Hisense U9N TV Review

The Hisense U9N has a premium design, even if it's rather thick. Still, most TVs are much thicker at their center point, while this TV is uniformly thick throughout. It has slim feet that feel sturdy and don't take up much space, although they're not adjustable, so you need to make sure your table is wide enough if you don't plan on wall-mounting it.

The TV comes with a pair of feet that support it well. Unlike the Hisense UX, this model's feet aren't adjustable, so make sure your table is wide enough to accommodate them. The feet only lift the TV about 2.2 inches, so many soundbars won't fit in front without blocking the lower portion of the screen. 

Footprint of the 75-inch stand: 58.3" x 14.3".

The TV's back is made of plastic, with two different textured patterns: vertical lines in its center plate and horizontal lines on the side panels. Near the center, there's a built-in subwoofer. The TV has clips for cable management on its feet, through which cables can be funneled. 

The TV has great build quality. It's solid and looks and feels well-built. It's mainly made of hard plastic, with metal feet and borders. There are no obvious quality control issues with our unit.

The Hisense U9N has fantastic contrast. Its native contrast is poor, but with local dimming enabled, the TV displays extremely deep blacks, and they stay that way when bright highlights are on screen.

The TV has amazing blooming performance, as the extremely small size of its dimming zones minimizes any blooming around bright objects or subtitles in darker scenes. There's some blooming with bright objects on a black, or near black, background, but it's hard to notice.

Overall, the TV's processing keeps up very well with fast-moving objects, and lighting zone transitions aren't very noticeable, with minimal haloing. Still, small bright objects get so dim with rapid movement that they almost disappear, which is disappointing on a TV with this many dimming zones.

It has a Fast Backlight Control feature meant to improve zone transitions. However, it greatly reduces the TV's peak brightness when enabled, and it doesn't work in Game Mode or with VRR enabled. 

We encountered an issue where the TV’s local dimming feature causes noticeable brightness fluctuations in our zone transition video. This only occurs when playing the video from an external device—such as a PC—or through the YouTube app on an Apple TV. The problem does not appear when using its internal apps, and we did not notice it when watching regular real-world content, so it's not likely to be an issue for most people.

Switching to Game Mode doesn't result in any noticeable difference in dark scene performance, although you cannot enable the TV's Fast Backlight Control feature in that mode.

The Hisense U9N has fantastic HDR brightness. Highlights really pop out during darker scenes, and the TV is bright enough that very bright specular highlights even stand out in well-lit scenes. Combined with its fantastic contrast, it provides an impactful HDR viewing experience.

Results with Dynamic Tone Mapping set to 'On':

• Hallway Lights: 845 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 1281 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 650 cd/m²

The Hisense U9N is slightly brighter in PC/Game Mode, but it's hardly noticeable.

Results with Dynamic Tone Mapping set to 'On':

• Hallway Lights: 826 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 1256 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 679 cd/m²

The TV has outstanding PQ EOTF tracking. Blacks are slightly too bright, and some shadows and midtones are slightly too dark, but, overall, it closely follows the curve. The TV is, however, too bright near its peak brightness. There's a gradual roll-off near the peak brightness, which helps to preserve detail in very bright specular highlights with content mastered at 4000 nits. It's bright enough to properly display highlights in content mastered at 600 and 1000 nits, so the roll-off isn't necessary at those nit levels.

The Hisense U9N's SDR brightness is fantastic, so glare isn't an issue even in the brightest rooms.

The Hisense U9N has a fantastic HDR color gamut. It has almost complete coverage of the commonly used DCI-P3 color space, with superb tone mapping. The TV also has great coverage of the wider Rec. 2020 color space, but highly saturated greens, cyans, and blues are undersaturated and off the mark.

The TV has outstanding color volume. It displays a wide range of colors at high luminance levels, and dark saturated colors are displayed well due to its fantastic contrast.

The Hisense U9N has great pre-calibration SDR accuracy, but it's not perfect, as the TV's gamma is too bright in most content. The white balance is good, but there is too much green and especially red in most shades of gray, while there's a bit too much blue in mid-grays, and not enough in bright whites. This makes the TV's color temperature a bit too warm overall. Color accuracy is excellent, but all light colors have minor inaccuracies.

The TV has fantastic SDR accuracy after calibration, and the TV is easy to calibrate, as everything works as expected. Any issues with white balance are gone, and the color temperature is essentially perfect. The gamma is now only slightly too dark in very bright content, but it's minor. Color accuracy is outstanding, with only minor inaccuracies in saturated colors.

Check out our calibration settings.

The TV has decent gray uniformity. There's some minor vignetting on the sides and some dirty screen effect towards the center. The TV's uniformity is excellent in dark scenes, however, with no visible backlight bleeding.

The TV's black uniformity is outstanding. With local dimming disabled, the screen is blueish and cloudy. With local dimming on 'High,' the blacks are deep and uniform across the screen, and there's only a tiny bit of blooming around bright objects on a dark background.

The Hisense U9N's viewing angle is alright. The image looks mostly consistent from a slight angle, but there's some brightness loss, gamma shifting, color shifting, and color washout that worsens the further you move off-center. Still, its viewing angle is wider than a lot of other LED TVs, and it's adequate as long as you don't watch the TV from an extreme angle. 

The TV's reflection handling is outstanding. Its glossy coating significantly reduces reflections caused by both direct and indirect reflections, and there's no rainbow smearing. Combined with the TV's superb brightness, it easily overcomes glare in even the brightest of rooms.

The TV has satisfactory HDR gradient handling. There's noticeable banding in grays and greens, but all other colors have minimal banding.

The TV has very good low-quality content smoothing. It does a great job at smoothing out artifacts in low bitrate content while still preserving details.

The Hisense U9N does a good job at upscaling low-resolution content like DVDs or lower-resolution streams. Details are clear enough, but finer details are a bit hard to make out.

The TV has an RGB sub-pixel layout, so it doesn't have any issues rendering text when used as a PC monitor.

It uses quantum dots to achieve high color peaks with excellent separation between blues, greens, and reds. This gives it great color purity and allows it to display a very wide color gamut, which can be seen in the TV's spectral power distribution (SPD) chart.

The Hisense U9N has an excellent response time for minimal blur behind fast-moving objects, but it's slower when coming out of dark states, so there's some black smearing in dark scene transitions. There's also some noticeable overshoot in many of its dark zone transitions, which causes inverse ghosting.

Unlike other similar TVs from Hisense, the U9N's response time doesn't behave differently at different refresh rates when VRR is enabled.

The TV uses pulse width modulation (PWM) to dim its backlight, which introduces flicker that can bother people who are sensitive to it. Fortunately, it flickers at a very fast 7800Hz in all picture modes and at all brightness levels, so it's not noticeable.

The Hisense U9N supports backlight strobing, more commonly known as black frame insertion (BFI). The feature is designed to improve the appearance of motion by strobing its backlight and reducing the amount of persistence blur. Unfortunately, it can only insert black frames at a 120Hz refresh rate, and the image is blurry with some image duplication.

This 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. It really struggles in faster-moving scenes, and there are distracting artifacts, haloing, and a screen-tearing effect.

Due to the its 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 automatically removes judder from any source, ensuring a smooth movie-watching experience.

The Hisense U9N supports all three VRR formats, so it has great compatibility regardless of the source. Unfortunately, with 1080p @ 240Hz and VRR enabled, the TV's built-in frame counter shows 72Hz, there's bad frame skipping, and chroma 4:4:4 isn't displayed properly. With VRR disabled, 1080p @ 240Hz works without issues.

This Hisense U9N 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. The input lag on this Hisense is a bit higher than on other models, such as the Hisense U8/U8N, but it's still very low.

The TV supports all common resolutions up to 4k @ 144Hz on two of its four HDMI ports. Unfortunately, 1080p @ 240Hz only works properly with VRR disabled.

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

The TV is fully compatible with everything the Xbox Series X|S offers, including 1440p @ 120Hz, 4k @ 120Hz, HDMI Forum VRR, FreeSync Premium Pro, and Dolby Vision gaming. It also supports Auto Low Latency Mode, so you don't have to worry about manually switching to PC/Game Mode to get the lowest input lag.

The TV has HDMI 2.1 bandwidth on HDMI ports 3 and 4, with both supporting up to 4k @ 144Hz. Fortunately, HDMI 1 is the eARC port, so you don't lose a high-bandwidth port when you plug a soundbar into it. The TV supports all HDR formats and has an ATSC 3.0 tuner, so you can watch over-the-air 4k content.

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.

It has a mediocre frequency response. Dialogue is clear and easy to understand at moderate volume levels, but the sound becomes more unbalanced as you approach its maximum volume. You'll want to avoid using the TV at maximum volume for balanced sound.

The TV's distortion performance is decent. There isn't much distortion at moderate volume levels, but the distortion worsens as you raise the volume. At the TV's maximum volume the distortion is audible for those who are sensitive to it, but it won't bother most people.

The TV 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 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 TV comes with Hisense's backlit remote. It has buttons for popular streaming services, and you can use the built-in microphone to switch inputs, change apps, search within apps, and ask for the weather and time. Unfortunately, you can't change the settings on the TV using the voice controls.

There's a single button on the bottom center of the TV that can be used to switch inputs and power the TV on/off. There's also a small switch that you can use to turn on/off the TV's built-in microphone.

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