Does the affordably priced Hisense U8N live up to the hype? It’s complicated (2024)

Make no mistake: This TV ain’t a flop. The U8N has been thoughtfully engineered to emphasize its own strengths and to creatively close the gap between itself and heavy-hitting flagships. It leans into its sensational brightness, putting out a brighter picture than anything we’ve tested to date. It offers better built-in audio than most TVs on the market. Most people will take one look at the U8N’s HDR performance and feel like they’ve gotten away with something by not paying more for the privilege.

Unfortunately, this crowd-pleasing TV has proven to be a complicated one. Throughout our time with the U8N, we’ve had performance issues come and go unpredictably. Some issues were solved by disconnecting the TV from power, some were addressed via firmware update, and some were altogether absent on a second review unit we received from Hisense.

If you’re looking for a bright, HDR-centric TV with great gaming chops and a price tag that double-underlines its value, the U8N is a good bet. However, based on an exhaustive series of tests with constantly shifting results, we can’t guarantee that your U8N will look as good as ours eventually looked after a very specific set of circ*mstances. It simply lacks the finesse we’ve come to expect from the TVs it’s competing with.

About the Hisense U8N

The U8N is available in four sizes ranging from 55 to 100 inches. Our review units are 65-inch models we received on loan from Hisense.

Here’s how the series shakes out in terms of pricing:

• 55-inch (Hisense 55U8N), MSRP $1,099.99, current street price $849.99
• 65-inch (Hisense 65U8N), MSRP $1,499.99, current street price $1,099.99
• 75-inch (Hisense 75U8N), MSRP $1,999.99, current street price $1,599.99
• 85-inch (Hisense 85U8N), MSRP $2,799.99, current street price $2,199.99
• 100-inch (Hisense 100U8N), price TBD

Every model in the series blends mini-LED backlighting with quantum-dot color, but there are a few differences between these size options that you should know about. While Hisense promises peak brightness of “up to 3,000 nits,” this figure only applies to the 65- and 75-inch models. According to Hisense, the 55-inch U8N’s peak brightness maxes out at around 1,800 nits, while the 85-inch model maxes out at around 2,500 nits.

In addition, while the 55-, 65-, and 85-inch models use VA-style panels, the 75-inch U8N makes use of an ADS panel. Typically, ADS/IPS panels offer wider, more accommodating viewing angles, but they do so at the expense of black-level depth. You can read more about this in our guide to TV panel types.

Lastly, let’s talk about dimming zones. Each size variant within a mini-LED TV series features a different amount of dimming zones. A difference in zone count could spell slight differences in how a TV performs. However, while bigger sizes in a mini-LED TV series usually feature a higher number of dimming zones, the number of zones increases proportionally to a TV’s size.

Price and performance information about the 100-inch U8N are still forthcoming.

• Resolution: 4K (3,840 x 2,160)
• Display type: Mini-LED with quantum dots
• HDR support: Dolby Vision, HDR10+, HDR10, HLG
• Dolby Atmos: Yes
• eARC support: Yes
• Color: DCI-P3 color space/8-bit plus frame rate control (FRC)
• Native refresh rate: 120Hz (up to 144Hz)
• Smart platform: Google TV
• Auto Low Latency Mode (ALLM): Yes
• Variable Refresh Rate (VRR): Yes
• Processor: Hi-View Engine Pro
• ATSC 3.0 tuner: Yes
• Other features: AMD FreeSync Premium Pro, Filmmaker Mode, Game Mode, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Google Chromecast, Apple AirPlay, Apple Home

The U8N isn’t the sleekest-looking TV on shelves, but the U8 series design has seen some improvements year over year. While last year’s U8K sat atop a pair of heavy metal feet, our 65-inch model U8N swaps them for a pedestal-style stand with a flat, polygonal plate serving as the base. The stand can be attached in two configurations, the higher of which offers plenty of room for a soundbar. We dig the new stand, and we think most folks will, too.

Our favorite new design element is the revamped remote control. The old, hollow-feeling, black clicker that followed Hisense TVs around like a bad penny has been replaced with a sleeker, silver-tinted remote. It features a flat bottom so, mercifully, it doesn’t rock back and forth on surfaces anymore. Best of all, Hisense has jumped on the backlit remote control bandwagon—a bandwagon we can’t believe more TV brands haven’t hopped aboard.

Connectivity

The U8N offers a similar set of connectivity options as its predecessor, but there’s a key difference here: While the U8K’s dedicated eARC port doubled as one of its high-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 inputs, the U8N relegates that functionality to one of its lesser HDMI 2.0 inputs. This is great news if you want to make the most out of a soundbar and two current-gen gaming consoles.

Here’s what you’ll find in a side-facing cutout on the back of the panel:

• 2x HDMI 2.1 (4K @ 120Hz/144Hz)
• 2x HDMI 2.0 (4K @ 60Hz, 1x HDMI ARC/eARC)
• 2x USB (1x USB 3.0, 1x USB 2.0)
• RF connection (cable/antenna)
• Ethernet (LAN) input
• Composite audio input (with adapter)
• 3.5mm headphone jack

Performance Data

Before testing each TV, we make sure the panel is on and receiving a continuous signal for at least 2 hours. Our U8N received this standard warm-up time before any readings were taken. In addition, the TV received a firmware update while in our possession, and the numbers below reflect its post-update performance.

For both SDR and HDR tests, we’re using Hisense’s Filmmaker picture mode. We’ve chosen this setting because of its accuracy, but performance may vary depending on which picture mode is enabled. For example, you might experience a brighter picture with a different mode enabled, but it may negatively affect color temperature and overall color accuracy. We’ve also tested the TV in its Theater picture modes, but those results are not reported below.

To get a sense of the TV’s average performance, we use a standard ANSI checkerboard pattern for most of our basic contrast tests. We also use white and black windows ranging from 2% to 100% to test how well the contrast holds up while displaying varying degrees of brightness.

Our peak brightness measurements are taken with sustained windows ranging in size from 2% to 100% (full screen) to represent the TV’s peak brightness over a sustained period of time. Specular highlights (like brief flashes of reflected light) might reach higher brightness levels, but not for sustained periods of time.

All of our tests are created with a Murideo Seven 8K signal generator and tabulated via Portrait Displays’ Calman Ultimate color calibration software.

I'll expand on our test results throughout the review, but for now, here are some key takeaways:

• HDR contrast (brightness/black level): 1,060 nits/0.102 nits (ANSI checkerboard)
• SDR contrast (brightness/black level): 420.8 nits/0.038 nits (ANSI checkerboard, Brightness 45)
• SDR contrast (brightness/black level): 938.4 nits/0.093 nits (ANSI checkerboard, Brightness: 100)
• HDR peak brightness: 3,500.8 nits (18% white window)
• HDR color gamut coverage (DCI-P3 1976 uv/10-bit): 96.29%
• HDR color gamut coverage (BT.2020 1976 uv): 82.33%
• SDR color gamut coverage (Rec.709): 98.6%

Before testing, I ensured that the HDMI input in use was set to its Enhanced format. I also disabled the TV’s Automatic Light Sensor in each of the inputs I used throughout my testing. This toggle can be found in the TV’s General picture menu and might need to be adjusted when you move between inputs and apps.

For SDR tests, I kept the U8N’s Brightness slider at its default position of 45, but made sure to take SDR measurements with its Brightness set to 100 to get a sense of how it performed under those conditions.

For all tests, I used the U8N’s Warm1 Color Temperature, set the Local Dimming to High, and ensured that the following settings were disabled: Dark Detail, Active Contrast, HDR Enhancer (located within the Brightness submenu), Smooth Gradient, Super Resolution, Noise Reduction, MPEG Noise Reduction Motion Enhancement, and Motion Clearness (located within the Clarity submenu).

For HDR tests, Dynamic Tone Mapping was disabled.

What we like

Incredible brightness and backlight control

At the time of publishing, the U8N is the brightest TV we’ve ever tested. With HDR enabled, it doles out highlights that crest the 3,500-nit mark—a lightshow of the highest intensity. For reference, the QN90D, Samsung’s flagship mini-LED TV for 2024 (that costs at least twice as much as the U8N at time of publish), tops out at around 2,100 nits.

Thanks to its impressive backlight control, the U8N is at its most dazzling when these searing highlights are flanked by darkness. When the Matrix Ressurections title sequence envelops you with ripples of green digital code, you feel it.

In fact, the precision with which the U8N conducts its myriad mini-LEDs is every bit as impressive as it was on last year’s U8K. Even the toughest stress tests (white subtitles jutting up against a black letterbox, for instance) are easily handled. The U8N does a remarkable job limiting that bluish halo of light you’re liable to see on LED TVs when bright-on-dark picture elements take over. As with most mini-LED TVs, however, you’re bound to notice more blooming when viewing the U8N from off to the side.

While HDR specular highlights are the U8N’s bread and butter, it’s worth noting that its average picture brightness is among the highest we’ve clocked this year. This means that, regardless of what you happen to be watching on cable, streaming, or playing, the U8N is well equipped to deliver a punchy picture, even in sun-soaked living rooms.

Rich, voluminous color

The U8N’s bright, bold demeanor extends to its color palette, which is among the most voluminous we’ve seen in this class to date. According to our tests, the U8N saturates about 97% of the DCI-P3 color gamut, and an impressive 83% of the BT.2020 color space. That BT.2020 figure is not far off from the Sony A95L, a QD-OLED that we’ve gone on record describing as the best TV we’ve ever seen.

The secret to this saturation is, in part, the U8N’s brightness, which lets it dial into subtle shades that dimmer TVs might struggle to showcase, all the while pumping a ton of luminance into reds, greens, and yellows. Movies, games, and shows mastered for HDR10 or Dolby Vision are every bit as colorful on the U8N as we’ve come to expect from higher-end TVs that are an order of magnitude more expensive.

A great set of gaming features for the price—with one big upgrade

While not quite as kitted out for gaming as some of the flagship TVs it’s hoping to compete with, the U8N is nevertheless ready for action. It’s got a lot in common with the U8K: Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) and AMD FreeSync Premium Pro make their return, as does 144Hz support for PC gamers. Like the U8K, it supports 4K gaming at 120Hz, the maximum setting across Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 titles.

One massive improvement over its predecessor, however, is how these capabilities are doled out across its HDMI suite. Last year, we were disappointed to learn that one of the U8K’s gaming-optimized HDMI 2.1 inputs was pulling double duty as the designated eARC port. This limited your options if you were hoping to connect a pair of gaming devices and a soundbar.

This year, Hisense has taken a more thoughtful approach, relegating eARC duties to one of the U8N’s lesser HDMI 2.0 inputs. Now, users can take full advantage of two consoles and a soundbar without the soundbar hogging a would-be gaming input.

Big, booming sound

The U8N is hiding a subwoofer in the back of its panel, which partly explains its heft. You might not care if you intend on pairing your next TV with a soundbar. If you skip the soundbar, you’ll be thrilled the first time you crank this thing up on movie might. The U8N’s deep bellowing puts to shame the thin, hissy squawk of most TVs.

To be clear, if you’re hunting for an elevated audio experience, a soundbar is still a bare-minimum better bet. The U8N offers resonance, but it has the tendency to sound rather murky the louder it gets, and the chassis tends to rattle when things are really heavy on the low-end. (I thought it might vibrate its way off of our media console during the opening sequence of Blade Runner 2049.)

Still, it feels pretty cool to be discussing the quality of a TV’s built-in sound system. We wish more brands approached audio with this level of consideration.

What we don’t like

Apparently, the kinks are still being worked out

Our first U8N review unit had a couple of peculiar performance-related problems: an over-brightening of the picture in HDR and an overemphasis of red in SDR (such that shades of gray appeared pink). Throughout the course of our evaluation, these issues were alleviated to various degrees when we addressed the problem in three ways: unplugging the TV and plugging it back in, installing a firmware update that was automatically sent to our TV, and by measuring an altogether different review unit.

First, let’s start with what we mean when we talk about over-brightening in HDR.

In many cases, more brightness is better. A piercingly bright streetlight dotting an ominously dark alleyway is lifelike enough to grab our attention. A punchy picture that holds up in a sunny room lets us watch a baseball game without squinting at the screen. In particular, we want our LED TVs to bring brightness because, unlike OLED TVs, their overall contrast isn’t anchored by perfect black levels.

But unchecked brightness can make the picture look worse, and that was the case with our first U8N—at least initially. The excess brightness gave HDR10 and Dolby Vision content a milky, fuzzy quality, obscuring detail and lessening the impact of specular highlights. Consider the streetlight example from above: When the alleyway around the streetlight looks flat and hazy rather than deep and shadowy, the brightness of the bulb is dulled by association.

We saw this in our testing, too. The EOTF curve tracks how closely a TV hits brightness targets in HDR, from pitch black to peak white. Ideally, a TV will perfectly follow the target curve and deliver the HDR brightness the content creator intended (relative to the maximum brightness capability of the display). The U8N was tracking well above the line across the entire grayscale—meaning the mid-tones were brighter than they should be—thus explaining the hazy, flat look we were seeing during HDR10 and Dolby Vision content.

The U8N is a complicated crowd-pleaser.

After reaching out to Hisense with our concerns, its engineers recommended that we unplug our U8N, let it sit for a minute, and plug it back in. Once we did that, its EOTF tracking while receiving an HDR10 signal was almost perfect. It’s a strange phenomenon, frankly, and one I’ve not encountered in my decade of testing TVs. The supposition is that some combination of toggling different settings while evaluating the TV somehow caused the EOTF to be affected.

Unfortunately, this only somewhat improved the U8N’s Dolby Vision performance. Even after unplugging the TV, Dolby Vision content (via streaming or Blu-ray) still appeared over-brightened.

Unplugging and replugging the U8N also didn’t fix a rather significant red shift in SDR, which manifested most prominently in neutral tones like white and gray. Shadows had the tendency to look pink- or magenta-ish, depending on the darkness of the scene. It was easily viewable with the naked eye and wasn’t just a measurement aberration.

Shortly after we received our first review unit (and after we had learned about the unplug-replug method), a firmware update was pushed to our U8N which fixed the red shift, but only somewhat. When we put the U8N directly next to the Samsung QN90C, a TV with similar hardware and performance aspirations, the U8N’s SDR content still appeared pink and Dolby Vision content still seemed to be over-brightened.

Hisense provided a second sample that tracked the EOTF in HDR10 nearly perfectly out of the box in Filmmaker mode. We measured a slight red shift in SDR, but nothing as severe as what we measured in our first review unit. Unfortunately, Dolby Vision content remained over-brightened, even in the Dolby Vision Dark picture mode.

Panel-to-panel variance is expected in the world of displays (it’s one of the reasons you shouldn’t assume someone else’s calibration numbers will work for your TV), but this difference in experience between U8N samples is greater than we’d hope. We’re not comfortable with the unplug-and-replug solution for someone at home who thinks their TV’s picture might not look right.

Familiar picture processing flaws make an unfortunate return

In addition to Dolby Vision’s milky-looking patina, the U8N carries a handful of performance quirks that none of the steps above were able to remedy, and indeed, have been present to some degree on nearly every Hisense TV we’ve reviewed in recent years.

The most impactful of these seemingly recurring issues is the U8N’s struggles to upscale sub-4K content, particularly streaming content. Full-HD Blu-rays from yesteryear don’t look quite as clean on the U8N as they do on similarly priced TVs, and the sub-4K content I streamed across Netflix, YouTube, and live TV services was impacted by macro blocking and noise. This issue was made worse by the initial red-shifting problem, as these upscaling artifacts had the tendency to take on a pinkish hue.

A less-impactful visual blemish—but one we continue to see on every Hisense TV we evaluate—is a ghostly, red-tinted fringe that briefly appears alongside the edges of objects in motion, most notably during SDR content. I see it most often along hairlines, the edges of arms and legs, and especially during sequences with dim, warm-tinted lighting. You might also notice it during crossfades and dissolves, where an object momentarily flashes red before vanishing from the dissolve completely.

Similar to some of its predecessors, the U8N also struggles to resolve finer detail in motion. Something like the individual strands of hair close to a character’s scalp—the sort of texture that ought to appear clearly defined in native 4K content—has the tendency to ripple and smear into a flat, putty-like appearance with every subtle head nod. Unsurprisingly, this issue is made worse if the U8N happens to be over-brightening HDR10 or Dolby Vision content, as the picture begins to look like you’re watching it through a slightly frosted plate of glass.

I must admit that I go into every Hisense TV review hunting for these issues, if only because I’m desperate for its engineering TV to fix them once and for all. Given how quickly some of these artifacts flash upon the screen, I don’t expect most people to notice. However, it may contribute to an unshakable sense that there’s something off with the U8N’s presentation.

Should you buy the Hisense U8N?

Maybe, it’s amazingly bright but be ready to potentially exchange your panel

If you want to save a substantial amount of money on a seriously bright TV capable of showcasing HDR movies, shows, and games, the U8N might be a proper fit. At times, its performance comes close to what we've come to expect from mini-LED TVs that are nearly twice as costly.

However, many of those pricier models deliver a level of finesse and consistency that we just haven't observed with the U8N. And unfortunately for the U8N, among those models are year-old TVs whose prices have fallen closer to the U8N's. I found, for instance, that I was drawn more to the Samsung QN90C we had set up directly next to the U8N. The presentation was simply cleaner—from contrast to upscaling. Being a year-old TV, the QN90C’s price is currently in the U8N's ballpark.

We’d like to be able to tell you that if your U8N exhibits over-brightening, the answer is as simple as unplugging it, but this requires you to know it’s over-brightening unnecessarily in the first place. And if a movie mastered for Dolby Vision looks over-brightened, you might not be able to fix it by unplugging the TV, anyway.

We’d also like to be able to tell you that your U8N will arrive with as little red shift as our second review unit, but based on the panels we experienced there’s no guarantee.

One detail that might influence your decision is that every U8N comes with a two-year warranty from Hisense. Many of these performance issues are on the table for future firmware fixes, though there’s no guarantee that any, some, or all of them will be ironed out.

The U8N is by no means a bad TV, and it's sure to please a large swath of the bargain-hunting crowd. That said, it doesn't drive as hard of a bargain as last year's U8K, especially for folks who are liable to notice its shortcomings.

Prices were accurate at the time this article was published but may change over time.