see any duplications in motion.

The TV has an optional motion interpolation feature. With motion interpolation at its highest settings, there's noticeable artifacting in any fast motion, with visible halos in some scenes.

Due to the TV's relatively fast response time, there's noticeable stutter when watching 24p content, like movies, as each frame is held longer on screen. It's especially noticeable in slow panning shots.

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

The TV supports variable refresh rate (VRR), and it's compatible with all sources that support it.

The Hisense U8H has superbly low input lag, resulting in a responsive gaming or desktop experience. It's a bit higher than the best TVs on the market, like the LG C2 OLED, but it's not a significant difference.

Most common resolutions are supported, and it displays chroma 4:4:4 properly, which is essential for clear text from a PC. 4k @ 120Hz is also displayed properly, even with chroma 4:4:4, as long as you set the HDMI Input Optimization setting to 'Text Clarity Optimization'.

The TV can take full advantage of the PS5. It's compatible with all supported features of the PS5, including variable refresh rate support and 1440p support.

The Hisense U8H can take full advantage of the Xbox Series S|X. It's compatible with all supported features of the Xbox, including variable refresh rate support and 1440p support. The manufacturer advertises it to support 4k @ 120Hz Dolby Vision gaming, but it's limited to 4k @ 60Hz on the Xbox. If you start playing a game that supports Dolby Vision and have the refresh rate set to 120Hz, it'll fall back to HDR10 instead.

Two of the HDMI inputs support HDMI 2.1 bandwidth, with a maximum bandwidth of 48Gbps. Unfortunately, one of them is also the eARC port, so if you're planning on using an eARC device, you can only connect one other HDMI 2.1 device on the TV.

The U8H has an ATSC 3.0 tuner, allowing you to stream 4k channels over the air with an antenna. There are some reported issues with audio sync, and it appears to be downmixing Dolby 5.1 signals to PCM 2.0.

Unfortunately, there's no direct connection for composite sources. Instead, it requires an external breakout adapter, which is no longer included in the box.

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 Hisense 65U8H has an okay frequency response. Thanks to its built-in subwoofer, it produces more noticeable low bass than the Hisense U8G, but it's still not as good as an external subwoofer with a receiver system or soundbar. It's a bit boomy in the high-bass, and high treble sounds are a bit under-emphasized, but otherwise, it has a well-balanced sound profile and gets decently loud.

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

The TV comes with Google TV 11, an updated version of the Android TV platform used by 2021 Hisense TV models. It's redesigned with a few extra accessibility features, but other than that, it's the same user-friendly platform.

Like most modern TVs, there are ads and suggested content throughout the interface. You can opt out of suggested content, but this just changes the type of ads you'll see, not the quantity.

The Google Play Store has a ton of apps you can download. The interface is very smooth and pleasant to use.

The Hisense U8H comes with a slightly redesigned remote compared to the remote that came with 2021 Hisense TVs. Like most modern remotes, it lacks a Numpad, and there are quick-access buttons to popular streaming services. The mic built into the remote and on the TV gives you access to Google Assistant and Alexa, so you can ask it to search for content, open apps, and switch inputs.

There's a button underneath the center of the TV to turn the TV on/off and switch inputs. There's another button to turn off the mic built into the TV if you're concerned about privacy, and you can also use it for the Find My Remote feature.

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